Erin Stone
is a reporter who covers climate and environmental issues in Southern California.
Published April 5, 2025 5:00 AM
Matt Baffert stands in the ruins of his Altadena home that burned down in the Eaton Fire.
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Brian Vernor
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LAist
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Topline:
An Altadena resident and dedicated trail steward now has a two-fold mission — to rebuild his house, and the nearby trails that made it home.
Why it matters: The Eaton Fire not only destroyed thousands of homes, but also miles of beloved trails. For Matt Baffert, co-founder of the nonprofit trail restoration group Lowelifes Respectable Citizens’ Club, the trail restoration mission is more personal this time since he also lost his home in the fire.
What's next: The Angeles National Forest has reopened some trails, but it'll likely be a few years before others are open to the public again.
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.
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5:22
After the fire, a volunteer looks to rebuild Eaton canyon trails -- and his Altadena home
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 Forestin 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:
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.
Kavish Harjai
writes about how people get around L.A.
Published December 5, 2025 12:35 PM
Protesters packed Metro's board room Thursday to declare their opposition and support for the Dodger Stadium gondola.
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Kavish Harjai
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LAist
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Los Angeles Metro’s Board of Directors voted Thursday to re-approve the Dodgers Stadium gondola, clearing the path for state agencies and the city of L.A. to provide necessary sign-offs before shovels hit the ground. That means it's far from a done deal.
Next steps: Following Thursday’s vote, Zero Emissions Transit, the nonprofit developing the gondola, said the California State Parks Commission will consider amending the L.A. Historic State Park general plan and the city of L.A. will “evaluate land use permits.”
Tense meeting: The decision came after protesters showed up en masse, forced officials to retreat to an earlier-than-scheduled closed session meeting, and won their demand for a dedicated period of public comment on the project before the vote.
Read on … to learn more about where the city stands on the project and what the protest was all about.
The Los Angeles Metro’s Board of Directors voted Thursday to re-approve the Dodger Stadium gondola, clearing the path for state agencies and the city of L.A. to provide necessary sign-offs before shovels hit the ground.
The decision came after protesters showed up en masse, forced officials to retreat to an earlier-than-scheduled closed session meeting, and won their demand for a dedicated period of public comment on the project before the vote.
The gondola is not a Metro project. Rather, the transportation agency was tasked with preparing environmental studies and approving the project under the California Environmental Quality Act.
Following Thursday’s vote, Zero Emissions Transit, the nonprofit developing the gondola, said the California State Parks Commission will consider amending the L.A. Historic State Park general plan and the city of L.A. will “evaluate land use permits.”
L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn was the sole “no” vote on the gondola Thursday. At a Metro committee meeting in November, when the gondola was last discussed, Hahn said she wanted to “lean into” expanding, electrifying and making more efficient the Dodger Stadium Express, the existing Metro bus system that shuttles baseball fans to games.
If built, Metro projects the gondola will carry a maximum of 5,000 visitors every hour from Union Station in downtown L.A. to Dodger Stadium. The proposed route has an intermediate stop at L.A. Historic State Park.
The one-mile, one-way trip would last 7 minutes, according to Metro.
Wasn’t this already approved?
Yes. For the most part, Thursday’s vote was not materially different from last February, when the Metro Board of Directors initially approved the gondola.
Then, in May, following two separate lawsuits alleging inadequacies in Metro’s environmental documents for the gondola, the California Court of Appeal directed the countywide transportation agency to review ways the project’s construction noise could be mitigated.
L.A. City Council last month voted 12-1 on a resolution opposing the gondola.
“People from Solano Canyon, Chinatown [and] Lincoln Heights have asked me to step up and help preserve green space and help preserve their privacy and to not acquiesce to a billionaire,” L.A. City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who authored the resolution, said to LAist at the Metro meeting on Thursday. “I hope the mayor can hear us and see us.”
Mayor Karen Bass did not sign the resolution.
As a member of Metro’s Board, Bass voted in favor of moving forward with the gondola.
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Red versus Blue in the Metro Board room
After Metro accepted the unsolicited proposal for the gondola in 2018, community members formed a formidable opposition campaign known as Stop the Gondola.
At Thursday’s meeting, they were dressed in red, equipped with a megaphone, banners and signs and supported by anti-gondola L.A. City Council members, including Hernandez, Ysabel Jurado and Hugo Soto-Martinez.
