PALOS VERDES ESTATES — A winter’s day that began tracing Oregon’s coastline along U.S. Highway 101 as if they were driving through a postcard, ended with the Sigworths of Pacific Palisades, Sig and Molly, their two children – Alicia, a graduate student at San Diego State, and Blake, a junior at Pali High – gathered in an Eugene Airbnb around a computer streaming a Los Angeles TV station as a hellish wave swept across their hometown erasing nearly everything in its path.
Late in the afternoon of Jan. 7, the first day of the Palisades fire with scenes heartbreaking and all too familiar, one in particular literally hit close to home: The Sigworths, nearly 900 miles and thousands of questions away from their disappearing community, watched helplessly as the house three doors up the hill from theirs in the Palisades’ Upper Marquez section burned.
“I mean, every time we could recognize something, we would be like, ‘Oh, that’s blah, blah, blah.’ And then it would be on fire,” Blake Sigworth said. “And, yeah, it’s pretty surreal. I feel like it didn’t really set in, you know, it just, like, it looked like an apocalypse, like from a movie or something.
“It just doesn’t feel real, and especially then watching it on TV, and like watching the houses near ours, and watching, you know, the (city) library burning down and everything. That was just pretty surreal.”
The next day, Sig and Alicia returned to Southern California in search of answers. Molly and Blake stayed in Eugene, Blake, a promising miler, finding refuge on a trail named after a restless, impatient man who spent his life trying to outrace his demons.
“I mean, the great thing about running is that you can do it anywhere to a certain extent. That’s why we didn’t go home, because I couldn’t do it there. It really, I was just able to take my mind off it,” Sigworth said of his run on Pre’s Trail, named after Oregon distance-running icon Steve Prefontaine, who on Friday’s 50th anniversary of his tragic death remains American track and field’s last true rock star. “That trail is just so nice, and with, like, all the history there, it was nice to just take my mind off of everything.”
In the coming weeks and months, Sigworth would repeatedly find solace on his runs. On the trails of the Willamette Valley and up and down and around the Palos Verdes Peninsula and South Bay, around tracks from Laguna Beach to Moorpark, he worked through being homeless, that the life he knew, its touchstones were forever gone, that his friends were scattered, through concerns about the stress his parents were under, through questions about where he would go to school, if he would go to school and would he have a track season?
Through all of it, day after day, mile after mile, he chased answers, finally finding a path forward – and a place to call home – at Palos Verdes High School.
At 5:45 p.m. Friday with temperatures expected to approach 100 degrees, Sigworth, now a double Pioneer League champion, the school record holder at his father’s alma mater and one of the state’s most-storied prep distance programs, will step to the starting line at Veterans Memorial Stadium in Clovis for his State High School Championships 1,600-meter heat and a place next to some of the nation’s best milers, a place earned as much through his and his family’s resilience and the kindness of others as his talent.
“I feel like I’ve just been trying to stay focused on the future, because you can’t change what’s already happened,” the junior miler said. “So I’ve just been trying to better myself and make it as far as I can. I didn’t think I’d make it here, but I’m happy I did. I feel like just being able to find, you know, silver linings when I can, and positives made it possible.
“Like I don’t think I would have been, you know, as much as I wish that I was still at Pali (High) with all my friends and, you know, in my house, I don’t think I would have been able to run this quick if I was still there. I think that’s just something that I’ve been trying to look at and understand, like, this is something that happened because of this event, and I’m better for it.”
‘We really felt everything was gone’
Sigworth had first shown promise as a Pali High sophomore, running 4:16.85 for 1,600, 1:59.49 for 800 and then finishing third in the CIF LA City Section cross-country finals and 21st in the Division I State championships race last fall.
The family’s trip to Oregon was in part so Blake could make the pilgrimage to Eugene and a community so obsessed with the sport that it has proclaimed itself “Tracktown USA.” The Sigworths were on their way to Eugene on the morning of Jan. 7, heading south along the coast just outside of Newport when just before 11 a.m. they received an alert that there was a fire in Pacific Palisades.
Los Angeles Fire Department officials had first received reports a half-hour earlier of a fire burning across 10 acres in the mountains near Pacific Palisades.
“OK, so then we had no internet, I mean, no cell service or anything, and we were getting fire notifications,” Molly Sigworth said.
The family pulled into a small, red firehouse in Seal Rock and asked to use the fire department’s internet.
“And they let us stand there for the next 90 minutes and use their Wi-Fi,” Molly said. “Call our friends. They tracked the fire for us. Like it was a crazy, you know, again, the kindness of strangers.”
The family owned two homes in the Palisades. One they had lived in for 20 years on Livorno Drive in Lower Marquez but had been renting out the past two years. “What we consider our family house,” Molly said. Two years ago, they moved into a house they bought in Upper Marquez.
“We wanted to reach out to a friend to see because our house was very close to the origin of the fire, so we wanted to reach out to a friend to see if they would be able to go up, just in case, and grab a couple of things for us,” Sig Sigworth said. “And that was shortly after the fire started. By the time our friends got up there, who only live a mile down the hill, the fire exploded while they were up there.”
