Topline:
The annual Badwater 135 — an ultramarathon held during the hottest month in Death Valley — begins tomorrow.
Why it matters: SoCal resident Danny Westergaard, 67, is trying to finish his 19th consecutive Badwater 135. But whether he'll make it is a big question.
Why? That’s because the long-time 48-hour deadline to cross the finish line has shrunk to just 45 hours.
Read on... for more on the race and how Westergaard prepares.
When the full moon rises over Death Valley tomorrow night, 98 endurance athletes will begin their 135-mile run across the scorching desert before going over two mountain ranges and finishing up a third at Mount Whitney Portal.
Southern California has always supplied a good portion of the runners taking on the challenge of the Badwater 135 ultramarathon, and this year’s crop of locals includes Danny Westergaard, 67, holder of the longest streak of finishes. He’s completed the race 18 consecutive years. Whether he’d finished his 19th is a big question.
And even as the field of runners in this invitational race gets more and more competitive every year, Westergaard keeps getting asked back.
“I'm foolish enough to keep signing up as long as I can get in, and as long as I'm able to make the cutoffs ... every year I'm thankful that I get in,” he said.
He used to run every day when he was younger and could recover faster. Nowadays, he runs about every other day.
“Typically, I'll do, like, maybe 10 miles, but at a slow pace, and then on the weekend I'll try to do something longer,” he said.
His last race was 227 miles of a 250-mile race. He missed one of the cutoffs, which are landmarks the runners must pass in a certain amount of time in order to continue on. Cutoffs will be an issue this year at Badwater.
Despite his 18 consecutive Badwater finishes, Westergaard has his work cut out for him to extend his streak. That’s because the long-time 48-hour deadline to cross the finish line has shrunk to just 45 hours.
“It's a definite concern, the 45 hours,” Westergaard said. His first time running Badwater, he finished 12th in 32 hours and 22 minutes. Last year, it took 45 hours and 29 minutes.
There is an additional cutoff imposed by the National Park Service, which operates Death Valley National Park. Runners must pass the 2,000-foot elevation sign on the run up to Towne Pass — at about the 50-mile mark of the race — within 14 hours of starting or they’re out. So no matter the heat, participants have got to persevere.
“And especially if you have a bad spell in there, which a lot of people do at some point, all your downtime, the clock never stops. So if you're sitting, you know, sick trying to recuperate, the clock is still ticking. So you have to find a way to keep moving,” he said.
Westergaard is starting with the first wave of somewhat slower runners at 8 p.m. tomorrow so he has more time to get past the 50-mile cutoff. Other, faster runners start in waves at 9 and 10 p.m. Temperatures are in the high 90s at night before spiking up to well over 115 degrees in the daytime.
And once he makes it out of the desert, there is the final 13-mile steep slog up the mountain to Whitney Portal and the finish line. Some runners can only power hike the road as they near the end of the race.
The best way to follow the race is at the event's official website, where you can see a leaderboard over the course of the race.
Beyond the physical and mental challenge, the logistics of getting yourself and your crew safely across the desert heat and mountain climbs makes Badwater 135 an especially difficult race.
Westergaard is a retired aerospace engineer from Palos Verdes Estates — super organized guy — and after 18 consecutive finishes, he and his crew chief Jennifer Drain are dialed in.
He's also got an experienced crew including his daughters Madison and Meagan. They follow him in a rental van as he runs, and they can also run with him as pacers.
The van stops every mile or so and it's like a Formula 1 pit crew, offering ice, food, energy gels, electrolyte drinks, a fresh shirt, or anti-chafing cream to put down the shorts or any place else that might rub raw in the heat. And then there is his own special recipe made from a sports energy drink powder.
“We'll do a paste, like a pancake batter. And we put it in these 5-ounce flasks, And I'll just take a shot of it. It's great calories and great carbs and protein,” Westergaard said.
He also eats real foods during the race — fish, fruit, watermelon, veggie roll-ups with hummus, sweet potatoes. The crew also has to eat so that has to be purchased in advance and put on ice.
