My NDE with the Palisades Fire.

Out of everywhere and everywhen I could have been when the Palisades fire kicked off, I was with 4 friends up a Temescal Canyon hiking trail almost exactly where the fire began. This is an unforgettable tale I will take with me through the rest of my life.

Many online twitter detectives and internet sleuths have accused my friends and I of starting the fire based off of limited knowledge and unjustified conclusion jumping. At the same time many people have come to our aid to defend us for which I am beyond grateful for.

It has been a wild ride and I intend to tell our story in my own words to the best of my recollection of what transpired Tuesday morning January 7th and the days that followed.

Our Story

This is the story of how we escaped near death by a fire that would end up burning down thousands of homes, and displacing tens of thousands of people.

So the night before the fires set Los Angeles ablaze, my friend hit me up to go on a trail run for the next morning. He said there would be a group of 5 of us in total. I was hesitant because I don’t like running and there were also going to be high winds, but I decided to do it because I know it’s good to do things that are painful yet yield higher health. I also wanted to seize this opportunity to do it with friends who would all push each other.

So the next morning I woke up early to embark on this trail run up Temescal Canyon. I was stoked on Temescal because it has probably my favorite trails in all of LA.

We knew the wind would be pretty crazy but nobody suspected a fire would start. We actually thought it would be kind of fun to experience the winds and see cool views of all the plant life blowing in the wind.

(“The answer my friend, is a’blowin’ iin the wind” -Bob Dylan)

I arrived to the parking lot and realized I was actually right behind 2 friends in the car in front of me; lets call them “Mike” and “Sol.” The other 2 friends arrived around 15 minutes after; we can refer to them as “Kai’ and “Jei.”

We all met up and greeted each other at the parking lot by the trail head. There was an energy of being simultaneously amped up yet dreadful of the rigorous run that lied before us.

Right before we started the run we actually gathered and held hands to say some intentions and prayers. Just a little pre-run meditation to aid us in our efforts.

We started the run and our destination was a landmark known as Skull Rock. It is a cool big rock that looks like a skull.

The pattern of the run went as such: we would jog untill the person leading gassed out and then we’d take a break, then a new person would lead the next round. We rotated leaders each round.

The run was honestly pretty hard. It was uphill basically the whole time for around 2-3 miles. A few of us got pretty close to throwing up.

Finally Skull Rock was in view and we were on the last leg of the run. I pushed myself the hardest here knowing it would soon be over. When we got to Skull Rock it was around 10:12am.

(Time stamps feel important to share here)

As we were walking around the rock, I remember getting a whiff of something burning for only a single inhale. I asked one friend if he smelled it and he said he did, but we didn’t really think twice about it. We wrote it off because we couldn’t see any smoke or signs of fire. This would have been around 10:15.

So we relaxed and enjoyed the the view from Skull Rock for around 10 minutes or so.

After that someone spotted another rock nearby and suggested we try to get to it, but in order to get there we had to go off trail. So one of us went as a scout to check if we could make it to the next rock. He deemed it was safe enough so we all trekked to it.

This is an aerial view of our path to the 2nd rock we went to.

We got to it by going through a mildly strenuous jerry-rigged path. We had to bend down and almost crawl through sharp shrub.

We made it to the rock then had to climb up its 10 ft face.

Once we all settled in to a spot atop the rock someone recommended we meditate. I suggested we do a specific ‘crowdsourced meditation’ which is where a group drops in to a meditative state and anyone can vocalize what they are experiencing. The naming of your experience is part of the meditation. For example: “I feel my hands tingling” or “I notice the sounds of the birds.” The meditation is guided by the group. The purpose of the meditation is to create a non-hierarchical shared experience.

Ideally we can start to synchronize our minds and form a group coherence. The meditation is naturally guided by the emergence of the group.

So we started and soon one of us said “I feel gravity getting stronger”, another said “I notice my breath slowing down”, then finally the one that ended the meditation was 4 out of 5 of us saying in synchrony: “I smell smoke”.

This all happened within the first minute of the meditation

We all simultaneously turned around to face the peak of a mountain behind us. One of us goes, “holy shit there’s smoke right there”, then in the next moment someone else said, “holy shit there are flames too.” The fire appeared to be around 100ft away.

The shock was surreal. We quickly realized the severity of the situation and knew we had to leave immediately. It all happened so fast. We knew it was a serious emergency that should be treated as such.

This was at 10:25am.

There was a sense of real emergency and panic as we started to run. One of the scariest aspects was that we had to run back uphill through an off trail shrubby path before we could get back to the main trail that would lead us downhill. The only other options were to run rogue down the face of the wild and steep mountain or stay put and get torched.

