In Topanga Canyon on Saturday morning, suspended midair from an electricity line, hung the smoldering top of a utility pole. The pole itself had burned away. Its remaining crosspieces resembled a crucifix on fire. By the time Bob Melet videotaped this eerie scene, firefighters had managed to halt the advance of flaring patches that elsewhere had been whipped into infernos.
Barely 100 yards from the front door of Mr. Melet’s store, Melet Mercantile — a destination for fashion and interior designers who for decades have tracked Mr. Melet’s idiosyncratic tastes — lay the fire line at Camp Wildwood, a disused summer camp established in the 1920s and later turned into a resort and community center by two locals, Julia and Oka Stewart. To its west and along the Pacific Coast Highway, almost everything was torched.
“The canyon is a funnel that comes right past my doorstep,” Mr. Melet said by phone from a friend’s apartment in Corona del Mar, his evacuation point. “If it had reached me, it would have wiped out the entire town.”
The fact that it had not represented the miraculous survival of an ecosystem as fragile and anomalous as it is naturally untamed. An eccentric holdout of a countercultural ethos that once went a long way toward defining the Southern California lifestyle, Topanga lies at the western limit of an extensive system of canyons resembling a series of Cyclopean knife cuts slashed into the Santa Monica mountains.
Others among the 28 canyons — Laurel, Beachwood, Runyon — may be better known beyond the Los Angeles basin, largely for their place in rock ’n’ roll history and lore. While gradually over the decades those places succumbed to the irresistible forces of gentrification, Topanga Canyon has clung to its wildness, its renegade spirit and the durable aura it retains of a one-time redoubt of bootleggers and drug runners. Bisected by a single winding mountain road, Topanga straddles the mountains and links the sprawling suburbs of the San Fernando Valley with the blue vastness of the ocean.
“One of the things we’re proudest of in Topanga is the strength of the community,” said Stefan Ashkenazy, a long time resident of the canyon. By some standards, Mr. Ashkenazy’s exclusive hotel complex, Elsewhere — built on 39 hilltop acres of what was once a vacation ranch for the Howard Johnson family — could be seen as a harbinger of gentrifying forces. That it is not owes to his efforts to keep the hotel’s vibe communitarian and local (he has offered free lodging to the area’s ad hoc firefighting teams that call themselves Heat Hawks), and its imprint light upon the land.
“Believe me, I know how lucky we are to have this holdout,” said Mr. Ashkenazy, who also owns the four-star Petit Ermitage hotel in West Hollywood.
For Emmeline Summerton, a self-taught social historian whose Instagram account, Lost Canyons LA, has become an addictive source of Los Angeles history and lore, the story of Topanga Canyon is one of improbable survival — a thoroughly wild place less than an hour’s drive from the city’s business center.
“I’m not sure how much people outside Los Angeles know about it,” she said, referring both to the canyon itself — populated by coyotes, rattlesnakes, and mountain lions — as well as a community that has long worn its ornery countercultural reputation as a badge of pride.
“There is the local, small community and a very rural feeling,” Ms. Summerton said, one still largely under the influence of the first wave of New Age pioneers. There were free-love naturist hide-outs like Elysium Fields and Sandstone Retreat, she explained, along with Moonfire Ranch, a 60-acre sanctuary established in the late 1950s by Lewis Beach Marvin III, an animal-rights activist and heir to S & H Green Stamps, a once popular grocery store reward system.
“It was very much about people living off the grid, with solar and rainwater collection,” Ms. Summerton said, and about a tolerance for oddballs and eccentrics that hung on long after a succession of real estate booms permanently altered the character of other, less remote canyons. “A lot has changed and there’s a new breed of hippie-type people out there, influencers and wellness entrepreneurs, so, yes, it’s more exclusive and expensive than in the past,” she added. “But it’s still the one canyon where you get a sense of what it has always been.”
By this she meant a refuge for renegades and outsiders, for artists like Neil Young, who wrote his landmark solo album “After the Gold Rush” at his house there; for storied ’60s groups like Canned Heat, whose members once worked as the house band at the Topanga Corral club (which burned down not once but twice); for Linda Ronstadt in the days after she quit Stone Poneys, the folk rock trio, to go solo and make music with musicians who would later form the Eagles; for the American actor Will Geer to create an open air amphitheater set in a hillside and call it the Theatricum Botanicum, a name derived from a 17th century English botanical text.
To this day in Topanga Canyon there remains an itinerant community informally known as the “Creekers,” whose members live off the grid in encampments set along creeks in the hills behind the disused Topanga Ranch Motel; residents who ride horses to do their marketing at the Topanga Creek General Store; and naturists hiking canyon roads clad in little besides sun hats and sneakers.
This, of course, was before the wildfires.
Gone on the first day of the Palisades fire was the Reel Inn, a beloved Malibu fish joint opened in 1986 by Teddy and Andy Leonard at the base of Topanga Canyon. Also gone was Cholada, a bustling Thai restaurant whose takeout was both a staple of coastal dining and the source of catered meals for the art world honchos that regularly decamp to Los Angeles for the annual Frieze art fair. Gone, too, were the Topanga Ranch Motel, a bungalow style motel complex built in 1929 by William Randolph Hearst to house railroad workers, and the Malibu Feed Bin, a holdout from an era when this stretch of the California coast was still largely agrarian.
Entire hillsides and washes were reduced to ashes and, later that same afternoon so, too, was an entire stretch of multimillion dollar homes improbably perched oceanside where the canyons meet the water along Pacific Coast Highway.
“If you’re ever going to use the word surreal,” Mr. Melet said of the devastation, “it was surreal.”
What seemed almost miraculous, given the surrounding destruction, was that the fires failed to reach the Theatricum Botanicum, and left unscathed the Inn of the Seventh Ray, whose dining tables are set on stone terraces by a creek side and whose gift shop is filled with crystals and mystical arcana.
“So far Topanga has mainly been spared,” the actress Wendie Malick said by phone from her ranch set on a ridge above Topanga.
“The winds were in our favor,” she added. “Though we’re not out of the woods yet. Things can change on a dime.”
And, indeed, the cyclonic winds — biblical, raging, like nothing in memory — started up again on Monday.
“The fires didn’t get to us last week,” said Nick Fouquet, a French American designer whose Western-style hats are favored by celebrities including Tom Brady, Rihanna, J. Balvin and LeBron James. When the first alert came last week, Mr. Fouquet raced up the coast from his business’s headquarters in Venice to the geodesic dome in Topanga that he calls home and, aided by a band of locals pumped out his swimming pool to soak his house and its surroundings.
It was a scene being repeated throughout the canyon, Mr. Fouquet said, neighbors on a mission of “house triage,’’ putting out small burns before they could grow. Videos Mr. Fouquet sent this reporter from the early days of the fire showed crimson flames crowning a ridge less than a quarter-mile from his property line. “The wind, the firefighters, a myriad of factors have been on our side,” said Mr. Fouquet.
Among those factors were the triage efforts of a tight knit community that stayed put despite evacuation orders and that banded together — as it has consistently across the decades when the canyon was visited by the wildfires, earthquakes, mudslides and rockfalls that are a fact of life in a seismically unstable coastal desert perched at a continent’s edge.
“Topanga always felt like the ugly stepchild no one cares about,” Mr. Fouquet said, while acknowledging the role in his current reprieve of both firefighters and fate. “We’re used to doing things for ourselves.”