And yes, there is ice, at least 100 pounds of it.
“We'll bring one big cooler just full of ice 'cause ice is king out there. It's like gold. It's so valuable,” he said.
They also pack blister supplies, extra shoes, headlamps and safety vests — the list goes on and on. All in all, costs for the race can run up to thousands of dollars.
For the past month, Westergaard has been heat training, not just while running on the roads, but baking in his gym’s sauna, for hours at a time.
“That's a masochist thing, but the harder the training, the easier the race,” he said. “So the more torture you can put yourself in, and simulate race conditions during training, then the more acclimated and prepared you'll be for the race.”
California is losing its forests to wildfire faster than it can grow them back — and neither the state nor the federal government has the seeds, staff or money to close the gap, according to a CalMatters review of the state's draft reforestation strategy.
Why it matters: Over the past quarter century, high-severity fires have burned 2.3 million acres of California forestland so completely that the trees are unlikely to return on their own, the working draft found.
A windowless warehouse on the outskirts of Davis shelters pieces of California’s forests.
Icy air swirls and fogs around 42,000 pounds of seeds — the past and the future of these trees, frozen in cardboard boxes. It smells like the woods on a snowy day.
“This is like the mothership of forestry in California right here,” said Stewart McMorrow, staff chief for wildfire resilience at Cal Fire, standing outside the heavy metal door of the state seed bank at Cal Fire’s Lewis A. Moran Reforestation Center in Davis.
Private landowners especially rely on these seeds — some now more than a half-century old — to reforest property destroyed by wildfire.
At the pace California is burning, it’s nowhere near enough.
Climate change and more than a century of overzealous fire suppression are now fueling wildfires so severe that they’re wiping out the very forests that need fire to thrive — leaving iconic landscapes at risk of turning into brush and scrub, permanently.
Over the past quarter century, high-severity wildfires have burned 2.3 million acres of California’s forestland so completely that the trees are unlikely to return on their own — according to a working draft of the state’s new reforestation strategy obtained by CalMatters.
California is counting on these forests to store carbon, protect water supplies, clean the air, and shelter wildlife. By 2071, one recent analysis reports, half of California’s forest area could be gone.
“Reforestation,” said Malcolm North, a scientist with the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station, “is pretty damn important.”
Yet to replant even a quarter of the privately owned forestlands in the state, California would need to increase seed bank capacity by roughly 300%, according to Cal Fire — which means more seeds, more people, more space. And that wouldn’t solve the problem on federal land, which accounts for more than half the forests in the state and most of the lands that need replanting.
CalMatters reviewed a working draft of California’s reforestation strategy; the USDA California Climate Hub is developing it with state and federal agencies, the conservation non-profit American Forests, and the Governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force.
But both Sacramento and Washington have spent decades letting the money and staff needed to grow back California’s forests wither.
“We need to focus on reforestation as an emergency, as a state,” McMorrow said. “We are slowly losing our forestland, and we’re not catching up.”
Timber harvests once paid for much of the U.S. Forest Service’s efforts to replant trees.
But as new laws tightened endangered species and other public lands protections, logging in national forests declined. Severe wildfires also increased.
The combination devoured the Forest Service’s resources, and people: from 1998 to 2015, non-fire staff tasked with managing National Forest System lands decreased by 39%, according to a 2015 report.
With ever-increasing demands, a 2022 Forest Service document warned, there is a “critical need” to increase the number of staff “substantially dedicated” to reforestation.
Congress and the Biden Administration unstoppered additional money for a reforestation trust fund in 2021, a move championed by the conservation non-profit American Forests. Just a few years later, the Forest Service reported that it had replanted roughly 285,000 acres nationwide — the highest yearly total in more than a quarter century.
But the need still dwarfs action, and federally-directed work is lengthy and intense. Crews must clear dead and dying trees quickly to reduce the danger to people and the chance of reburns, a Forest Service spokesperson said. Finding seeds and growing seedlings can take a year or two, even before planting.
