The Brief

Two months and six days after the Eaton Fire broke out, on the very same day the Army Corps of Engineers came with bulldozers to clear the rubble of his burned down home, Matt Baffert finally got back out on the mountain trails.

“Idlehour Trail…in the upper Eaton Canyon,” he said. “For lack of a better word, my second home.”

Baffert works as a construction contractor by day. In his free time, he’s an avid mountain biker and trail steward, repairing trails after wildfires, floods and other mayhem in the Angeles National Forest. In 2019, he co-founded the Lowelifes Respectable Citizens’ Club, a dedicated nonprofit group of volunteer trail builders and menders.

Erik Hillard, CFO of Lowelifes (left) talks with Matt Baffert, CEO of Lowelifes (right) ahead of a trail work day on Mount Wilson in 2023.

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Erin Stone

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LAist

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Baffert and his crew have spent thousands of hours restoring trails in some of the more remote parts of the forest, including three off Mount Wilson that were heavily damaged after the Bobcat Fire and subsequent record rainstorms. That fire was the second-largest in L.A. County history, burning more than 115,000 acres in the Angeles National Forest in 2020.

Baffert’s group, in partnership with the Forest Service, has worked on those trails since. Thanks to their work, several of them are now open, but repairs are ongoing.

Matt Baffert during better days on the trails i the Angeles Forest.

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Brian Vernor

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LAist

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After the Eaton Fire, that volunteer work became more personal than ever. The January wildfire didn’t burn as many acres in the forest as the Bobcat, but it destroyed thousands more homes, including Baffert’s in Altadena, where he and his family lived for about seven years.

Baffert grew up in Long Beach, where he used to surf, but the mountains ended up calling him inland.

“Altadena, for me, is home, and the mountains and the trails are probably the biggest piece of that,” Baffert said.

Now, his mission is two-fold — rebuilding the trails he loves, while rebuilding his own home after fire.

Assessing the damage

On the same day the Army Corps was scheduled to clear the rubble of his home in mid-March, Baffert got the go-ahead from the Forest Service to assess the damage to nearby trails.

Before taking off for the wilderness above, Baffert and a friend and fellow trail steward made a stop.

“ I really wanted to see my property before it was gone,” he said. “I don't know why I was so compelled to do that.”

The view of the upper Idlehour trail in mid-March after the Eaton Fire.

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Courtesy of Matt Baffert

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The drive through Altadena was heart-wrenching, Baffert said. Then came the next blow — to the 5.3-mile Idlehour trail up the mountain. They started their survey up at the Eaton Saddle and the plan was to ride their mountain bikes down from there.

“We had made our way maybe about one mile down the trail and the impact of the damages really started to escalate,” Baffert said. “As you progress down the trail, the after effects of rain and storms on completely burned areas just becomes more exponential.”

As they descended, things didn’t look so good — chaparral charred black; formerly lush, tree-shaded canyons now sparse; trails washed out from the recent storms.

Fellow Lowelifes volunteer and friend Eric Melanson surveys damage in the "Harvard Branch" area of Eaton Canyon.

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Courtesy of Matt Baffert

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But there were pockets of hope.

“A moment of relief washed over me seeing green on the second half of Tom Sloane all the way to the saddle,” Baffert wrote in a web post of his post-fire observations on the group’s website. “Within the green are beautiful rock staircases built by the recently passed away volunteer and master mason, the legendary Dave Baumgartner.”

Despite the heartaches, Baffert also felt a sense of catharsis of finally knowing exactly how bad it all was. Baffert said he could now plan how to rebuild the trails — and his house.

Rebuilding home

Baffert said it’ll probably be at least three years before Idlehour and other heavily damaged trails reopen to the public.

A charred landscape in the upper Idlehour trail.

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Courtesy of Matt Baffert

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Signs of regrowth as native Humboldt lilies peak out of ashy dirt in mid-March.

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Courtesy of Matt Baffert

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“There's still cleansing that needs to take place, more erosion that's gonna take place,” Baffert told LAist. “Like we saw with the Bobcat Fire, eventually things start to stabilize. Chaparral starts to grow in. Roots start to bed into the hillsides. Eventually, you start to see things starting to hold.”

The aftermath of the Eaton Fire in the San Gabriel Mountains.

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Courtesy of Matt Baffert

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Once vegetation like chaparral takes hold, Baffert said they can start repairing the trails in earnest.

“It'll always look different, but you'll build a new relationship with the land, and then you'll realize that you kind of love it just as much as you did before,” Baffert said.

Even though things will never be exactly the same, Baffert said he’ll do everything he can to regain that old sense of home.

“Altadena’s forever changed,” Baffert said. “But everybody just kind of wants what they had before. So working towards that, like rebuilding my home and rebuilding Idlehour, I think of them collectively. It's a mission and I must do it.”

Before and after the Eaton Fire on the Idlehour trail.

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Courtesy of Matt Baffert

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After the Eaton Fire on the Idlehour trail.

