Hang-gliding pioneer dies in Palisades inferno

A hang glider for four decades, 69-year-old Arthur Simoneau was a calculated risk-taker. And so, as residents fled the Pacific Palisades fire Tuesday, Simoneau headed closer to the inferno.

He was returning from a ski trip in Mammoth when he learned of the evacuation orders for his Topanga home in the Santa Monica Mountains, said Steve Murillo, a longtime friend and fellow hang glider.

Simoneau kept going.

“He was heading home to save it if he could,” said Murillo, who spoke with Simoneau on Tuesday night as his friend drove back toward Topanga. “Arthur was the kind of guy that once he put his mind to something, you couldn’t really talk him out of stuff.”

Murillo texted his friend directions — which roads were open, which were closed. He never got a text back.

Arthur Simoneau in a glider last summer. His friends said he was one of the pioneers of the sport and would go hang-gliding every weekend.

(Kia Ravanfar)

On Thursday, officials found Simoneau’s body, another grim notch in a mounting death toll fueled by one of the worst wildfires in the state’s history. As of Saturday night, Los Angeles County had reported 16 deaths.

Simoneau was found near the doorway of his home, apparently trying to defend it, Murillo said.

Friends and neighbors say Simoneau represented the best parts of Topanga, a tight-knit bohemian mountain community with a reputation for welcoming the free-spirited.

He was soft-spoken and quirky, his long silver hair kept in a ponytail. Every weekend was an opportunity to hang-glide. Back in the day, he even did it barefoot. Then he switched to sandals.

“He was a denizen of Topanga. He fit in good,” said Malury Silberman, a friend who met him through the Sylmar Hang Gliding Assn. “Kind of a grown-up hippie — never a harsh word out of the guy.”

His neighbor Susan Dumond said everyone in the area knew him as the informal caretaker of Swenson Drive, where he lived. He’d been one of the first to move onto the remote road in the early ‘90s. For decades after, he would use his own money to make repairs on it. He greeted all his neighbors with a grin and a peace sign and was known to leave a trail of freshly yanked invasive species behind him wherever he went.

“I always knew he had been on the street because there were weeds all over the road,” said Dumond, who lived a few houses away.

A hillside smolders near Topanga Village along Topanga Canyon Road.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Dumond evacuated Tuesday night, the air thick with smoke and winds so strong she could barely open her car door. She returned Thursday to get medical equipment for her husband.

As she left around 4:30 p.m., she saw a sheriff’s deputy outside Simoneau’s home.

“That’s his nature is to protect the community, protect his house. I would imagine that’s what he did,” said Dumond. “He cared about the community a lot, and would do anything to try to help it.”

That community, centered on a windy road inside a fire-prone canyon, is no stranger to devastating blazes. A year after Simoneau built the home in 1992, a wildfire raced across the town, claiming 350 homes and three lives.

Jim Wiley, the town plumber who grew up in the area, remembers talking with Simoneau in the aftermath of the 1993 blaze. Like Wiley, Simoneau had decided not to evacuate and told Wiley it was a good thing he hadn’t — he’d been able to stamp out embers that started drifting in after the heat busted a small bathroom window.

“If the guy wasn’t there to put it out, it would have burned down bad,” said Wiley.

The remains of Simoneau’s home on Swenson Drive in Topanga, destroyed by the fire.

(Rebecca Ellis / Los Angeles Times)

This time, the inferno proved too intense. A blackened brick husk of a home was all that remained Thursday after a fire tore through so hot it brought down the steel beams. Three charred cars and a few motorcycles were the only things recognizable inside.

Simoneau’s son Andre wrote on a GoFundMe page that he always knew his father — who he said rode motorcycles at “Social Security” age with a helmet that said “for novelty use only” — “wouldn’t die of old age or illness.”

“It was always in the back of our heads that he would die in spectacular Arthur fashion,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, he died in the Palisades fire protecting his house [and] doing what he did best: being a badass and doing something only he was brave enough (or crazy enough) to do.”

His son didn’t respond to an inquiry from The Times.

Many local hang gliders said Simoneau was fearless, and though his biggest passion was a risky one, he was careful in the sky.

“He was always a very cautious person,” said his friend of 40 years, Gary Mell, who questioned whether a lack of home insurance might have driven Simoneau to stay too long. “If he had insurance, Arthur’s too smart of a guy to do something like that.”

News of Simoneau’s death shocked the area’s tight-knit hang-gliding community. Friends say he was one of the few old-time hang gliders who continued with the sport for decades.

(Mary Marasco)

The hang-gliding world, his friends said, had lost one of its pioneers.

Kia Ravanfar, 40, said most of the old-timers who were around when hang gliding became popular — an era when people would design their own gliders with materials from the hardware store — had either died or long since stopped.

Simoneau was one of the few who had done neither.

“He didn’t live a life like he was old,” said Ravanfar, who said Simoneau had recently been flying in Owens Valley, which is to hang gliding as Mavericks is to surfing. “I always had imagined that he’d be hang gliding until he couldn’t walk.”