Topline:
An advisory council packed with allies of President Trump voted on Friday to weaken federal oversight of construction projects affecting historic sites.
Why it matters: Critics, in anticipation of the vote, told NPR that the move would not only clear a path for President Trump's controversial projects in D.C., but also endanger the preservation of historic and cultural places across the United States.
An advisory council packed with allies of President Trump voted on Friday to weaken federal oversight of construction projects affecting historic sites.
Critics, in anticipation of the vote, told NPR that the move would not only clear a path for President Trump's controversial projects in D.C., but also endanger the preservation of historic and cultural places across the United States.
"Every American who has any place in their heart that is historic or culturally significant to them should be concerned about this attempt to gut historic preservation protections," said Greg Werkheiser, founding partner at the law firm Cultural Heritage Partners.
The National Register of Historic Places contains over 100,000 properties, encompassing more than 1.8 million buildings, structures, sites, objects and districts. They take many forms, from a house to a burial ground, a shipwreck to a landscape, a single tree to an entire neighborhood.
"It's the thing that defines America," Werkheiser said. "The places that you go where your family has an attachment over generations … There are millions of these sites in this country, and all of them are made less protected by this effort by the Trump administration."
The White House and the Department of the Interior did not respond to NPR's request for comment.
Part of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, known as Section 106, requires federal agencies to evaluate how new construction projects would affect historic places.
Under the Section 106 review process, the federal agency overseeing a project must invite interested parties — like preservation groups and local and tribal governments — to weigh in. Currently, agencies are required to consider whether the project would cause "adverse effects" to a historic property and, if so, explore ways to "avoid, minimize, or mitigate" those harms.
The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, the federal agency responsible for overseeing the Section 106 review process, is packed with Trump appointees. And now, 60 years after the law took effect, the council wants to water it down drastically.
Ashley Fry, the council's director of external engagement, confirmed to NPR on Friday night that members voted to advance proposed changes to Section 106. The outcome was widely expected.
"Because President Trump controls 21 of the 24 members of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, it's very likely that they will proceed with doing what the administration wants for them to do," Sara Bronin, who served as the Senate-confirmed chair of the advisory council under President Biden, said Thursday.
Bronin is the most recent chair of the council, as that position is currently vacant. President Trump has yet to nominate a new one, instead appointing its vice chair, Travis Voyles, to serve in an acting capacity.
Last Friday, Voyles sent an email to council members asking them to vote on proposed revisions to the wording of Section 106. According to draft language obtained by NPR, those changes include redefining what kinds of properties can be considered historic in the first place, making public comment on new projects optional and removing the requirement to consult with Native American tribes.
"What it means is that the federal government, in its own discretion, can decide whether — if ever — to tell an American community that it's about to do a major project that could harm or destroy a historic resource," Werkheiser said. "The public will be completely cut out of any conversation around the future of places that matter to them in this country."
The changes do not take effect immediately after Friday's vote. They need to clear several more steps of the federal rulemaking process, including a roughly 30-day public comment period.
Werkheiser called the vote a "foregone conclusion," but said it sets the stage for a legal fight later.
"As sure as the sun rises and sets over Washington, D.C., there will be litigation in an attempt to stop this absurd gutting of protections of American history," he said.
After World War II, an era of urban renewal and federal highway construction destroyed high-profile buildings like New York City's Penn Station and devastated many historically Black neighborhoods.
The advisory council's memo describes that period as "one of the greatest, yet most destructive building streaks in American history." It prompted public outrage and resulted in Congress passing the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966.
"Small wonder, then, that Congress enacted a requirement that all Federal agencies take into account historic preservation concerns in future Federal actions," the memo reads. "Consideration, however, was not the same thing as a mandate that historic preservation concerns trump all others."
The memo says the current regulations under Section 106 "create confusion and uncertainty for both the public and regulated entities and contribute to agency delays." It cites a 2019 study that found consultation can take nearly seven years in extreme cases.
And it proposes revisions that it says would help "agencies strike a more appropriate balance between evaluating effects on historic properties and advancing critical federal projects."
The changes would limit the type and number of historic properties that will receive protection, ruling out "significant landscape features" like the Grand Canyon. Bronin says it would also change the type of actions that will be reviewed in the first place, with an "alarming number of exemptions," including for federally funded projects carried out by local authorities.
"Things like state highway widening, which in the past have been highly destructive of historic places, including not only whole neighborhoods but also burial sites … won't [undergo Section 106 review] under the new rules," she said.
The new wording would also narrow what is considered an "adverse effect" to anything that is directly and foreseeably tied to the project (as opposed to indirect or cumulative effects). And it allows agencies to condense much of the process into a written report, which they would then share with third parties for review instead of consulting them along the way.
