We were scheduled to meet in January, and as usual, I penned a “Message from the Chair” in anticipation of the meeting. It was cheery and positive and upbeat, and discussed the fact L.A. is the only major city in the world bisected by a mountain range.
On the morning of January 7th, I was meeting with a client in his brand-new house in Pacific Palisades. About 11 AM, an assistant ran in and told us there was an evacuation order and we had to get out, fast. We stopped the meeting, got in our cars, and took off. I looked left up to the intersection of Sunset and Bienveneda, saw cops with lightbars flashing directing cars west – which turned out to be into the fire. On an instinct, knowing the rabbit-warren of streets there as I do, I turned south (away from the intersection) and navigated my out of the Palisades and got home. I escaped. I was also the last person to see the client’s beautiful new multimillion-dollar house, which burned to the ground.
But later in the afternoon came the evacuation order for Mandeville Canyon. We had to hastily pack up pets, important papers and a few clothes. I wasn’t particularly concerned: we’ve had evacuations before, and they typically last a day and a night, two at the most. This time it was 12 days, camping out with our daughter, son-in-law, and three grandbabies (delighted by a long sleepover with grandma and grandpa).
No longer at home, we watched the action remotely from our Ring cameras (until power was cut off). From our front and rear cameras we watched a huge pillar of black smoke marching toward our neighborhood on the west ridge of Mandeville Canyon (“Brentwood Hills”). We also saw a cloud of black smoke in Sullivan Canyon, next door to Mandeville. The last thing we saw, before the power and the cameras failed, were firemen swarming across our backyard and deck, running hoses out to the big ravine below our deck.
As the fire approached Mandeville, the firefighters mounted a massive Defend the Alamo attack on the fire, with helicopters dumping water and jumbo jets dropping retardant. The first indication our house was still there was not until Saturday, four days later, as ABC interrupted Good Morning America to show live aerial coverage of our street and our house, intact, on ABC7. We watched the jumbo jets and helicopters bombing the fire, which they stopped from spreading into our canyon. No homes in Brentwood Hills were lost.
Most of our friends live in the Palisades, and most lost their homes. The staggering degree of the loss caused by this disaster is difficult to exaggerate. Although police are not letting outsiders in, the Palisades today looks like a war zone. Almost everything in the Village area is gone, including two supermarkets, the library and rec center, the Catholic church, and several schools. Palisades High School, while it didn’t burn down, is damaged and unusable. Several other schools as well.
More to the point of our organization, the Santa Monica Mountains have suffered a severe blow. Many trails we enjoy are closed, including the Westridge Fire Road above my house, the Sullivan Canyon and Sullivan Ridge Trails, Rustic Canyon, and the Kenter-Canyonback Fire Road from Kenter up to dirt Mulholland. The fire is believed to have started at the Skull Rock formation on the popular Temescal Ridge trail, which of course is closed.
I haven’t said anything about the Eaton Fire, which also started in a beautiful ecological preserve above Pasadena and wiped out much of Altadena. Those are the San Gabriels, outside our jurisdiction.
Combined with the shocking political developments underway in our country, 2025 is off to an overwhelming, discombobulating and gloomy beginning. For environmentalists, the new administration’s neutering and dismantling of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), established by Richard Nixon in the 1970s, is alarming. And that’s just a small piece of the coming attack on the environment, and aggressive attempt to unwind everything accomplished over the last several decades.
The national Sierra Club is mounting a massive and expensive fight against all this, and we need to support that. For our Task Force, plenty of trail work and remediation lies in our future.
Eric Edmunds, Chair
Santa Monica Mountains Task Force