By 2 p.m., the Palisades Fire, driven across a parched landscape by hurricane-force Santa Ana winds gusting up to 90 mph, had stretched across 200 acres. An hour later, it was burning across more than 1,200 acres.
After leaving the Seal Rock Fire Station, the family high-tailed it over the Coastal Range mountains to Eugene.
“We turned on the news, and, you know, it’s just shocking to see,” Sig recalled.
“And at one point, Alicia said, ‘Mom, is that your car getting bulldozed on Sunset Boulevard?’ She was like, ‘I think it is,’ because our neighbors had found it, took it with them, and then we saw a house three up from us, on fire, burning to the ground on the national news.”
“So we really felt everything was gone and the neighborhood was gone,” Molly said.
The next day, Sig and Alicia returned to Los Angeles, hiking into the Palisades later that day. At noon, the Sigworths learned that their home on Livorno, “our family house,” was burning.
Their current home, however, just three houses from the home they watched burn the day before, had somehow survived.
“How are we one of four on each side of the street still standing? I don’t know, but I think that the firemen were there at the time that (house) was burning.” Molly said. “That neighborhood also was one of the first to burn. So I think there may still have been water. I don’t know. I’m totally conjecturing this.
“So, I mean, we really lucked out, and then the other homes didn’t burn, probably until Tuesday night, Wednesday morning, when that neighborhood went. I think it’s the point that, you know, there was no water, all of that.
“So while we lost one, we still have one. It’s not habitable, but it’s still there.”
‘Some semblance of normalcy’
Eventually, the Palisades Fire would consume 6,837 structures and leave 12 dead and thousands homeless, including the Sigworths.
“Came back to L.A. and, you know, no one could find anywhere to live,” Molly said. “It was crazy.”
Eventually, a family friend in Palos Verdes, about to head to Hawaii for vacation, offered the Sigworths his home, a temporary landing spot amid the chaos. The family still had to find a permanent home. There were four cars that needed to be replaced. Their house was at least months, if not longer, from being livable again. There were price-gouging Realtors and property owners and insurance companies to deal with.
“It was a lot of big items, and Molly’s just amazing at this stuff,” Sig said. “But our focus was really on Blake for school.”
Rich Heffernan, whose house the Sigworths were staying in, was a recently retired Palos Verdes High teacher and soccer coach.
Sig Sigworth ran track and cross-country at Palos Verdes High in the early 1980s, growing up next to the Palos Verdes cross-country course, nationally known for an unrelenting and unforgiving hill simply and appropriately known as “Agony.”
Initially, Pali High officials and Heffernan reached out to Palos Verdes cross-country and distance coach Brian Shapiro to see if Sigworth could train with the Sea Kings team.
Palos Verdes, along with South Bay rivals Mira Costa and Redondo Union, had been at the forefront of making the area one of the country’s prep middle- and long-distance running hotspots in the late 1970s and early ’80s.
“A national brand,” a rival coach said of Palos Verdes.
The Sea Kings resumed their place in state and national prominence under Shapiro and Jeff Atkinson and later assistant Kevin Farrington after the school reopened in the early 2000s. PV girls shared a state record by finishing in the top five at the state cross-country meet for 12 consecutive years. From 2009 to 2014, the PV boys and girls teams finished in the top three at the state meet. Palos Verdes is the only California school to qualify both teams and individuals in both genders for NXN, the annual Nike-sponsored national cross-country championships in Portland.
“So one of the things we were able to do with Rich, was, ‘Hey, we don’t know where we’re going to live. We don’t know where Blake’s going to go to school, but you used to coach at PV, could you connect us to the coach?’” Sig said. “And we just want to ask, could Blake just work out with him for the short term, just so he’s with other 17-year-olds, 16-year-olds, just so he has some other, you know, some semblance of normalcy in his life, even though he doesn’t know anyone, but at least it’s, you know, it’s his passion, and it’s the ability for him to again, just kind of work out with another team and get his mind off of all the drama that we’re going through.”
Shortly thereafter, Sig took Blake to a PV workout and introduced him to Shapiro, Farrington and the team
“And then I kind of disappeared, but unbeknownst to him,” Sig recalled, “I stood up by the gate to listen, because Shapiro introduced him, and just did a great introduction, and said, ‘Look, Blake’s from the (Palisades). He is a great runner, but he doesn’t have a team to run with right now, and he’s not transferring here or anything. But you know, for as long as he’s here and working out with us, you know we’re going to treat him as an honorary Sea King.’
“It was just such a warm welcome. And during all this trauma, it’s interesting, it still gets emotional. Now, during all this stuff, it was all the, it was all the nice things that people do that brought up the emotion, you know, because a lot of crappy things, like, you know, price gouging and all that stuff. So, you know when, when somebody actually stepped forward and did something kind, it always meant a lot for sure, for sure.”
