There are countless stories of heroism, bravery and community collaboration emerging from the devastating wildfires that ravaged the Los Angeles area throughout January. We would like to express our sympathy and support to all those who have been impacted.
One viral image that has resonated with equestrians across the country is that of a teenage girl riding a black horse on a winding mountain road with the fires blazing around them, the caption read: “I rode 14 miles on a horse that isn’t mine out of a canyon because he wouldn’t load for evacuation.”
Hunter/jumper rider Kalyna Fedorowycz of Topanga, Calif., was the brave teenager riding the terrified Friesian cross, Sovereignty, who is owned by her neighbor and family friend, Tamara Walker. “I’ve known Kalyna since she was five years old, and she has always been very bright-eyed and bushy tailed,” Walker said. “She has a naturally positive, ebullient, and adventurous nature, and always looks towards the bright side of things. She is brave and fearless and enjoys all challenges.”
That fearlessness was clear during the Palisades Fire, which burned over 23,500 acres and destroyed large areas of the Pacific Palisades, Malibu, and Topanga. When the fire broke out on Jan. 7, Kalyna and her mom, Donna Fedorowycz, were at Mammoth Mountain ski resort 300 miles away. At first, they thought their home and animals would be safe as the fire was still a long way from them, but as 60 m.p.h. Santa Ana winds blasted across Los Angeles, the blaze grew at historic rates and was soon threatening their neighborhood of Tuna Canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains. While Kalyna and Donna drove six hours to get home, older sister, Olenka, evacuated nine of the 10 horses with Tamara, and took them to the evacuation center at Pierce College in Woodland Hills.
“All of the horses are trained to load because we live in a fire area, so that's the first thing we teach our young horses,” said Kalyna, who turned 17 on January 24. “But Sovereignty is so stubborn, and he's such a scaredy cat. He just froze up and they couldn't get him in.”
Walker went on to explain details of the emergency situation. “Sovereignty is not a confident horse and does not like the trailer. Normally we can still get him to go in, but with the panicky energy due to the fire, he sensed our anxiety and refused to load the two times we tried over the course of two hours,” she said. They were forced to leave the 16-year-old gelding at Walker Horse Farm in order to get the others to safety.
Kalyna, Donna and Olenka – along with their two dogs, three cats, and a bunny - spent the night sleeping in a trailer at Pierce College to keep an eye on the other horses, which included Kalyna’s mount, Ciel. “The trailer didn't have a mattress in it, so we had to just lay down all the blankets and saddle pads that we had from the last show,” Kalyna said. “It just felt safer in there and was closer to the horses.” The next day, Kalyna and her dad went back to the barn to check in Sovereignty and make another attempt to evacuate him.
“Nicholas is very big on fire care, so he sets up his water tank specifically to have the sprinklers on his roof and had a fire hose ready at the house,” Kalyna explained. “He stayed as long as possible with Sovereignty while the fire was literally burning all around him.” Sovereignty spent the first night in a large pasture surrounded by cleared brush and fire-resistant oak trees. However, by the time Kalyna and her dad, Markian, arrived the next morning, the hills flanking the property had already burned or were still burning with spot fires, and telephone lines were down. “My dad took his little Prius and drove underneath the telephone poles and around the rocks!” she recalled.
Kalyna said she didn’t even think about going home to get her own belongings and was only focused on getting Sovereignty to safety. “He was scared and covered in ash, it was blowing all around him, so I cleaned him up, and I tried to calm him down,” she said. The concern was that even if Sovereignty wasn’t hurt by the fire, the stress would cause him to colic, or he’d get hurt on a fence trying to escape. “Sovereignty was pacing around looking really anxious. I grabbed all of my favorite tack and threw it on - because if everything was going to burn, I was saving my best tack!” said Kalyna, whose trailer had already been destroyed by the blaze.
Kalyna began riding Sovereignty north on Tuna Canyon Road in the direction of Pierce College, which is about 14 miles away. “He definitely did not want to go. Even though there was still a fire, he did not get that he was in danger, and he was more scared of the stuff that had already happened than the actual flames coming towards him. I had to get on and off him a lot to make sure he was OK because he was rearing and doing little spins,” said Kalyna, who is known for riding hot horses and sitting big bucks. “He just did not want to go forward. I had to get off and walk or run with him a lot of the way. Eventually, once we got a little down the road, he calmed down a little.”
Markian followed behind her in his car to slow down traffic as she took Sovereignty up Tuna Canyon to Fernwood, then on to Topanga Canyon. “There were a lot of people who waited until the last minute to evacuate, so there were cars who wanted to pass me and my dad. We had to pull over to let them go past, and it took a really long time to get out.” By that point, the roads were closed off to everyone except residents trying to evacuate and emergency services, including Animal Control, entering to assist them.
“We initially had planned to walk 14 miles until we got cell service to call Tamara to bring the trailer because she had no idea we were doing this,” Kalyna said. “She obviously trusts me a lot with her horses, I've always taken really good care of them and had ridden Sovereignty many times before,” she added.
Desperately missing his herd, Sovereignty neighed every time a trailer went past in the hope of seeing other horses. “He’s always with the group. It was so sad,” Kalyna said. Eventually, someone pulled over with an empty two-horse trailer and tried to give them a ride, but Sovereignty was still too scared to enter the small, confined space on his own. “He was like, ‘no, not happening,’ so we ended up walking around 10 miles until a trailer full of Shetland ponies pulled over and a lady helped us,” Kalyna recalled. “I encouraged him from the back, and he hopped in. She trailered us to Pierce College.” At that point, the fire was coming up Topanga Canyon and firefighters were concerned about the speed at which it was spreading.
