Crews on horseback search burn area as some Palisades Fire victims remain missing

The once-lush greenery of the Santa Monica Mountains between the communities of Topanga and Monte Nido was blackened on Friday, about one-and-a-half weeks after the Palisades Fire ripped though the area, burning more than 23,000 acres.

It was the first time that officials could safely examine the burn area. Images captured by KTLA showed deputies with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department saddling up and venturing down into the canyon on horseback, surrounded by crispy foliage and the occasional plots of lands that used to contain a house in the remote area.

As of Friday, along that 23,000 acres of devastation, seven people were still reported missing. The impossible job of those deputies: Canvas that area and hope you stumble upon a survivor.

“There’s no specific information that anyone may be missing in this area. We don’t have any leads like that, they don’t have any leads like that,” KTLA’s Eric Spillman said from a vantage point on Friday that provided a wide view of the torched Santa Monica Mountains landscape. “But what the Sheriff’s Department has to do, in this entire burn zone … is they have to check every single area.”

The search for missing individuals is likely to add to the death toll. As of Friday, 10 were confirmed dead from the Palisades Fire.

The outlook on Friday was bleak from Spillman’s viewpoint, but if the goal of repopulation across the devastated Palisades Fire burn area was to be achieved, a full canvas of every scorched acre needed to happen.

And so about five or six deputies on horseback ventured into that canyon on Friday in an isolated section of the wreckage, hoping to provide positive news to families hoping to rebuild after an unthinkable week.