An Inferno in the Mountains

An out-of-control blaze that began as a remote brush fire in the Angeles National Forest continued Wednesday to travel the northern rim of the San Gabriel and Pomona valleys, threatening thousands of homes as it advanced on Mount Baldy Village and sending smoke as far as Las Vegas.

The fire swelled to an estimated 30,000 acres by 6 p.m. Wednesday, stretching along 11 miles of the San Gabriel Mountains. Nearly 3,000 firefighters from dozens of agencies battled the blaze, which officials said was 10% contained and could burn in the Angeles National Forest for as long as a month.

Fire officials said 71 structures, mostly cabins in San Dimas Canyon, have been destroyed. Authorities have closed the national forest until the end of the fire season.

A steady storm of ash fell over the foothills, and the heat from the towering flames could be felt two miles away.

The plume of smoke reached 26,000 feet and continued to blanket a mammoth swath of Southern California. The South Coast Air Quality Management District issued an advisory Wednesday for foothill communities from Pasadena to San Bernardino County, urging people to “avoid unnecessary outdoor activities.”

By Wednesday night, walls of flames were advancing on three fronts through the rugged canyons north of Glendora, La Verne, Azusa, San Dimas and Claremont.

By 11 p.m., firefighters were bracing for flames that had advanced within half a mile of evacuated homes in northern Claremont’s Palmer Canyon. Fire also had come within two miles of Mt. Baldy Village and was moving that way.

Flames churned through brush that front-line firefighters compared to 7-foot-tall shag carpet--brush that has not burned in 35 years--and leapt northeast across Glendora Ridge Road and East Fork Road. Another wall of fire moved slowly toward the southeast. A third edge of the fire rocketed through a basin known as Cow Canyon.

“We are positioning ourselves to defend the community,” San Bernardino County Fire Division Chief Mike Conrad told his troops during an afternoon briefing in Mt. Baldy Village. “It’s up to nature now.”

Though the most dangerous flames appeared to be moving deeper into the mountains to the north and northeast, officials remained concerned about metropolitan areas to the south, including the northeast portions of Azusa, La Verne, San Dimas and Glendora.

An estimated 10,000 homes remained in some danger, fire officials said. More than 2,000 people were forced to evacuate Tuesday and Wednesday, mostly around Mt. Baldy, as well as from Palmer Canyon and Padua Hills, north of Claremont.

Forest Service spokesman Bruce Quintellier said firefighters believe they know where the blaze started, but that point is now buried in rubble, and the cause remains under investigation. Authorities said they have ruled out campfires and barbecues as the possible cause.

So far, the cost of fighting the fire has exceeded $4 million, fire officials said.

Many foothill residents stayed home from work Wednesday, trying to decide what to take with them and what to leave behind. They were packing up family keepsakes, photographs, laptop computers and financial records.

“These quilts, I can’t lose them,” Glendora resident Sandra Hoodye said. “It’s the little things that seem so important now.”

At the end of one cul-de-sac in Glendora, Suzanne Safavi, 44, stood holding a hose outside her home. “It’s like a priest coming in and giving last rites to someone on their death bed,” she said. “My whole purpose in life is this house.”

Heightening the tension, firefighters trying to keep the flames away from more populated foothill neighborhoods were forced to abandon the fire line Wednesday because of terrain that was impossible to negotiate on foot. Officials were largely relying on helicopters and bulldozers in steeper areas.

“Some of what the fire is doing we just have to let it do,” Conrad said. “We can’t put people on the fire line in some areas. It’s too treacherous.”

Farther up in the mountains, flames reached the peak of Sunset Ridge late Tuesday, triggering the evacuation of Mount Baldy Village, said Jim Wilkins, a San Bernardino County Fire Department captain. An estimated 900 residents of the mountain community, located 4,000 feet above the Los Angeles Basin, were told to leave.

