As the wildfires first ignited in the enclave of Pacific Palisades, Caitlin Doran frantically made her way to her childhood home to check on her beloved pet Tiptoe, a 23-year-old, 175-pound tortoise that she’s cared for since receiving him as a Christmas gift at age 7.

In the initial hours of the January 7 blaze, she didn’t expect the flames to inch close to her parents’ home, but after a call from her mother, Cindy Ford, she headed there from her place at Marina Del Rey to check on everyone.

“It took me less than a minute to get into the car because the last time we had a fire that was close enough was in 2019 and the neighborhood was evacuated, and you weren’t able to get in or out. That was my biggest fear,” Ms. Doran, 27, told The New York Sun. 

She arrived at their home 15 minutes later and watched from a patio on the second floor over the next few hours, as an inferno inched closer to their home. Caitlin’s mother told her to prepare because their home might soon be engulfed in flames.

“She just looked at me and said, ‘You got to get Tiptoe to Marina,'” she said. “As prepared as we are, when you’re moving a 175-pound tortoise, you say, ‘Well, where do we bring him? Do we bring him to the beach?’ The house I live in is not the ideal location for Tiptoe.”

As the smoke billowed over their street, the family got their minivan packed up as Caitlin grabbed a bag of one of Tiptoe’s favorite treats, red and yellow peppers, and used them to lure him out of his enclosed holding pen in the backyard and coax him slowly down the driveway and into a bin to hoist him into the trunk.

“I unfortunately left my car there, but I got mom’s car and got Tiptoe in. We drove to Marina, and I was so lucky to be able to drop him off with a ton of friends.” she recounts. “And they all sat on the couch with Tiptoe while I tried to organize everything because I had Grace, my dog, my parent’s dog, and Tiptoe at this point.”

Tiptoe, an African sulcata tortoise, is a social media star, with Caitlin at the helm of his career. She has made a full-time job out of creating content for his accounts on various platforms, all of which garner high traffic from fans. The Instagram account @cailinandtiptoe boasts nearly 400,000 followers and a video posted on TikTok about their escape from the wildfires has garnered almost 53 million views.

Ms. Doran created the account in the early days of the Covid pandemic, when lockdowns prevented her from finding a job as a certified behavior analyst after earning a master’s degree in special education. She had left her previous job two days before the start of the pandemic, and the exams she was studying for to become board-certified were canceled soon after she pivoted into sharing her life with Tiptoe and her family on social media.

“My goal was to help make people’s lives easier, happier, better,” she says. “And somehow, some way through Tiptoe, I’m still doing those sorts of things.”

Caitlin’s family members are longtime residents of Pacific Palisades, going back at least three generations. Her grandparents, parents, and other relatives could evacuate to Caitlin’s home at Marina Del Rey, which the wildfires had left unscathed. Still, the Palisades Fire completely destroyed all of their homes.

“We’re so blessed to have this place because instead of, you know, everyone freaking out and scrambling like so many of my other friends, families unfortunately had to do,” Ms. Doran says. “We are all safe under this roof. So, we’re beyond lucky to have this.”

She says her family intends to rebuild their homes in Pacific Palisades, but with a long road ahead, they will all be under one roof, including Tiptoe, who is already adjusting to his new surroundings at Marina Del Ray, spending his day doing all the things he loves.

“Taking care of him is not the most challenging job, as one may think, with him being 175 pounds. But he has a very simple routine. He likes to wake up and eat a ginormous pile of hay,” she says. “He likes to soak in his warm water spa. But he likes to do that, get hydrated, walk throughout the neighborhood, and literally just eat.”

Taking care of him is pretty cool because it’s something that also forces my family to really slow down,” she adds. “When you’re working with Tiptoe, you’re not working too fast, which for people like my family, we’re very like, ‘Go, go, go.'”

“It gives us such a nice balance. … Somehow, someway, he’s made his way to being the man of the family.”