Local residents and activists used the one hour-long public comment period to highlight the effects construction and operations will have on nearby neighborhoods and L.A. Historic Park. They rejected Metro and the project developer’s claims that the gondola is a viable transportation option, instead calling it a “boondoggle.”
During public comment, Phyllis Chu asked the Metro Board of Directors whether they serve a “billionaire developer” or their constituents.
The “billionaire developer" refers to Frank McCourt, the former owner of the Dodgers. McCourt still owns some parking lot real estate near the stadium, and some critics believe the aerial tram is part of McCourt’s vision to develop the area.
Zero Emissions Transit, along with its allies from organized labor and business groups, say the gondola would provide an environmentally friendly transportation option for baseball fans, local residents and park-goers.
Dodger Blue-clad supporters also showed up at Thursday’s meeting and responded to the opposition with chants of their own. They walked in a procession around the Metro Board room holding up signs with a blunt message: “Build the Gondola.”
Zero Emissions Transit said in its news release that “nearly 18,000 individuals and more than 400 businesses in Chinatown, El Pueblo, and Lincoln Heights have signed up to support the project, and a recent poll found 72% of Los Angeles County residents support the project.”
"I love the relationship with the clients," said architect Frank Gehry. In Bilbao, Spain, where he designed the groundbreaking building for the Guggenheim museum, "people come out and hug me," he said.
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Dominieuq Faget
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AFP/Getty Images
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Topline:
Frank Gehry died Friday at his home in Santa Monica after a brief respiratory illness, according to his chief of staff. He was 96.
What he's known for: Swooping, swirling, gleaming, sculpted — Gehry made buildings we'd never seen before. The architect behind the Guggenheim Museum in Spain and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles transformed contemporary architecture.
His career: Gehry won all the top awards — including the Pritzker Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1999, when the American Institute of Architects gave him their Gold Medal, Gehry looked out at an audience that included contemporary gods of building — Philip Johnson, Richard Venturi, Michael Graves — and said, "it's like finding out my big brothers love me after all."
Swooping, swirling, gleaming, sculpted — Frank Gehry made buildings we'd never seen before. The architect behind the Guggenheim Museum in Spain and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles transformed contemporary architecture. He died Friday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif., after a brief respiratory illness, according to his chief of staff. He was 96.
Gehry won all the top awards — including the Pritzker Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1999, when the American Institute of Architects gave him their Gold Medal, Gehry looked out at an audience that included contemporary gods of building — Philip Johnson, Richard Venturi, Michael Graves — and said, "it's like finding out my big brothers love me after all."
"He was probably the only truly great artist I've ever encountered who desperately cared what people thought of him and that people loved his work," says Gehry's biographer Paul Goldberger. The architect got his share of criticism — "accusations that he made crazy shapes and paid no attention to budget."
But the praise was louder, because his striking buildings made people happy.
With 12 huge glass "sails," the Louis Vuitton Foundation takes the form of a sailboat among the trees of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris.
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Bertrand Guay
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AFP/Getty Images
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A woman walks inside the Louis Vuitton Foundation in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris.
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Bertrand Guay
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AFP/Getty Images
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"I've always been for optimism and architecture not being sad," Gehry told NPR in 2004. "You know, a building for music and performance should be joyful. It should be a great experience and it should be fun to go to."
There was exuberance in his work. The swoops and swirls — made possible with aerospace technology — lifted the spirits of viewers used to post-war modernism — strict, boxy glass and steel buildings that looked imposing and unwelcoming.
Gehry says he found that style, cold, inhuman and lifeless. "I thought it was possible to find a way to express feeling and humanistic qualities in a building," Gehry said. "But I wasn't clear about it until I started experimenting, quite accidentally, with fish forms."
He loved the shape of fish, and the way they moved. He drew them all his life, an inspiration that began in his grandmother's bathtub in Toronto.
"Every Thursday when I stayed at her house, I'd go with her to the market," he recalled. "And there would be a big bag of some kind filled with water that we would carry home with a big carp in it. We'd put it in the bathtub. I'd sit and watch it and the next day it was gone."
Those carp were turned into gefilte fish — a classic Jewish dish — but stayed in Gehry's memory long past suppertime. He translated their curves and motions into architecture. In Prague, Czechs call his elegant design for an office building "Fred and Ginger" — two cylindrical towers, one solid, the other glass, pinched in at the waist, like dancers. His Disney Hall and his Guggenheim museum swell like symphonies.