As we were running my mind was filled with the possibility of being surrounded by flames trapped up on the mountain. The wind was at such high speeds I knew we had a short window of time to get out of there. It was quite terrifying. In that initial escape it felt like we were truly running for our lives. (Which we were)

Here’s a video that Kai grabbed as we ran for our lives. You can see the smoke cloud in its infancy in the very beginning of the video.

Fire escape video

It took us a little over 2 and a half minutes to get to safety.

We luckily made it back to the main trail then ran down below Skull Rock to a more open and flat part of the trail. Once we reached that point we felt a slight sigh of relief. We were out of the immediate danger zone. We turned back to see the fire just about reach where we had been 3 minutes before. A true close call if there ever was one.

We took a brief couple minutes to look at it and take some videos. Here are a couple of those.

We were in utter shock to see the fire about to reach the exact spot we were just a few minutes prior.

I had the thought of how lucky we are to have our sense of smell because if we hadn’t been able to smell the fire who knows when our other senses would have detected it considering we were in an eyes closed in a meditation. It might have been too late.

It is so interesting how these survival situations can be fun. The closer you get to death the more fun and thrilling it is to survive. But of course the greater the risk is, the more likely you are to end up dead which is the worst possible outcome. Many adrenaline junkies meet there demise by pushing the risk meter a little too far. But this experience wasn’t pursued by us, it was an emergent emergency that forced us into a close encounter with death.

We only stopped for probably 5 minutes max to take videos. We felt we were in the clear, but knew we had quite a long way down so we kept moving at a jog pace. I didn’t realize we would also be running downhill.

We encountered hikers on the way down, some who knew there was a fire others who were oblivious.

Two of the first hikers we saw were elderly women who didn’t seem able to run fast. We were still pretty close to the fire at this point. We offered to carry them but they adamantly insisted they were fine. They also went on a different trail back to a different trail head that was much closer, but also directly in the path of the wind. I imagine they made it out fine but it seemed like a gamble.

As we moved down the trail we looked around at what we suspected would soon be engulfed by flames. It was unbelievable to think all the flora around us would be crisped. It also felt a bit ominous.

The wind started blowing more in our direction as we neared the bottom. It was picking up like crazy. By the time we made it to the parking lot there were rangers telling everyone to evacuate.

We made it back to our cars at around 11:20am, almost an hour after we first spotted the fire. During this time we watched the cloud of smoke continue to grow and grow. By this time there were already airplanes dumping water and heavy traffic of people evacuating the area.

As we escaped I reflected on how precious the gift of life is and how the near death experience put it in perspective.

We escaped to Santa Monica and continued to watch the fire get so big. It got more and more surreal to us. The fact that the fire ended up doing such an enormous amount of damage and we were near its inception point shortly after it started was just unbelievable. I hadn’t been to Temescal for months and I also hadn’t hung out with this group of friends for months. The coincidence of it all is beyond me.

That night I ended up posting a video to Tiktok and expected it to go viral. To my unsurprise I woke up the next morning to more likes and comments than I have ever seen. It was fun to go viral but also at the same time became a bit unnerving to see how many users started to accuse us of starting the fire.

I had also posted the videos on Twitter which didn’t really blow up for around 4 days, but when it blew up it exploded like a nuke. We had Rob Schneider ringing the alarm asking the internet to find us.

The whole experience was very eye-opening to see how easy it is to skew logic and prematurely jump to conclusions. Being on my end of the story I knew exactly what happened so I could see right through all of the wacknut theories. I honestly couldn’t even deny that certain things seemed suspicious, but the fact of the matter is the people making accusations didn’t know the full story.

Out of all the wacky theories this is probably the only one that made any sense.

It’s crazy because I consider myself somewhat of a conspiracy theorist and this was a great lesson teaching me not to jump to naive certainty. It makes me realize how little we know and that Socrates was right when he said, “The only thing I am sure of is that I know nothing.”

It got to the point where I had all the top news agencies hitting me up left and right but I didn’t really want to start doing interviews. A part of me wanted to get press and attention but another part of me didn’t want to bring more limelight to us.

It was a double edged sword because I wanted to clear our name by providing more context to our story but I also knew anything I said could and would get twisted to dig me into a deeper distorted web of lies.

I ended up doing an interview with the LA Times that felt intuitively aligned for some reason. I was really glad and grateful for their portrayal of our story. It gave good voice to our point of view in all the chaos.

Here is a link to that

Overall this is an experience I will never forget and it will always be a crazy story to tell. Anyone who knows me even in the slightest knows I am one of the last people on the planet who would start a fire or hang out with people who would start a fire.

My heart goes out to all the victims of these LA fires which includes good friends I grew up with.

The silver lining I see is that natural disasters always present an opportunity for real community to emerge. People come together in ways that nourish our needs for meaningful social connection. There is a clarity that acts as a reminder of what is really important in this human life on Earth we get to live for an unpredictable amount of time.

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