The federal government’s capacity to replant forests eroded away over time, and it will take time to rebuild it, said Solomon Dobrowski, a professor of landscape ecology at the University of Montana. Dobrowski’s research found that the reforestation gap spans millions of acres across the West and is likely to double or even triple in the coming decades.
“You don’t turn that ship around on a dime,” Dobrowski said.
Instead, the Trump administration cut the Forest Service significantly. The agency lost 20% of its staff last year.
“It just makes me cry at night … it’s basically a child swinging a wrecking ball,” said Hugh Safford, a forest and fire ecologist with the UC Davis Environmental Science and Policy Department and a former regional ecologist for the Forest Service. “Morale is down, capacity already was really minimal.”
And California keeps burning.
The loss of forests “is one of the least-known impacts of climate change and megafires,” said wildfire task force director Patrick Wright.
The draft strategy for California obtained by CalMatters comes with no dedicated funding. The goal, Wright said, is to put every agency and organization trying to replant California’s scorched forests on the same page.
The strategy calls for streamlining planning, prioritizing projects tackling critical human safety concerns and ecosystem issues like water supply, and increasing the supply of seeds, seedlings and workers.
It urges land managers to avoid adding more fuel to the fires, and recommends replanting at lower densities and with more natural spacing instead of the classic, closely-packed “pines in lines” grid. Scientists have linked high-density plantings to high-severity fires.
The most startling pieces, though, come from the draft strategy’s look at the current landscape. California would need to scale up reforestation by 35% annually to meet the state’s existing post-fire replanting goals, which start at 280,000 acres per year in 2030. The increase would take “significant funds,” the report said, because reforestation can cost up to $6,400 an acre.
But the current pace is lagging. Statewide, land managers have replanted roughly 254,000 acres of severely burned forest since 2020 — or around 16% of the area stripped of forest cover by high severity fires between 2020 and 2024 alone. The number is just 8% on federal lands, outside of wilderness areas.
Safford said the numbers are actually even more dire: Factoring in both wilderness areas and excluding forests likely to regrow on their own, his recent study reports that the U.S. Forest Service replanted just 1.2% of the agency’s California lands that wildfire denuded between 2016 and 2023.
It wasn’t always like this, said Safford. The Forest Service’s replanting efforts mostly kept pace with wildfires until around 2006.
“And then,” Safford said, “it just falls to shit.”
For all the vitriol between Gov. Gavin Newsom and President Donald Trump over the care and raking of California’s forests, state and federal money — and people — often intersect on the landscape.
On California’s end, Cal Fire funds and conducts research, and provides grants for forest restoration on private, state and even federal land. Cal Fire also runs the reforestation center in Davis, where flats of glossy young conifers are gently misted with water in the summer heat.
McMorrow — tall and crisp in his navy Cal Fire uniform — can’t help but dig his hands into the dirt to pull out weeds tangling with the seedlings.
One of the most challenging chokepoints, McMorrow said, is finding the right seeds to grow these seedlings — getting climbers to the right spot, at the right time, to pluck ripe cones from the treetops.
“Believe me, I do it,” said McMorrow, who created a tree-climbing program at Cal Fire. “We are trying to meet the demand that’s in front of us, and it’s crushing.”
Yet the money for Cal Fire’s efforts — cobbled together from the state budget, federal grants and other one-time funds — represents a relatively small and ever-changing fraction of Cal Fire’s multibillion-dollar budget.
The nursery in Davis shut down in the early 2000s, a casualty of across-the-board state budget cuts. Though the seed bank freezer stayed on, the reforestation center didn’t fully reopen until after the Legislature in 2017 tapped a 2012 fee on wood products to bring it back online.
Scaling up and upgrading the facility now carries an estimated $26.2 million price tag; this year’s state budget included about $1.2 million to fund preliminary planning.
Meanwhile, other funding is on the line. California’s climate regulators — chaired by Newsom appointee Lauren Sanchez — voted in May to overhaul a key climate program in ways that could substantially reduce, or even eliminate, up to $200 million a year for wildfire resilience. Grants for reforestation are among the many competing priorities for this funding.
While the Proposition 4 climate bond includes $1.5 billion for wildfire and forest resilience, state leaders are spending down the bond quickly.