Gehry's whimsical towers in Prague have earned the nickname "Fred and Ginger."
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Tony Hisgett via Flickr Creative Commons
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"He really wanted you to feel a sense of movement," Goldberger says. "A building is a static thing, but if it feels like it's moving, for him that was more exciting."
The Guggenheim — a billowing swirl of titanium in gold and sunset colors — excited viewers. After it opened in 1997, Gehry said everyone who came to him wanted a Guggeinheim. But Gehry wasn't interested.
"Like all great artists, he wanted to keep pushing himself and move forward," Goldberger says. "He did not want to copy himself. He did not want to do that building again."
The Guggeinheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain and The Disney Hall in Los Angeles (it opened in 2003, a swoosh of silver stainless steel, 1/16th of an inch thick) are Gehry's signature buildings. But they're a far cry from his early work. His own 1978 residence in Santa Monica sports common materials. If clients couldn't afford fancy — marble, say — he'd use cheap.
Gehry constructed the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles out of stainless steel. "We're living in a culture, in a time where movement is pervasive," he said. "Everything is moving. And so if we hook onto that and use it as part of our language, our architectural language, there's some resonance for it."
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Frederick M. Brown
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Getty Images
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Inside the Disney Concert Hall.
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Hector Mata
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"He started using plywood and chain link fence and corrugated metal," Goldberger says.
Those buildings got attention. But the later ones made him a star — and a term was coined: Starchitect. Goldberger says Gehry hated it.
"He didn't really hate fame," Goldberger explains. "But he was too smart to sacrifice everything for it."
Gehry kept faithful to his vision. He turned down jobs that didn't feel right and imagined others that got built, were widely admired, but sometimes didn't live up to his imagination.
"You know, what's in my mind's eye is always 10 times better than what I ever achieve because the dream image can leak ..." Gehry said with a laugh. "But in terms of its public acceptance it's beyond anything I ever expected. I've never been accepted before like this."
Gehry received a National Medal of Arts from Bill Clinton and a Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama. The New Yorker called Bilbao "a masterpiece of the 20th century." Architect Philip Johnson said it was "the building of the century." And the public (with some exceptions, of course) adored the work.
"He made great architecture accessible to people," Goldberger says, and that re-shaped their sense of what buildings could be.
He describes Gehry's work as "one of those extraordinary moments where the most advanced art intersects with popular taste. That only happens very rarely in the culture, in any field."
It's been said that architecture is the message a civilization sends to the future. With walls that are shaped and sculpted, and buildings that look joyous and free, Frank Gehry's is a message of humanism and hope.
The author of this obituary, Susan Stamberg, died in October 2025. The story was updated and reviewed before publication.
Shannon Rhoades edited the audio of this story. Beth Novey adapted it for the Web. Copyright 2025 NPR
The State Department is instructing its staff to reject visa applications from people who worked on fact-checking, content moderation or other activities the Trump administration considers "censorship" of Americans' speech.
Who will be affected: The directive, sent in an internal memo on Tuesday, calls out H-1B visa applicants in particular "as many work in or have worked in the tech sector, including in social media or financial services companies involved in the suppression of protected expression."
The backstory: The Trump administration has been highly critical of tech companies' efforts to police what people are allowed to post on their platforms and of the broader field of trust and safety, the tech industry's term for teams that focus on preventing abuse, fraud, illegal content, and other harmful behavior online. President Donald Trump was banned from multiple social media platforms in the aftermath of his supporters' attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. While those bans have since been lifted, the president and members of his administration frequently cite that experience as evidence for their claims that tech companies unfairly target conservatives — even as many tech leaders have eased their policies in the face of that backlash.
The State Department is instructing its staff to reject visa applications from people who worked on fact-checking, content moderation or other activities the Trump administration considers "censorship" of Americans' speech.
The directive, sent in an internal memo on Tuesday, is focused on applicants for H-1B visas for highly skilled workers, which are frequently used by tech companies, among other sectors. The memo was first reported by Reuters; NPR also obtained a copy.
"If you uncover evidence an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship of protected expression in the United States, you should pursue a finding that the applicant is ineligible" for a visa, the memo says. It refers to a policy announced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in May restricting visas from being issued to "foreign officials and persons who are complicit in censoring Americans."