If the fire breached Mt. Baldy Road, fire officials said, it could funnel through the canyon and block the only paved exit for lingering residents and firefighters.

“There’s one way in and one way out,” said John Klopp, a Mt. Baldy resident and, like many of his neighbors, a member of the local volunteer fire department.

Firefighters had established a safe zone in a rocky area close to the peak of Mt. Baldy. They were preparing contingency plans to yield the village if they were overrun by flames.

Despite the threat, as many as 150 residents of Mt. Baldy stayed.

John Norris, 74, a retired engineer, has lived on Mt. Baldy since 1965--long enough to have fought five fires and four floods.

On Wednesday afternoon, he was on top of his roof, sweeping off dry leaves.

“The people that went down are the kids who haven’t lived here very long. All the old-timers will stay,” he said from his roof. “The people who have lived here don’t abandon their homes. The ones who run come back to burned out houses. The ones who stay and fight have something to show for it.

“Every fire so far I’ve followed the last firetruck down the hill. And I’ll do it again this time.”

Norris, who said he has a heart condition, became short of breath and had to sit down. But he said he was determined to finish his task.

“You see me up here with a bad heart valve sweeping off these leaves,” he said. “But I don’t want the bonfire of the vanities on my roof.”

Stan Tibbetts was out of town on business in 1988 when a small brush fire destroyed his Mt. Baldy home.

This time, he said, he isn’t going anywhere and would stave off flames with a hose if he had to.

“I packed up the wife and the kids and the dog, but I’m here,” he said. “I have to be here. I agree totally with them getting everybody out of here. People would just be in the way, and that’s why my family is not here. And I’m not so dumb to stand there and burn up. But if there is anything I can do, I will.”

Even with a stiff chin turned toward the flames, “I don’t think there’s anyone who is not afraid,” said Missy Ellingson, who, with her husband, owns the Mt. Baldy Lodge, a restaurant and a collection of cabins.

“It could conceivably trap us in here,” she said. “We’d leave if in danger. We are not going to go down with the ship.”

Barbiann Schmeiser, who lives in a Mt. Baldy cabin, spent Tuesday night at a Red Cross center established at the Magnolia Recreation Center in Upland. Schmeiser had time to grab six of her eight cats before fleeing. She dropped them off at the vet, but when she returned to retrieve the last two, she was told she could not go back up the mountain.

“It was kind of a scary feeling,” she said. “There was no sky at all except for smoke.”

In Cow Canyon, just west of Mt. Baldy, dozens of firefighters were forced to merely sit and watch late Wednesday afternoon as flames burrowed up a hillside.

“It’s basically a death trap,” Wilkins said.

On the northern end of the fire, however, firefighters won one skirmish with the blaze.

It happened shortly after noon, when the fire took off across East Fork Road and tore around the Julius Klein Conservation Camp, which houses about 125 inmates, many of whom were out fighting the fire.

As flames approaching 100-foot heights crested a ridge, about 22 firefighters from the California Department of Forestry took positions around the perimeter. They set several backfires, and watched as the advancing blaze whipped around them, sparing the camp.

“It went exactly as we thought it would go,” said Battalion Chief Jack Consol, who led the Forestry Department strike team.

As the fire raced past, it tore through mountainsides like the flame from a cigarette lighter through paper, officials said, at times consuming 100-acre swaths in minutes. But as it advanced toward Camp Follows and Camp Williams, both also were saved by backfires.

The fire appeared to be headed north toward the boundaries of the so-called Curve Fire, which burned an estimated 18,000 acres near Rattlesnake Peak two weeks ago. Firefighters are hoping the remains of that fire will help extinguish this one.

The fire has forced the closure of the Angeles National Forest, one of California’s most popular recreational areas, for the first time in more than 25 years.

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Times staff writers Peter Y. Hong, Geoffrey Mohan, Kenneth Reich and Nora Zamichow in Los Angeles and Tom Gorman in Las Vegas contributed to this report.