"This change in consultation will have the effect of not surfacing the location, significance and effects on historic sites, meaning that they could have the potential to be destroyed at scale," she said.
The new wording would also remove requirements for public comment, eliminating the phrase: "views of the public are essential to informed Federal decisionmaking."
That stands out to Charles Birnbaum, the founding president and CEO of The Cultural Landscape Foundation, an education and advocacy organization based in D.C. He told NPR over email that he sees similarities between the revised law and the reason it exists in the first place.
"Consent of the governed is being replaced with my way or the highway," he wrote. "This is the same haughty, retrograde, and myopic attitude that resulted in urban renewal, which decimated cities with highways and destroyed countless neighborhoods nationwide, especially underserved communities."
The Cultural Landscape Foundation has already sued over the administration's repainting of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, saying the National Park Service improperly used — by its own words — a "streamlined" Section 106 review. A judge has not yet ruled in the case, as the pool saga continues to unfold.
Simplifying the Section 106 review process could help to fast-track some of the Trump administration's renovation projects in D.C.
The requirement for third-party consultation — which many historic and cultural preservation groups say is happening too fast or not at all — has been one of the few hurdles in the already fast-moving approval process for Trump's arch.
Bronin says under the proposed new language, near-constant construction noise near Arlington National Cemetery would not be considered an adverse effect, and the 250-foot arch's disruption of historic views would not be considered under the review process.
"Although I would encourage listeners to not simply focus on D.C.'s iconic landmarks, because this proposal would have far-reaching effects, the proposal for the arch in front of Arlington Cemetery is an excellent example of what's at stake with these changes," Bronin said.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers and the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers have all issued statements opposing the Section 106 changes, taking issue both with the substance and the brief voting timeline. They each have representatives on the advisory council board.
Elizabeth Merrit, deputy general counsel for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, wrote in an open letter that she would vote against the proposed changes, calling them "likely to cause widespread chaos and confusion, and … curtail the consultation process that has led to thousands of win-win outcomes around the country."
Werkheiser agreed that the proposal would be "terrible for developers," who want predictability and information early on to avoid delays and issues down the road. He said that's why the existing Section 106 process generally works so well. Trying to speed it up by even a few days, he said, would be "a losing trade for America in the long-term."
"Folks who complain about the relatively little time it takes to pause in front of a massive development project and say, 'Are we destroying something that can never be replaced?' I think those folks need to ask themselves, what legacy are they handing to their children and their grandchildren?" he said.
Both Werkheiser and Bronin encouraged people who oppose these changes to speak up not only during the public comment period, but to their legislators directly.
"As chair, I saw the topic of historic preservation as a bipartisan issue, and one that unites people who care about their communities, whether they're in red states or blue states," Bronin said. "I think that the public comment on the regulations will really help to send a powerful message that we care about our historic places and we don't want them to be destroyed."
Congress could potentially take action, including passing legislation to strengthen Section 106.
Democrats on the Senate Natural Resources Committee released a statement this week opposing the changes. They urged the council to "go back to the drawing board and work directly with Tribes and states on a new proposal that actually improves the consultation process without undermining the rights and voices of those most directly affected."
Copyright 2026 NPR
Topline:
When summer rolls around, many parents scramble to sign up their young kids for outdoor activities. But what do you do when extreme heat and wildfire smoke increasingly make the outdoors dangerous?
Why it matters: Throughout the summer months, parents scramble to get kids out of the house. But with weather conditions that make outdoor fun not just impossible, but dangerous, parents, summer camp leaders and school-aged kids told NPR how they're experiencing the effects of the changing climate.
On a beautiful summer day in July, seven-year-old Penelope is turning into a mermaid.
"I like playing mermaid," she says, with her feet dangling in the swimming pool at Beauvoir Summer Camp in Washington, D.C.
"Like, I'm a human, and then I turn into a mermaid and I use one of the pool noodles as a dolphin, and I play with my friends," she says.
It's Friday, which means free swim, and the kids are splashing around on blue kickboards and sinking miniature torpedo toys. In the kiddie pool, the littlest campers jump in and show off their twists and turns with screeches of delight.
Penelope and her best friend Sam, also 7, say pool time is their favorite activity at this camp. NPR is only using the kids' first names because they are minors.
The pool was empty during the last free swim. Campers spent the day indoors to avoid hazardous air quality from wildfire smoke. And, earlier in the summer, the heat forced them to cut down their outside play time, says Drew Mackay, the director of auxiliary and summer programs at Beauvoir School.
