They outran the flames in Altadena, wondering how they lived through the fury

Jason Deach and Mike Griswold — two handymen at the Zorthian Ranch, an artists colony in Altadena — had escaped the flames hours earlier, racing into the smoke, wind howling, buildings burning, trees exploding around them.

“We started hearing about the fire around 5:30 p.m. Tuesday,” Griswold said. “The winds were blowing hard, and the flames were eating the canyon. Brush was catching fire everywhere, all around us. Embers hitting us in the face. We started loading up at 3:30 a.m. We went south.”

“Houses were on fire. Everything was on fire,” Deach said. “There was no stopping it. It was apocalyptic.”

The two men, ragged and sleepless, belongings jammed into two battered pick-ups, were regrouping Wednesday morning in La Cañada Flintridge, a few miles northwest of Altadena. Wrapped in scarves, they reeked of smoke, watching ash blow around them as emergency vehicles and firefighters raced toward the gray-orange glow of the Eaton fire, which has killed five people and burned more than 10,000 acres near Pasadena and Altadena.

Describing themselves as carpenters, mechanics and sheep-shearers, Deach and Griswold were gathered at a Ralphs parking lot with others displaced by the destruction. The men had come from the Zorthian Ranch, a 45-acre community in the foothills of Altadena founded seven decades ago by the late sculptor and craftsman Jirayr Zorthian. The ranch, which offers public tours, bills itself as a “natural respite from the city” and has long been popular with intellectuals and artists.

The men said about 15 people, mostly artists, escaped the fire, along with four horses, a donkey and a dozen or so chickens.

“I don’t know what happened to the 40 sheep, pigs and Brahman bull,” Deach said. “They ran into the woods, probably burned.”

As the men spoke, the sky over La Cañada Flintridge shifted from black to gray to mustard. The wind tugged hard; the sun appeared and disappeared. A woman sat in a Mercedes packed with possessions. Another man, who gave his name only as Joe, because he was violating an evacuation order, stood near a truck stacked with boxes of family photos — weddings and ski trips — and a portrait of Abraham Lincoln saved from his father’s house a few blocks away.

“I ran up here from Torrance and grabbed what I could,” said Joe, whose pants and boots were soaked with water from hosing down his father’s home. He looked to the sky, the street, the empty stores. “We live in an urban wildland interface,” he said. “It’s beautiful. That’s why we’re here. But people are totally kidding themselves if they think they can control Mother Nature.”

The traffic lights weren’t working. The churches were quiet. Sheriff‘s deputies were knocking on doors, telling people to leave this usually tranquil swath of suburbia at the foot of the San Gabriels. One man slept in his car at Ralphs near a couple who had fled Altadena but didn’t know where to go.

“There’s supposed to be a shelter in Pasadena,” the man said as his wife nodded. A few of the people, including a man with a camera, stared at the sky, studying the way the smoke rose and shifted, letting in glints of light and then closing again.

“The worst of it was last night,” said Michael Hudson, a carpenter and social worker from nearby La Crescenta who had come to La Cañada Flintridge to check on the fire’s path. “But the wind is still steady. It comes through the canyon here. It just comes shooting down. You could hear our house creaking.”

Hudson drove away.

Deach and Griswold felt the wind. They were tired but animated, finding it hard to fathom the fury they had lived through and the uncertainty that awaited.

“The flames hit hard,” said Deach, cap pulled tight, scarf blowing. “They came down the hill at 80 miles per hour and cut through a Jeep Wagoneer like a blow torch. It hit every building on the lower ranch and went across the bridge in a clean sweep.”

Griswold nodded.

“I saw a barn go up in 30 seconds,” he said. “Gone that fast.”

The men were hauling trailers stacked with wood. Other possessions were crammed in the cabs and truck beds. They didn’t know exactly where to head. Maybe, Deach said, they’d put their stuff in a storage unit for a month.