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Courtesy of Matt Baffert

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How to help

Baffert said Lowelifes always welcomes new volunteers. You can keep up with their post Eaton Fire efforts and sign up to volunteer here.

There are also other trail steward groups in the region, including:

• Angeles Volunteer Association
• Bear Canyon Trail Crew (and their meetup group)
• Concerned Off-Road Bicyclists Association
• Mt. Wilson Bicycle Association
• Restoration Legacy Crew
• The Sturtevant Conservancy
• See a full list of volunteer groups active in the Angeles National Forest here.

What trails are now open?

On Friday, the Angeles National Forest officially reopened multiple popular trails after the Eaton Fire, including:

• Switzer Picnic Site
• Chantry Flat Recreation Area
• Upper and Lower Winter Creek trails
• Sturtevant Trail
• Sturtevant Loop
• Gabrielino National Recreation Trail (all of it is open)
• Gould Mesa Campground

See the map of all open trails here.

These trails remain closed:

• Bear Canyon Trail
• Bear Canyon Trail Camp (Hike-in Campground)
• Echo Mountain Picnic Area
• Echo Mtn Trail via Cobb Estate
• Hoegees Trail Camp (Hike-in Campground)
• Idlehour Trail
• Idlehour Trail Camp (Hike-in Campground)
• Ken Burton Trail
• Millard Trail Camp (Hike-in Campground)
• Mt. Lowe Trail Camp (Hike-in Campground)
• Mt. Wilson Skyline Park Picnic Site
• Mt. Wilson Trail
• Paul Little Picnic Area
• Sam Merrill (lower) Trail
• Sam Merrill (middle) Trail
• Spruce Grove Trail Camp (Hike-in Campground)
• Zion Trail

Keep up with the latest on closures here.

And remember, if you do visit the forest, tread lightly and stay on the trails — the land still needs time to heal, and higher traffic on trails after fires is one reason trails and landscapes can face further damage.

An earthquake is overdue along Southern California’s “critically stressed” San Andreas and San Jacinto faults, according to a new study.

As stress builds on a fault over centuries, it builds pressure that has to be released in an earthquake. In the study, scientists found that the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults are under more stress than at any point in the last 1,000 years, meaning that a massive earthquake could be on the way.

“Because it’s been quite a long time since the Southern San Andreas or the San Jacinto have had a large earthquake, we’ve accumulated a lot of stress,” said Kate Scharer, a co-author of the study and a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Using geological evidence, including tree-ring records and sediment samples, a team of scientists created a computer model that shows how pressure accumulates along faults over time. Then they ran the model up to the present day to estimate how much stress is now building beneath our region. They found that pressure has been gradually building since the last Big One in 1857, one of California’s largest seismic events on record.

“The idea that all of those segments of the fault could have enough stress for an imminent future earthquake was already there,” said Harold Tobin, the director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network and a professor at the University of Washington who was not involved in the study. “This [study] puts it on more of a quantitative, rigorous scientific basis.”

One area of interest is the Cajon Pass, the narrow corridor between the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains.

“Cajon Pass could act as an ‘earthquake gate,’ like a junction that either stops or transmits large ruptures between the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults depending on stress conditions,” said Liliane Burkhard, the lead author of the study and a research affiliate in the Hawaiʻi Institute of Geophysics and Planetology.

The pass is a place where a major earthquake could jump from one fault system to another, Burkhard said. It could allow the rupture to spread farther across Southern California and affect millions more people across the Coachella Valley and San Bernardino County.

Going forward, Burkhard hopes to study other earthquake-prone regions where several fault systems interact and create risks that remain difficult to predict.

Scientists agree that Southern California will experience another major earthquake. The challenge is that no one knows exactly when.

“It could happen today, tomorrow, or in 10 years, or in 30 years,” said Ahmed Elbanna, director of the Statewide California Earthquake Center and a professor at USC who was not involved in the study. “On geological time scales, these are all very short.”

So it’s a question of when, not if.

“We should certainly expect to experience large earthquakes in our lifetimes,” Scharer said.

In notoriously car-centric Los Angeles, thousands of fans have been taking public transit to get to the World Cup.

Metro has logged more than 100,000 rides to and from SoFi Stadium for the first four matches in Inglewood, on its special shuttle buses carrying fans directly to the stadium from various locations across the region. That service costs $1.75 a pop – the same as a typical bus ride.

The transit agency organized the enhanced bus system to bring passengers to the stadium directly from as far as Newport Beach and as nearby as Culver City. Ridership on those buses has jumped each match – from 18,551 rides to and from the first game between the U.S. and Paraguay to more than 29,000 rides when Iran played Belgium on Sunday afternoon.

There were long lines to catch the shuttle at Union Station before the first two matches. One rider, Cristian Vasquez, came from the Antelope Valley for the U.S.-Paraguay match. He left home at 9:30 a.m. and was the first in line for the bus.

“It’s a service that really helps out the community that probably can't afford SoFi Stadium's parking lot or the existing parking areas,” he said.