This summer has brought no shortage of extreme weather and wildfires across the country. In northern Minnesota and Canada, fires devastated communities and caused dangerous smoke to blanket large swaths of the Midwest and Northeastern U.S. Deadly floods prompted disaster declarations in parts of Texas. And an extreme heat wave in July was dubbed the "new normal" for July Fourth celebrations.
As the climate warms due in large part to the burning of fossil fuels, research shows that heat waves, droughts, hurricanes, and floods have become more intense and more frequent.
Families are feeling it. Further north in Pennsylvania, Lauren Smith and her kids have had a summer full of dangerous weather. First, it was the extreme heat that disrupted the normal activities at a soccer camp, with temperatures reaching almost 100 degrees Fahrenheit on a big, treeless field. Then, wildfire smoke kept the family in the house. When the nonstop rain hit, it was almost a blessing.
"The kids are going crazy in the house — that's it, we're going for a walk," she remembers thinking. "Then, they're like, 'It's starting to rain.' I'm like, 'Doesn't matter. It's an adventure.' "
Smith added that, surprisingly, her kids have enjoyed helping her declutter the house. They also took up baking and painting acorns. But on the few days of sunny bliss, she can't get them back inside, she said. "The summer is just like a waiting game — just waiting to do some stuff outside," Smith says.
This generation of school-aged kids has already dealt with the isolation of COVID-19, the global pandemic that forced students to work from home. Now, they're up against extreme weather.
Throughout the summer months, parents scramble to get kids out of the house. But with weather conditions that make outdoor fun not just impossible, but dangerous, parents, summer camp leaders and school-aged kids told NPR how they're experiencing the effects of the changing climate.
"It's changed my summer a lot," Penelope, the mermaid, says. She describes climate change as "the areas around you are just, like, changing all around you all the time."
For many kids, summer is an around three-month break from school routines and homework.
A 2024 Gallup survey found that 55% of U.S. parents reported their school-aged kids attend at least one structured summer program. Henry DeHart, the CEO of the American Camp Association, which provides resources and accreditations to hundreds of camps across the country, says the skills kids learn at camp — independence, problem-solving, and teamwork — will equip them for the future, especially in an increasingly AI-centric world.
"Kids need camp now more than ever," DeHart says.
While dealing with the whims of weather is nothing new for camps, and accredited ones are required to have thorough safety plans, DeHart says the frequency of these extreme weather events is noticeable.
In the past few decades, he says, "A camp might have had three or four or five days with the heat index over 105 [Fahrenheit]". Now they may have eight or 10."
The impacts on specific camps across the country are varied. In Ohio, Ellen Watkins directs Miakonda Day Camp on a 160-acre site for Scouting groups. When wildfire smoke filled the air, they were able to move inside and provided masks.
While inside, they did swim exercises on dry land and pulled out an inflatable archery set. She said she got many comments from parents thanking them for finding a way to keep the camp running.
"Was it stressful to have campers inside of buildings all day when they would rather be outside? Yes. Did it stress our program? No, we were fine," Watkins said.
But for some camps, switching up activities to deal with the smoke wasn't an option. That was the case in Ely, Minn., at Camp Widjiwagan. The camp, which hosts over 700 kids each summer and leads programs across North America, evacuated in July.
The camp drew considerable attention after a haunting photo showing 19 of its canoes under water was widely seen online. Ben Hoffman, the camp's executive director, said they decided to submerge the historic canoes that were too fragile to move to safety.
"This is a pivotal moment," Hoffman said. "We have never sunk canoes at camp."
Eleanor Pitts, a 17-year-old camper at Widjiwagan, went on the camp's 26 day backpacking trip in Willmore Wilderness Park in Alberta, Canada, starting in June with four other girls and a counselor.
"It was an experience like no other," Pitts, who has attended the camp for seven summers, said. "We become the closest group of people. They were genuinely my family by the end."
The last day of the trip was supposed to be a homecoming back at the base camp in Ely with a huge celebration of hot dogs and watermelon and campfire skits. Her group found out the day before that the wildfire smoke would force them to miss that last day. " 'Wait, so this is our last night?' " Pitts said she and her fellow campers asked their counselor. "And we all just started crying."
Pitts said it brought the reality of climate change right before her eyes. Beyond the wildfires, throughout the trip, her counselor pointed out flooded rivers in Canada because of extreme heat melting snow runoff.
"Going forward, trips are just going to be different because of this climate change situation," Pitts said. "It hasn't affected me until I'm seeing it right now and I'm just like: now it's too late."
In D.C., at Beauvoir Summer Camp, summer programs director Mackay said adapting to extreme weather is now part of the summer camp job. "For us, it's a new reality," he said.
The kids, on the other hand, are just worried about getting as much pool time as possible.
Copyright 2026 NPR
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 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.”
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.