The Trump administration has been highly critical of tech companies' efforts to police what people are allowed to post on their platforms and of the broader field of trust and safety, the tech industry's term for teams that focus on preventing abuse, fraud, illegal content, and other harmful behavior online.
President Trump was banned from multiple social media platforms in the aftermath of his supporters' attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. While those bans have since been lifted, the president and members of his administration frequently cite that experience as evidence for their claims that tech companies unfairly target conservatives — even as many tech leaders have eased their policies in the face of that backlash.
Tuesday's memo calls out H-1B visa applicants in particular "as many work in or have worked in the tech sector, including in social media or financial services companies involved in the suppression of protected expression."
It directs consular officers to "thoroughly explore" the work histories of applicants, both new and returning, by reviewing their resumes, LinkedIn profiles, and appearances in media articles for activities including combatting misinformation, disinformation or false narratives, fact-checking, content moderation, compliance, and trust and safety.
"I'm alarmed that trust and safety work is being conflated with 'censorship'," said Alice Goguen Hunsberger, who has worked in trust and safety at tech companies including OpenAI and Grindr.
"Trust and safety is a broad practice which includes critical and life-saving work to protect children and stop CSAM [child sexual abuse material], as well as preventing fraud, scams, and sextortion. T&S workers are focused on making the internet a safer and better place, not censoring just for the sake of it," she said. "Bad actors that target Americans come from all over the world and it's so important to have people who understand different languages and cultures on trust and safety teams — having global workers at tech companies in [trust and safety] absolutely keeps Americans safer."
In a statement, a State Department spokesperson who declined to give their name said the department does not comment on "allegedly leaked documents," but added: "the Administration has made clear that it defends Americans' freedom of expression against foreigners who wish to censor them. We do not support aliens coming to the United States to work as censors muzzling Americans."
The statement continued: "In the past, the President himself was the victim of this kind of abuse when social media companies locked his accounts. He does not want other Americans to suffer this way. Allowing foreigners to lead this type of censorship would both insult and injure the American people."
First Amendment experts criticized the memo's guidance as itself a potential violation of free speech rights.
"People who study misinformation and work on content-moderation teams aren't engaged in 'censorship'— they're engaged in activities that the First Amendment was designed to protect. This policy is incoherent and unconstitutional," said Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney and legislative advisor at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, in a statement.
Even as the administration has targeted those it claims are engaged in censoring Americans, it has also tightened its own scrutiny of visa applicants' online speech.
On Wednesday, the State Department announced it would require H-1B visa applicants and their dependents to set their social media profiles to "public" so they can be reviewed by U.S. officials.
NPR's Bobby Allyn and Michele Kelemen contributed reporting. Copyright 2025 NPR
Destiny Torres
is LAist's general assignment and digital equity reporter.
Published December 5, 2025 11:07 AM
(L-R) FIFA President Gianni Infantino, US President Donald Trump, Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum and Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney stand on stage during the draw for the 2026 FIFA Football World Cup taking place in the US, Canada and Mexico, at the Kennedy Center, in Washington, DC.
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Brendan Smialowski
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AFP via Getty Images
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Topline:
The U.S. will host Paraguay in Los Angeles when the 2026 FIFA World Cup arrives for the first time in over three decades. Friday morning’s draw in Washington D.C. laid out what the 48-team tournament will look like in what will be the largest World Cup ever.
Who is playing in L.A.? The U.S. will face Paraguay on June 12 at SoFi Stadium. The winner of that match will face Australia or the winning team in Playoff C, which could be Türkiye, Romania, Slovakia or Kosovo. FIFA will reveal the official schedule with kick-off times Saturday at 9 a.m.
Can you still get tickets? Around 2 million tickets have been sold globally, and yes, there’s still time to get yours. Ticketing for all games — including in Los Angeles — happens in phases through a lottery draw system. For access to all ticket sales, you’ll need to register a profile through FIFA’s site. The third phase of ticket sales begins on Dec. 11, according to FIFA officials.
What about the Women’s World Cup? There’s a chance that Southern California could host the 2031 Women’s World Cup. Four Los Angeles stadiums placed their bids as potential sites last month, including the Rose Bowl, L.A. Memorial Coliseum, Dignity Health Sports Park and SoFi Stadium.