After the Iran-New Zealand match, LAist observed long waits for a bus ride home from SoFi, as the crowds exiting after the match all lined up to board the buses at the same time.

People have also been taking the train to the tournament. According to Metro's numbers, when Iran played New Zealand at SoFi last week, K Line ridership was up 41% and C Line ridership jumped 23%, compared to a typical Monday. Those lines are the closest to the stadium.

Other fan events such as the FIFA Fan Festival at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum have led to similar spikes for Metro. On the day of the first match in Los Angeles, when the U.S. beat Paraguay 4-1, the agency reported that fare gate taps at the Expo/USC station were up nearly 600% compared to an average day.

Alicia Greene took Metrolink and Metro to the Fan Fest from Anaheim and was enthusiastic about the journey.

"The Metro system is awesome," she said. "It couldn't be easier."

Angelenos packed trains in Koreatown last week when South Korea and Mexico played each other in a highly anticipated match. Ridership on the newly extended D Line was up more than 95%.

"While we were laser-focused on the stadium, something else was rising across town," Metro CEO Stephanie Wiggins wrote in a blog post. "In Koreatown, thousandsof fans poured onto our rail lines at key stations like Wilshire/Western and Wilshire Normandie and into the streets to watch the Mexico-South Korea rematch."

The World Cup is considered a test run for public transit before the 2028 Olympics, and it's not over yet. The next game in Los Angeles is Thursday, when the U.S. plays Turkey at 7 p.m.

Kavish Harjai, Destiny Torres and Matt Ballinger contributed to this report.

The Los Angeles Unified School Board is scheduled to vote Tuesday on a nearly $21 billion spending plan for the next school year.

The budget includes raises, class size reductions and increased mental health support that are part of new contracts with the district’s largest labor unions.

There is also nearly $5 billion in school construction and renovation projects, which are funded by voter-approved bonds — that money cannot be shifted to pay for salaries or other school needs.

LAUSD’s budget next year exceeds expected revenue by $2 billion. The district will, for the third consecutive year, pay the difference with reserves.

However, district staff say by the 2028-29 school year, the budget deficit will grow to $3.6 billion. The board recently approved a fiscal stabilization plan to solve the deficit — but which will likely result in the elimination of thousands of jobs.

The board’s meeting begins at 10 a.m. Tuesday and will stream online.

A refrigerated warehouse operated by Lineage Logistics has burned in Boyle Heights for nearly a week. Public health officials are urging residents nearby and downwind to protect themselves from the smoky air.

But what exactly is in the air is still unclear.

Authorities say they’ve cleared the most hazardous materials — ammonia and lithium-ion batteries — from the fire zone. A spokesperson for the L.A. Fire Department said foam insulation, wood pallets of food, and solar panels on top of the 500,000 square-foot building continue to smolder.

Materials including plastics, electronics and even rotting meat are likely burning, which means the pollution particles emitted “tend to be highly enriched with toxic organics, toxic metals, that are above and beyond what just normal, day-to-day air pollution would look like,” said UCLA air pollution researcher Yifang Zhu.

She said air quality indexes may capture the concentration of particulate matter in the air, but not necessarily the specific toxins in them.

“You'll have almost like a double jeopardy in a sense that the levels [of particulate matter] are higher, and the toxicity is also higher,” she said.

Measuring heavy metals or volatile organic compounds requires special monitoring equipment, Zhu said.

“It’s very difficult to measure,” she said.

But she suspects at least some types of health-harming heavy metals are likely to be in the smoke.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado on Monday called for more specifics about what is in the smoke.

People “shouldn't have to guess about what they're breathing or rely on rumors, scattered information and updates, and incomplete information,” she said at a news conference. Jurado, whose council district includes Boyle Heights, added that data from regulators, such as the South Coast Air Quality Management District, should be released in clear, understandable language in English and Spanish.

The South Coast AQMD told LAist before Jurado spoke that the agency has monitors that measure particulate matter, ozone, carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide, but not other types of pollutants. The agency said it has set up additional monitors at Eastman Avenue Elementary and Robert Louis Stevenson Middle School. The agency added that the Environmental Protection Agency is also monitoring air quality at the fence line of the facility. LAist has reached out to the EPA for details.

Zhu added that even when the fire is eventually put out, the cleanup can kick up even more pollution — a lesson learned through her research after the L.A. fires.

“ I think people really need to take precautions,” Zhu said, emphasizing that those closest to the fire and downwind should avoid being outside as much as possible, keep windows closed, run a HEPA or MERV 13 air filter, and wear an N95 or similar mask otherwise.

UC Irvine toxicology professor Michael Kleinman said if thawed meat is also burning, that could lead to further toxic gases being released.

Experts urged precautions, especially if you smell smoke.

“ For people who are very close to the fire, like the firefighters themselves, they have exposure to both particulate matter and potential toxic gases, and that's why you'll see them wearing respirators,” said UC Irvine chemistry professor Suzanne Blum. “But once you're some feet away from the building, then the primary concern is the particulate smoke that is coming from this fire.”