“The truth of the matter is that California is probably, infrastructurally speaking, in a better place than any other western state,” Safford said.
“What that tells you is how piss-poor the capacity is in general in the Western U.S., because California is nowhere near prepared for the scale of this.”
On the banks of Jenkinson Lake in the Sierra Nevada foothills, Stella Krone and Elyse Wohlenberg wrestled with a slingshot that towered over the two of them. It took their combined strength to slot the bungee into position, then Wohlenberg stepped back.
“All clear?” Krone asked, kneeling in a clearing and pointing the slingshot at a Douglas fir 50 yards away. “Firing!”
Krone, Wohlenberg, and dozens of other hard-hatted people were there, crunching over conifer needles, for Cone Camp — a training program led by American Forests with support from Cal Fire and the Forest Service.
The campers — some forestry professionals, some interested laypeople — peeled off with oversized slingshots and souped-up potato guns to learn how to knock cones loose from tree branches. That’s how they check the cones for ripeness and viability, before sending someone up the tree to collect them for a seed bank.
The problem was, there were hardly any. Last year’s dry cones rattled to the forest floor as Krone and another camper jiggled the rope they’d shot into the canopy.
“So far, not a great cone year,” said Leana Weissberg, American Forests’ California director.
In the clearing, the instructor asked whether the group was ready to try again.
“Let’s go,” Krone said. “We’re cone hunters for a reason.”
Topline:
The documentary "City of Gold" was released in theaters a decade ago. Its filmmaker Laura Gabbert wonders how Jonathan Gold would have written about L.A.’s recent challenges — from the pandemic, ICE raids, the L.A. fires.
Why it matters: Gold’s food writing taught people to be more adventurous, to have more empathy, to go out and explore L.A. outside their comfort zones.
The backstory: Gold was born and raised in L.A. The film includes Gold’s descriptions of the L.A. Jewish communities he grew up in, a UCLA commencement speech after his Pulitzer win during which he describes himself as a failed cellist, and interviews with the immigrant founders of L.A. restaurants such as Meals by Genet and Guelaguetza.
It’s been eight years since Jonathan Gold died, 10 years since City of Gold was released in theaters, and nearly two decades since the he became the first food critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for criticism.
“Since he died, there have been times when major things have happened either globally or to our city — the pandemic, ICE raids, the L.A. fires,” Laura Gabbert, who directed City of Gold, said.
“The first thing I always think of is, ‘How would Jonathan be writing about this?’ Because you know he would, and I miss his voice,” she said.
Gabbert got to know Gold’s voice well. She began reading Gold’s columns about food and restaurants in the LA Weekly in the 1990s when she moved here.
“It changed how I explored the city. I saw it in a whole new light through his writing,” she said.
There have been times when major things have happened either globally or to our city — the pandemic, ICE raids, the L.A. fires. The first thing I always think of is, ‘How would Jonathan be writing about this?’
Years later, Gabbert’s and Gold’s kids attended the same L.A. school and she’d see him a few times a week. She is a documentary filmmaker whose films take on social issues such as aging, the environment, and AIDS. She pitched a documentary.
“He said no to me three different times,” she said.
Gabbert refined her pitch. She said she wanted to make a film about L.A. through his eyes. He said yes. City of Gold premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015 and was released in theaters the year after. It remains an essential document to understand the people and circumstances that contributed to L.A.’s current rich food scene.
Gold was born and raised in L.A. The film includes Gold’s descriptions of the L.A. Jewish communities he grew up in, a UCLA commencement speech after his Pulitzer win during which he describes himself as a failed cellist, and interviews with the immigrant founders of L.A. restaurants such as Meals by Genet and Guelaguetza.
“I think that they felt seen and felt acknowledged and felt that their food was important,” Gabbert said of those restaurant owners.
He may or may not have eaten deer penis.
Source: "City of Gold"
Gold devoted much of his food writing to giving context to what is on the plate: where did the people who made the food grow up, where their recipes came from, how the location of their restaurants impacted the dishes?