‘A big step forward’
Sigworth eventually decided to be a Sea King on a permanent basis, choosing first to transfer to Palos Verdes for the remainder of the school year and then deciding to stay at the school for the 2025-26 academic year instead of returning to Palisades High.
“The kind of thing he could say to his parents was he trusted us,” Molly said of Blake. “He said, ‘As long as we’re all together, I trust you.’ I’m like, ‘OK, he was good with however it all went.’ So I think we really lucked out in that realm. And I think he’s just a very nice, solid kid in that respect. He’s, you know, he’s taking it in stride, but it all kind of worked out for us. It’s one of those moments.
“There’s a calmness to him, that’s very kind, and he’s open and inclusive and like, yeah, if he had a tail, it would wag. He just likes to run.”
But there were times, especially early in the season, when Sigworth’s transition to a new school and new teammates wasn’t as seamless as his success on the track suggested.
“I mean, one of the great things about track is that everyone is so kind and nice, and everybody’s going through the same thing, so there’s not really any, like animosity or anything,” Sigworth said. “It definitely took a while, honestly. I mean, the people, they’re just like, different a little bit, so I had to take some time to fit in. And I don’t mean to say that like anybody wasn’t kind or nice, but it’s just like you do, like, obviously, when you’re running with a completely different group of people, you have to, kind of, I guess, change a little bit. Just, you know, that’s, I feel like, the thing I keep bringing up, too, is just like inside jokes. Like, that’s something that, you know, every friend group has them, and then it’s like, you come to this new place, and every time somebody says something and like people laugh, then you have to ask, ‘What does that mean?’”
In time, Sigworth would be in on the joke, becoming popular with his new teammates and even a leader, a transition Shapiro took note of.
“He’s a naturally kind of quiet, introspective student, and so I think that he’s processing a lot,” Shapiro said. “I think he’s a deep thinker. That’s kind of the nature of the distance runner, is to go out and into the wild and think, and so you sometimes can’t tell. Is he, you know, just a bit on the quiet side and shy side, or is he, you know, really having a hard time, you know, dealing and coping with some of the tragedy that their family and community experienced?
“Yeah, there, you know, there have been a couple times where you could tell that, you know, certain things made him think about home and upset him. But for the most time, he’s done a very good job of carrying on the maturity that he shows about not wanting to add any burden or stress to his parents. You know, here’s this kid, just as nice as can be. And you know, he’ll never have a disciplinary issue in his life, but worried that he might be, you know, causing some extra stress to his family, I think is a real sign of maturity.”
Sigworth won his Sea King debut, taking the 3,200 at the Crescenta Valley Distance Invite in February, then running 4:18.29 in his 1,600 debut a few days later. He lowered his 1,600 PR to 4:14.49 by the end of March, and then after sweeping the Pioneer League 1,600 and 800 titles, broke an 11-year-old school record by running 4:11.05 while placing third at the CIF Southern Section finals, closing in 59 seconds, an indication he is capable of an even faster clocking.
“I feel like I still have so much room to grow and I can really improve,” Sigworth said. “But I guess that was definitely a big step forward for me. I mean, going into (the season), I never thought that I would make state. Southern Section had been like, viewed as like, such a, you know, monster accomplishment to make state. From that, I figured that I would just maybe make (CIF) prelims, maybe (CIF) finals. But then, once I ran 4:11, I definitely knew that, you know, I could keep up with some of these guys.”
He will find out for sure Friday on a sweltering night, five months from the days when an inferno swallowed so much of what was familiar to him. Yet as he steps up to the starting line, surrounded by the nation’s best, he has found, as he now is in Palos Verdes, a place where he belongs.
His new teammates, conscious of his and his family’s journey, the threat of homelessness, his friends scattered like embers in a hurricane-strength wind, are struck by his optimism and his sense of humor.
One afternoon this week, he spent his lunch period in Shapiro’s office wearing a sweatshirt with a retro illustration of Smokey Bear wearing a forest ranger’s hat with “PREVENT WILDFIRES” underneath the image.
Sig and his dad spotted the sweatshirt while his mom shopped for some much-needed clothes shortly after the fire.
“My dad and I saw it, and we loved it, and then we were like, you know, they only had one large so we were like, ‘OK, we’re going to share this,” Sigworth said. “And then I think it’s been in my closet, like, all five months, and I don’t think he’s wearing it at all, but it was just something that, you know, we’re trying to stay positive and think on the bright side, make jokes about stuff. So I think it’s just a way to remind myself that this happened, but also to think of it in a positive way.”
Related Articles
Santa Margarita pitcher Brennan Bauer keeps winning, deceptively Previews of the CIF-SS softball finals for OC teams on Friday and Saturday Santa Margarita, Mater Dei, Estancia playing for CIF-SS baseball championships Five Orange County players to watch in the CIF-SS softball championships U.S. investigating California over transgender high school athletes Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( How the Palisades fire put a high school runner on a new course )
Also on site :