The Brief

Tucked away in the Central Valley, Central California Women's Facility sits off Highway 99 between Fresno and Merced. Farmland surrounds much of the prison, and visitors are rare.

The 640-acre facility is the largest women’s prison in California, and holds more than 2,000 women, nonbinary and transgender people. In total, women make up just 4% of the state's prison population.

For these reasons and more, the prison in Chowchilla seems an unlikely place to have its own newspaper. But last year, an organization for prison journalism helped open up a media center and started training journalists there.

Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla is California's largest prison. More than 2,000 women, nonbinary and transgender people are incarcerated there.

In September, they put out their first issue of The Paper Trail, an in-house newspaper written and edited by incarcerated people. Its supporters say it's the first effort of its kind at a women's prison in the U.S.

" It's been amazing to be a part of something starting here for women that inspired a lot of women," said Megan Hogg, a writer for the paper who has been incarcerated at CCWF for 12 years. "The first issue that came out, people were like 'Oh, wow, we have a newspaper.' You cannot find a copy now. People are like, 'Can I look at yours?'"

I visited the prison in December. It was so huge that my escort told me corrections officers use tricycles to get around. It took us more than a half hour to walk from the prison's front gates into the media center. Along the route were long, sparse yards, check points and a cafeteria.

The prison grounds were mostly quiet on the Friday morning of my visit, but the newsroom was abuzz. A handful of staff members sat in front of desktop computers while others gathered around a table to discuss story ideas and works-in-progress.

Behind them, writing on a whiteboard declared: "Journalism: providing information to people so they can make informed decisions in their lives."

Leaders of The Paper Trail talk about editorial goals with advisor Jesse Vasquez.

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Libby Rainey

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Ice, lizards & unexpected stories

The Paper Trail has the look of a local paper, and in some ways its content mirrors that style, with coverage of community events like an in-prison farmer's market and pickleball games.

Other stories illustrate the oddities and surprises of prison life. A recent piece by Hogg compared lizards to Fendi bags — because it's become popular to capture and keep them as pets. Another incarcerated reporter, Brenda Bowers, wrote a story about ice and how most people can't get ahold of it at the prison.

"It's something that people probably wouldn't think about, because they get it so freely out there, but in here, you gotta pay for it, or bargain and wheel and deal," she said.

The paper also includes tips and guides to life inside. A recent issue featured two pieces on experiencing menopause behind bars.

"Although CCWF is a women’s facility, there is a never-ending need for sanitary products," Delina Williams wrote in one of them. "It adds an extra layer of stress for women trying to care for their very private needs, not to mention the overall difficulty of striving for 'normalcy' within the razor wires."

The paper is distributed in print, on tablets available inside the facility, and online. It's funded by the nonprofit The Pollen Initiative. That group's executive director Jesse Vasquez drives from Oakland twice a week to work with the paper’s staff.

Vasquez was himself formerly incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison, where he served as the editor of a newspaper there called The San Quentin News. (Full disclosure: I volunteered for that paper several years ago.)

"The men have always gotten the majority of attention by the fact that there are far more men. Most of the programming, most of the services revolve around the majority of people they're going to serve," Vasquez said. "So in this endeavor with The Paper Trail, I've noticed that they have a sense of empowerment."

The Paper Trail is the first newspaper out of women's prison in the country.

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Libby Rainey

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Reporting from the inside

The Paper Trail launched during a time of change for women's prisons in California. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of women in California prisons fell 31%, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. CCWF also began housing transgender women in recent years. One of The Paper Trail's earliest articles was about the facility's first ever LGBTQIA+ Pride Walk.

It also started during a period of scandals at CCWF. In July, a woman died at the prison during a heatwave. In January, a former correctional officer, Gregory Rodriguez, was found guilty of 64 counts of sexual abuse and battery against multiple incarcerated women, including rape.

Editor-in-chief Amber Bray said in December that she’s interviewing people about their experiences with Rodriguez for the paper’s first story looking into the abuse.

" What I would like for us to do is use the opportunity to say, 'Yeah, this is what happened to some people here, and it's sad, and it's unfortunate. But we're not defined by it,'" she said.

Bray has access that would be impossible for an outside journalist to get.

In journalism classes, she said, they were told “don't limit your thinking on what you can cover. If you see that there's a problem, well then go and learn about the problem, pitch the story, and, you know, see where it goes."

Bray will face a different dynamic when the story is ready to publish: The Paper Trail is subject to review by officials with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

" They're not able to do hard-hitting, investigative journalism from within a prison. I mean, it's just common sense,” said William Drummond, a journalism professor at UC Berkeley and an advisor to the San Quentin News, which goes through the same review process. “If you do that, and embarrass the warden and the staff, you aren't going to be in business long."