“The firefighters were doing a big push. They had to cut [the fire] off because if it got into Fernwood, there's not nearly enough good brush clearing there to stop it,” Kalyna explained. “They also didn’t have any helicopters out yet as it was too windy to fly.”
When Walker learned of Kalyna and Sovereignty’s great escape, she said her “first reaction was not disbelief, but rather a laugh and ‘Of course she rode him down!’” she said. “Kalyna is very strong willed and once she makes up her mind, not much stops her. Fortunately, most of her decisions turn out to be good ones. And in this case, it definitely was.”
Kalyna said she wasn’t scared when she was riding Sovereignty out of the canyon as she was more focused on easing his fears and making him feel safe. “I was definitely full of adrenaline when I was riding. I wasn't as nervous as you would think as I know those roads really well and have walked them many times before,” she said. “I was mainly just focusing on getting Sovereignty out and putting up with his behavior! Fear didn’t enter my mind until after he was settled at Pierce College.”
Once she dismounted at the evacuation center, Sovereignty was still very stressed out. “He was OK when he got back with his herd, but he wouldn’t settle when we first we unloaded him, he was like, ‘where are we?’” Kalyna said. “He was alone again at that point, and I couldn't stop him looking around for all the other horses. I was trying to tell him, ‘Your family is over there, you're going to be OK.’ We had to take small steps over to the other side of the property to get him in the pasture with his herd. Then he started blowing out, licking, chewing, and even rolled – he was so happy.”
While Sovereignty was safe, the Palisades and Eaton fires were still burning thousands of acres without containment, and new fires like the Sunset Fire were sparking across the city. The Fedorowycz family drove back to check on their own home, which is located at the end of a long dirt road, and discovered that the canyon was burning all around it. “Of the four corners around our home, three of them were on fire,” Donna said. “We figured we had about five minutes to grab things from the house because the brush was burning 30 to 40 yards away. We picked up what we could, but by then your brain stops working because you can't decide what to take, whether it should be something sentimental, practical, or valuable ... in the end, you realize it's just stuff and we practically took nothing and drove away,” she explained. The Fedorowyczs were “pretty much grieving” that night as they assumed their whole house had burned down and they’d lost everything. “We were also feeling grateful that we had all our animals with us and that Sovereignty and the other horses were safe. Belongings can be replaced, animals cannot,” Donna said.
Miraculously, “we were astounded the next morning when we woke up and got a text that our home was still standing,” Donna marveled. “What we didn't know at the time is that when the fireman came down our road, they noticed that we had a good staging area for the homes around us, so they dropped water from helicopters and fought the fire from our house. That's how it was saved.” Once the immediate fire threat passed, emergency services were strict about who entered the neighborhood because of the concern about looters. Police and the National Guard were stationed at checkpoints coming in and out of the canyon, asking everyone who passed to prove that they lived there and to explain why they needed to leave or enter.
Sovereignty was uninjured in the fire, but Kalyna’s horse Ciel hurt herself after she was evacuated. “Pierce College took great care of all of the horses during the evacuation,” Walker said. “They are such an important facility for the horse community. Ciel was unfortunately injured while trying to knock down a fence, but they handled it and let us know ASAP. She went to the hospital for surgery, but the rest of the horses remained at Pierce and were OK until we were able to bring them home.”
Fortunately, Ciel is responding well to treatment for a punctured knee, and after two weeks of stall rest, she is now rehabbing. It is hoped that she’ll be back at work in four to five months, Kalyna said. Despite a rocky start to their partnership due to Ciel being green and unstarted, and having “a really nasty buck” when Kalyna first started riding her, the pair had seen recent success on the local show circuit before the fires broke out. “It's super fun to ride her and we've just clicked as we have the exact same personality,” Kalyna said.
“Ciel and Kalyna are currently coursing 1-1.10m at shows and have done a 1.35m course once at home. Her goal with Ciel is to compete in the 1.20m by the end of the year,” Walker said. “Ciel is a handful, but through Kalyna's persistence and dedication, together they are becoming a team. Kalyna is surely one of the hardest working teens we know,” she praised.
“I feel very accomplished to have a horse doing well at shows after having years and years of disappointing shows when I was younger,” said Kalyna, who hopes that Ciel will have recovered enough to show again later in the year. In mid-January, it was announced that Kalyna was the Top Finisher for the 2025 Michael Nyuis Foundation, a grant program intended to offer support for young riders who have the passion and drive to compete but lack the resources to do so consistently throughout the year.
Walker said that aside from Ciel, the rest of her horses are happy to be home and are faring well. “They definitely know something happened as the landscape around our barn is completely burned and the air smells like ash,” she said. She recommends that anyone who lives in a fire-risk area with large animals has an evacuation plan in place. “Clearly practicing loading them throughout the year is helpful so you don't run into a potentially bad situation like we did with Sovereignty,” she advised. “We also like to have supplements on hand to reduce stress and help protect the horses’ stomach and intestines during the time of stress,” as the concern of gut issues and colic increases substantially.
“We definitely underestimated the unpredictability of the fire. Our property survived due to a lot of fire prep, water tanks, fire hoses and sprinklers, but the neighborhood is destroyed and resembles a moonscape,” Walker said. “It is a miracle our property survived.”