The ridge above Los Angeles is full of clues. There are pieces of smashed electrical equipment, and a forest of drones blackened by fire. Police tape is tied to one part of the sandy soil, now mixed with ash.
Investigators entered these rocky bluffs with sweeping views of the Pacific Ocean as the site of the Palisades fire, a blaze that destroyed at least 5,000 homes and businesses and killed at least eight people.
A recent visit by New York Times reporters to the site – near the “crime scene,” as Los Angeles Police Department officers who were sent nearby described it – raised a range of possibilities, some of them contradictory, for the origin of the fire.
Burnt wooden poles litter the floor. Another patch of charred chapparal is from a previous fire that firefighters thought they had put out on New Year's Day, a week before the Palisades fire broke out. And there's evidence of recent visitors to nearby Skull Rock, an eerily shaped rock that attracts young hikers and partygoers with discarded beer bottles sitting in a pile of broken glass.
For now, the answer to what caused one of Los Angeles' most destructive firestorms may elude even investigators. Yellow crime scene tape flutters in the wind near Skull Rock hundreds of yards up the steep trail from where a New York Times analysis of satellite images and witness photos suggests the arson site may have been.
This place is a ruin today. The sand and rock slopes are colorless and moonlike, as if a fire has burned away all traces of chlorophyll. It's far from before the fire, when the hiking trails in the area are made up of green plants with reeds and drought-tolerant trees.
The fire tore through the hillsides on both sides of the Temescal Ridge Trail, running north-south, in roughly the same direction as the strong winds that drove the Palisades fire so soon after it ignited on Tuesday, Jan. 7, just before 10:30 am
An hour earlier, Ron Giller, an attorney who lives in the Enclave, a neighborhood in Pacific Palisades near where the fire started, walked with a friend to a section of the fire that was burning on New Year's Day. Citizens think that the wrong firecrackers may remove the person.
This New Year's fire was reported to have just passed midnight and burned eight hectares before the fire brigade put it out completely. Other members of the group are constantly monitoring the outbreak of the fire.
The area burned by the New Year's fire, still scarred and dark, is less than 100 meters from the houses to the west – some of which have been destroyed.
On the morning of the January 7 fire, Mr. Giller said he saw what looked like smoke or dust coming from the area. “It looked like there was smoke there, but there were no flames,” he said in an interview. “It just raised a question in my mind. What's going on? I was thinking, can this thing still work? But it seemed impossible, you know – is there still smoke from the fire that happened six days ago? That didn't make sense to me.”
Some of the deadliest wildfires of the last century were flames that firefighters believed they had extinguished, but the remains burst into flames. They include the 1991 firestorm in Oakland that killed 25 people and the 2023 wildfire on the Hawaiian island of Maui that killed 102 people.
Investigators concluded that the Maui fire started from the smoldering remains of a nearby residential fire hours earlier, possibly from heat buried under dirt until the wind exposed it again.
Researchers have found that fires can smolder in the roots of plants or other organisms for days before conditions allow them to start again.
Mr. Giller and his friend, Alan Feld, weren't the only ones scouting the Palisades hills before the fire last week. The panoramic view from the ridge often attracts hikers from the area and beyond.
When they left that day, Mr. Feld said, they saw several people sitting on top of Skull Rock.
“And one of us even said, 'I hope they don't smoke or anything, with these spirits,'” said Mr. Feld.
A video posted on social media from that morning shows a group of young men near Skull Rock, mostly dressed in sneakers and jogging shorts, one holding a portable speaker. The clips posted by another member of the group begin with men running on a path near a rock, with a small cloud of smoke rising from the hill above them. The men, still running, screamed at the smell of smoke and saw the fire rapidly approaching them.
Another clip shows the same men minutes later, looking back as the fire continues to grow and smoke billows into the sky.
“Dude, it's where we were standing,” said another. “We were literally there,” said another.
The man who posted the video initially agreed to talk to The Times, but then stopped responding to messages. His account on X appears to have been deleted. At the moment there is no indication that any of these men were responsible for putting out the fire; videos of them smoking.
When the latest fire started to spread on Jan. 7, the nearby villagers watched in horror as he grabbed a dry piece of grass and jumped down the hill, blowing the wind. They called 911 and packed evacuation supplies in case they needed to escape. At that time – around 10:30 in the morning – flames were raging in the area, according to photos from another resident. Just half an hour later, the fire had already moved down most of the hill to the houses below.
Firefighters rushed to the scene by ground and air, and one firefighter told fire dispatchers that the fire started “under an old burn scar” – from New Year's. blaze – and can reach nearby homes in minutes.
“It's pushing towards the Palisades,” he said on the radio. “This thing is going to be fine.”
At least one law enforcement officer investigating the fire was looking into whether a downed utility line could have cleared it, as power lines run north and south along the Temescal Ridge Trail. California has a long history of wildfires caused by downed power lines, and early images from another deadly fire that started last week in the Los Angeles area — the Eaton fire — show flames burning under power lines.
On a trail near where the Palisades fire started, the Times found pieces of electrical wire debris, including what appeared to be part of a lightning arrester. But the nearest overhead power line was about a third of a mile to the north. The trail, which turns from the trail into the area, was heavily damaged by the fire, but witness photos show it was intact shortly after the fire started.
The poles along that route have a tumultuous recent history. Many of them date back to the 1930s, and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power began a project in 2019 to replace some of them with stronger steel structures.
The program has stalled after environmentalists said the Department destroyed 183 small trees known as Braunton's milkvetch, which are endangered species.
The department agreed in 2020 to pay the fine, and received permission to continue the work, saying the work is “critical to our wildfire prevention program.” But it seems that the project never went ahead.
A Times review of the ridge showed several damaged and fallen poles along the northbound path — an area that had been burned, but not until a day after the fire started.
Investigators have made it clear that it may take some time to reach firm conclusions about the cause of the fire.
The US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which leads, took more than a year to report conclusions about the Maui fire.
“We're looking everywhere,” Dominic Choi, Los Angeles' assistant police chief, said Monday of the fires burning across the region. He said it had not yet been decided to burn one of them. In the case of the Palisades fire, he added, “there has never been a definitive determination that it was arson.”
At the moment, the entire area around the investigation site is incredibly empty. Areas near the trail are being cleared and a number of houses have been repaired; – the only signs of life are a few fire trucks and the occasional police patrol.
Down in the hills, on the sea, there is complete destruction. The whole area has been flattened, parts of it now just ashes.
Christiaan Triebert, Ivan Penn, Danny Hakim again Claire Moses reporting contributed.
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