“I don't think it's hyperbole to say that Jonathan fundamentally changed food writing,” Gabbert said.
City of Gold explains that Gold mastered a style of writing in which he brought the reader in by speaking directly to them, as in this 2016 review of a Koreatown restaurant: "When you first sip sullungtang, you may recoil at its blandness until somebody remembers to tell you that you are supposed to add sea salt and chopped scallions from canisters on the table," he wrote.
“He democratized it in many ways long before Anthony Bourdain and all the Netflix food TV shows and long, long time before all the influencers out there,” she said.
Gabbert said Gold’s writing taught people to be more adventurous, to have more empathy, to go out and explore L.A. outside of their comfort zones — all traits we could use a lot more of today.
Topline:
A portion of Sunset Boulevard reopened overnight after LADWP crews finished repairs on a water main break in West Hollywood that shut down the area for more than a week.
The backstory: The 110-year-old water main ruptured on Thursday, flooding streets and damaging businesses.
What's next: LADWP says crews will need to be back to finish up work in the coming weeks.
A portion of Sunset Boulevard reopened overnight after LADWP crews finished repairing a water main break in West Hollywood that shut down the area for more than a week.
The water trunk line broke more than a week ago on Thursday, July 16, flooding streets and opening a sinkhole on Sunset Boulevard. LADWP says crews will need to return in the coming weeks to complete permanent paving and other work.
LADWP also said it's accelerating the installation of a new trunk line to replace the 110-year-old pipe. The infrastructure project, which was originally scheduled to begin installation in 2031, is currently “60% designed” and will take approximately four years to complete.
Those affected by the water main break can file damage claims with LADWP.
West Hollywood contact info:
Topline:
An L.A. nonprofit theater company wants to buy the century-old Westlake Theatre near MacArthur Park and transform the shuttered movie palace into a community arts and nonprofit hub.
The org: Strindberg Laboratory led about 50 people — including representatives from the Koreatown Youth and Community Center, Homies Unidos, LA Commons and other groups — on a flashlight tour of the vacant theater recently, pitching a shared civic center that could host performances, film screenings, neighborhood council meetings, workshops and office space for nonprofits.
Why it matters: The Westlake neighborhood has few public gathering places, and the proposal would revive a 1926 landmark that has sat largely unused since it closed as a movie theater in 1991 and became an indoor swap meet. Preservation advocates see a chance to restore a historic building while creating badly needed community space.
This story first appeared on The LA Local.
Armed with flashlights, dozens of community members stepped into the darkened Westlake Theatre on Thursday, sidestepping puddles and broken glass as they imagined what the century-old movie palace could become.
Inside, much of the theater looks frozen in time. Dust coats the staircases leading to the balcony, while rows of worn seats still face the stage beneath peeling painted ceilings and decorative plasterwork. Above the auditorium, a faded Anthony Heinsbergen mural offers a glimpse of the theater’s past.
Los Angeles nonprofit theater company Strindberg Laboratory hopes to change that.
The organization wants to purchase the historic Westlake Theatre and transform it into a community arts and nonprofit hub. Their proposal calls for preserving the space while adapting it into a shared civic center that could host live performances, film screenings, neighborhood council meetings, lectures, arts workshops and office space for community organizations.
The effort is in its early stages.
The building has not been purchased, no major funding has been secured and organizers say community input will help determine what the project ultimately becomes before fundraising begins. The group’s proposal estimates acquiring and restoring the theater would cost between $6 – $8 million.
“This is just the first gathering,” Michael Bierman, founder of Strindberg Laboratory, told The LA Local. “It’s not an exclusive club. We welcome everybody and anybody. Everybody has something to input in their community.”
Bierman wants to create a coalition to see the project come to life. Several organizations have already expressed interest, he said, and about 50 people attended Thursday’s tour, including representatives from the Koreatown Youth and Community Center, Homies Unidos, LA Commons, the Los Angeles Historic Theatre Foundation, Central City Neighborhood Partners and other community groups.