Prison newspapers in California are growing

Prison newspapers are rare, but not new, in California. The San Quentin News dates back to at least 1940, and was re-launched in 2008. That project has since won awards and been the subject of news coverage itself. Mule Creek State Prison near Sacramento has a newspaper, as does Pelican Bay State Prison in Northern California. The Paper Trail at CCWF is the fourth, and latest, prison newspaper in the state.

There are also a handful of newsletters produced and distributed at state prisons including at California Institution for Women in Southern California, according to Vasquez. The advocacy organization California Coalition for Women Prisoners has a long-running newsletter called The Fire Inside.

Coverage in collaboration with news organizations outside prison walls have grown in recent years, too, with podcasts such as Ear Hustle out of San Quentin and Bay Area radio station KALW's show Uncuffed. Those programs work with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people to tell their stories, and both recently expanded to California Institution for Women in Chino.

Drummond said the reason prison media projects are expanding is simple: it's an opportunity for incarcerated people to tell their own stories.

" When they get involved in a newspaper, they discover something. And that is, in a very basic sense, you get a following. You get to say stuff people then react to," he said. "It means you're affirming yourself and your identity. And I've seen this happen dozens of times."

For Megan Hogg at CCWF, this meant being seen as someone who’s more than the crime that landed her in prison.

"We're still mothers, we're still sisters, we're still daughters," Hogg said. "We will never deny, yes, I did something horrible, and yes, someone was harmed by it in unimaginable ways. However…we don't want to be defined only by that."

For Delina Williams, the newspaper represents a step forward for all women who are affected by the criminal justice system.

" The opening of this media center starts a whole new era of women being able to speak their truths," she said.

More writers being trained

A new cohort of incarcerated people at CCWF are now training to join and contribute to The Paper Trail, Vasquez said. As the paper grows, he said its challenge is two-fold: writing "news you can use" for people inside California's prisons, and getting their voices heard by those on the outside.

While chasing those bigger goals, the new journalists are in a day-to-day grind that is all too familiar to any working writer: pitching stories, getting edited and trying their best to reflect and communicate the world around them.

"Writing is not easy," said the paper's features editor Sagal Sadiq. "But when the perfect sentence is down on paper, it's like, yes, it's beautiful. [There's] nothing like it."

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.”

Leilani Villeda prepares to fire a weighted line into the high branches of a pine tree using an air-powered launcher during Cone Camp, an annual training session where participants learn how to survey and collect pine cones, in Pollock Pines on July 15, 2026.

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Anna Hoch-Kenney

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CalMatters

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Bleeding the federal workforce

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.

Stewart McMorrow, staff chief of wildfire resilience for Cal Fire, opens a box of seeds in the seed bank at the Lewis A. Moran Reforestation Center in Davis on July 15, 2026.

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Anna Hoch-Kenney

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CalMatters

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A widening gap

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.”

‘Nowhere near prepared’

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.”

Cone hunting

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.”

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.

Danny Westergaard finishing his first Badwater Ultramarathon in 2007, placing 12th.

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Courtesy Adventure Corps Inc.

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'It's a masochist thing'

“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.

Danny Westergaard on a Palos Verdes Estates running trail.

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Sharon McNary

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LAist

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The race got harder this year

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.

Every runner at Badwater 135 takes along a wooden stake that, if they have to leave the course for any reason, they can put down to mark the place where to resume the race. Danny Westergaard’s stakes from his 18 past Badwater finishes,

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Courtesy Danny Westergaard.

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“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.

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.

How to conquer Badwater 135

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 first wave of runners leaves Badwater Basin during the Badwater 135 ultra-marathon race on July 15, 2013 in Death Valley National Park.

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David McNew

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Getty Images

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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.

A competitor passes the unofficial thermometer at Furnace Creek Visitor Center during the Badwater 135 ultra-marathon race on July 15, 2013 in Death Valley National Park.

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David McNew/Getty Images

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Getty Images North America

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“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.”

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.

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.

Jonathan Gold during the production of the 2015 documentary "City of Gold."

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Joey Fantastico

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Courtesy Laura Gabbert

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“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.

Laura Gabbert, left, during production of "City of Gold," with Jonathan Gold.

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Joey Francisco

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Courtesy Laura Gabbert

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He transformed food writing

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.

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.

Jonathan Gold during the production of "City of Gold."

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Joey Fantastico

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Courtesy Laura Gabbert

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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.

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.

How to get help

Those affected by the water main break can file damage claims with LADWP.

West Hollywood contact info:

• Residents should email safety@weho.org
• Businesses can contact business@weho.org