A hang gliding pioneer dies in the Palisades hell

Arthur Simoneau, 69, had been flying hang gliders for forty years and was a calculated risk-taker. And so, as residents fled the Pacific Palisades fire on Tuesday, Simoneau headed closer to the inferno.

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

Simoneau kept walking.

“He was going home to save him if he could,” said Murillo, who spoke to Simoneau Tuesday night as his friend returned to Topanga. “Arthur was the type of guy who, once he set his mind to something, couldn’t be talked out of it.”

Murillo texted his friend with directions – which roads were open and which were closed. He never received the text back.

Officials found Simoneau’s body on Thursday, another grim development in the growing death toll from one of the worst wildfires in state history. As of Saturday evening, 16 people had died in Los Angeles County.

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

Friends and neighbors say Simoneau represented the best of Topanga, a tight-knit mountain arts community famous for its hospitality of free people.

He was soft-spoken and quirky, with long silver hair tied in a ponytail. Every weekend was an opportunity for hang gliding. He even did it barefoot once. Then he switched to sandals.

“He was a resident of Topanga. He fit in well,” said Malury Silberman, a friend who met him through the Sylmar Hang Gliding Assn. “He’s such a grown-up hippie, I never yell harshly at him.”

His neighbor, Susan Dumond, said everyone in the neighborhood knew him as the informal caretaker of Swenson Drive, where he lived. He was one of the first to move to the remote road in the early 1990s. He repaired it with his own money for decades. He greeted all his neighbors with a smile and a sign of peace, and was known to leave a trail of freshly plucked invasive species in his wake wherever he went.

“I always knew he was on the street because there were weeds everywhere,” said Dumond, who lived a few doors away.

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

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

“His nature is to protect the community, to protect his home. I imagine that’s what he did,” Dumond said. “He cared deeply about the community and would do anything to help them.”

This community, clustered along a windy road in a fire-prone canyon, is no stranger to devastating wildfires. A year after Simoneau built the house in 1992, a fire broke out He raced around the cityconsuming 350 homes and three people.

Jim Wiley, the city plumber who grew up in the arearemembers talking to Simoneau after the 1993 fire. Like Wiley, Simoneau decided not to evacuate and told Wiley it was a good thing he didn’t – he managed to stifle the embers that started pouring in after the heat shattered the small bathroom window.

“If there wasn’t a guy there to put it out, it would have been a major fire,” Wiley said.

This time the hell was too intense. The blackened brick shell of the house remained Thursday after a fire that burned so hot that it knocked down steel ceiling beams. Inside, only three charred cars and a few motorcycles could be recognized.

Simoneau’s son, Andre, wrote on GoFundMe page that he always knew that his father – who he said rode motorcycles at Social Security age, wearing a helmet marked “for novelty use only” – “would not die of old age or disease.”

“We always thought in the back of our minds that he would die in a spectacular Arthur-like manner,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, he died in the Palisades fire protecting his home (and) doing what he did best: being a tough guy and doing something that only he was brave enough (or crazy enough) to do.”

His son did not respond to an inquiry from The Times.

Many local hang gliders said Simoneau was fearless and although his greatest passion was taking risks, he was cautious in the air.

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

His friends said the hang gliding world had lost one of its pioneers.

Kia Ravanfar, 40, said most veterans who were around when hang gliding became popular – a time when people designed their own gliders from hardware store materials – have either died or stopped doing so long ago .

Simoneau was one of the few who did neither.

“He didn’t live the life he did when he was old,” said Ravanfar, who added that Simoneau had recently been flying in the Owens Valley, where you can hang glide like Mavericks does surfing. “I always imagined he would hang glide until he couldn’t walk.”