The Westlake Theatre opened in 1926 as a 1,949-seat vaudeville and movie palace overlooking MacArthur Park, according to the Los Angeles Historic Theatre Foundation. It operated as a movie theater until 1991, when it closed and was converted into an indoor swap meet. The city’s Community Redevelopment Agency bought the property in 2008 with plans to restore it as a live entertainment venue, but those plans stalled after the agency was dissolved in 2012.
In 2018, the property was sold to 634 Alvarado LLP, an entity controlled by Jamison Properties and today, the ground floor houses a swap meet with small businesses, including clothing vendors, tailors and a barbershop, while the historic auditorium remains unused.
Bierman said the next step is forming a steering committee before seeking philanthropic, local, state and federal funding. If organizers can secure enough partners and financing, he hopes the coalition can purchase the theater by winter. Restoring the building, he said, would likely take several years.
For many who attended Thursday’s tour, the proposal was also personal.
Aurora Corona, a former Pico Union Neighborhood Council member, remembers visiting the theater as a child.
“It just brings back memories of the glory of the way it was,” Corona said. “The history is here. So for me, revitalizing and bringing back to what it was is like a dream.”
She said she hopes the restored theater could host performances, international films, festivals and local artists while reflecting the surrounding community.
Sara Zapata Mijares arrived in the Westlake neighborhood from Yucatán in 1969, when she was 17 years old. She remembers when MacArthur Park served as a gathering place for families in the neighborhood.
The coalition’s steering committee is expected to meet in the coming weeks to discuss the project’s next steps.
Residents and organizations interested in joining the effort can email Strindberg Laboratory to participate in the discussion.
“This used to be a park where my dad and I used to come and have picnics and he would play ballgaming here with a lot of families,” she said. “I remember coming to the park and coming to watch movies here.”
Zapata Mijares said reviving the theater could also help nearby businesses. Visitors to the nearby Mexican Consulate, she said, could help boost the local economy if they stayed in the neighborhood to shop or eat after their appointments.
The idea to transform the theater into a community hub grew out of Strindberg Laboratory’s own search for a permanent home after rising rental costs made it increasingly difficult to continue working out of the Frida Kahlo Theater. But after touring the three-story building, Bierman realized the space was too large for a single organization.
“We dreamed of a community public space that also is a hub for culture and arts and theater and films and education and newspaper and all those things that every single community needs,” Bierman said.
The effort faces practical questions beyond raising millions of dollars. The proposal would have to address the future of the businesses already operating inside the building.
Sofía García, who has sold clothing inside the swap meet for about a year, said she hopes a restoration would bring customers back to the space.
“That would be good because it would improve the atmosphere here,” García said in Spanish. “By improving the theater, there would be more people and therefore more sales.”
García estimated her sales fell sharply after parking was removed outside the building and nearby street construction made it difficult for customers to visit her business.
Bierman acknowledged that vendors will have to be part of the conversation if the project moves forward.
“They are part of the community,” he said. “We’re not going to just come in and take over and boot them out. We need to talk to them and see what they want.”
Jesús Sosa Guerra, who recently opened a tailoring business inside the swap meet, said he supports the proposal but worries existing tenants could be displaced.
“It wouldn’t be good to sideline small businesses, because we all need to hustle to make ends meet,” he said in Spanish.
Preservation advocates see the project as an opportunity to restore a historic landmark while creating badly needed public space in a neighborhood with few gathering places.
“This city is filled with talented people who are lacking one very fundamental thing, which is a place to show what they’re capable of and to make connections,” said Kim Cooper, co-founder of Esotouric, a walking tour that explores various neighborhoods around the city.
Cooper said the space could be opened up to people who have bands and want to perform, to book events, to readings, to poetry slams, to any kind of number of things.
“You could have spelling bees, like anything. You could just have a neighborhood potluck. You could have fruit exchanges. I don’t know. I mean, the neighborhood will tell you what they want to do,” she said.
Cooper’s partner, Richard Schave called Bierman’s proposal “an opportunity for a neighborhood that has had perhaps the worst succession of public policy decisions made about it to finally have one decent public policy decision made about it.”
