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Thank you for hiking with us!
On Saturday morning, about 35 hikers and at least three dogs joined Times and Zócalo Public Square staffers for a history lesson and trek through Placerita Canyon State Park near Santa Clarita.
We gathered on a beautiful winter day outside the Placerita Canyon Nature Center, starting our adventure with gentle stretches led by Times wellness writer Deborah Vankin, who has written extensively on how to stay limber long into adulthood. We were soon greeted by Jack Levenberg, a docent and naturalist, with Sierra, a great horned owl, perched on his gloved hand. The raptor serves as an animal ambassador at the center.
Docent-naturalist Jack Levenberg introduces visitors at Placerita Canyon Nature Center to Sierra, an animal ambassador who lives at the center and provides education about raptors.
(Deborah Vankin / Los Angeles Times)
We started our hike by heading to the Oak of the Golden Dream, where gold was first discovered by colonizers in 1842.
Tataviam Land Conservancy board member and Cultural Bearer Kevin Nuñez led a historical discussion, explaining that his people of the village Japchibit are the original Indigenous people of the San Gabriel Mountains, and his family has a traceable lineage with Japchibit traceable through 1765.
“In the 1770s, the Spanish-made presence made land and began to build missions in the Los Angeles County area,” said Nuñez, the captain of Japchibit. “My family was impacted heavily because Japchibit was the political center of the Vanyume or Serrano people of the Antelope Valley and the San Gabriel Mountains.”
Tataviam Land Conservancy board member Kevin Nuñez shares about how Spanish colonizers discovering gold harmed Indigenous people in the L.A. County area. He also spoke about the broader harm and violence that came to Indigenous people with colonization and the construction of missions.
(Brittany Levine Beckman / Los Angeles Times)
Afterward, our group headed to the Canyon Trail, a 3.6-mile out-and-back hike through a lush oak woodland alongside Placerita Creek.
We paused to smell the zesty aroma of California sagebrush, which grows all along the Canyon Trail. We also passed dense stands of thick-leaved yerba santa, California buckwheat, sugar bush and chilicothe vines and we were treated to the squawks of California scrub jays and a red-tail hawk flying overhead. A variety of hawks call Placerita Canyon their home.
Our group deftly made it over multiple water crossings and shared trekking poles and shoulders to ensure we all could make it safely through the creek. None of us left the canyon with dry feet, but we did end up with new friends.
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About 1½ miles in, we started to smell a sulfur-like aroma and knew we were close to one of the most interesting features of this hike. We trekked up a steep incline to quickly discover signs for white oil bubbling out of the ground.
“This very rare geologic feature of translucent petroleum has been filtered by nature,” the sign read. “This special resource originates from deep within the earth in the Placerita Schist basement complex of rocks.”
Soon after, we gathered under the shade of old oak trees at a large clearing with several picnic tables.
Just under two miles in, we rested at a large picnic area under the shade of old tall oak trees. A stone fireplace and concrete foundation were nearby, the last remains of a house that Frank Walker started to build but never finished. The Walker family lived on the land starting in the 1920s. We sat together for about 20 minutes, sharing our favorite local hikes, including the Gabrielino Trail that runs through the San Gabriel Mountains.
The hike was part of California 175 — What Connects California?, a suite of free Zócalo events and essays, bringing together leaders and thinkers from all walks of life to envision California’s next 175 years.
Please keep an eye out for the next Times subscriber hike, which will be sometime in the spring. In the meantime, want to learn more about the L.A. outdoors? Subscribe to The Wild, our (free!) weekly outdoors newsletter, where I provide you with the best places to hike around L.A. County. See you out there!
Inde Navarrette and Michael Johnston in Obsession.
Focus Features
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Focus Features
Two big horror films, Obsession and Backrooms, just smashed all box office expectations. So much of their success has been driven by Gen Z, which is now the biggest moviegoing demographic. But what makes a movie a Gen Z movie? Today we’re bringing you an episode of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute. Host Brittany Luse talks about this trend with Sam Adams and Reanna Cruz.
If you want to hear more about these movies, check out these episodes:
In ‘Obsession,’ love hurts. It really, really, really hurts.
‘Backrooms’ brings YouTube horror to the big screen
Zendaya brings ‘The Drama,’ we bring the spoilers
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I regret to inform you I’ll need to keep this introduction brief. Not because there’s any lack of things to say about July’s crop of notable new releases; it features award-winning journalists and several different flavors of anxiety about our bleak ecological future and data-dominated present, as well as the welcome returns of several beloved novelists.
No, these books certainly deserve some love, dear readers. It’s just that I’m finding it a bit tough to type while bearhugging a box fan. And since it seems that may be my last best chance to get through this latest U.S. heat wave here on the east coast without sweating through my shirt, I feel some urgency to get back at it.
So enough with the ado. With any luck, you’ll soon be cracking open one of these great reads on the beach — or in front of a decent air-conditioning unit, at any rate.
You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, by Rachel Aviv (July 7)
Aviv, New Yorker staff writer and finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize, has a fairly extensive purview in her role as reporter at large. Still, when reviewing her latest work, Aviv noticed a crucial throughline: “I realized that, to some degree, I’d been writing about mother-daughter pairs for the last decade,” she explained to the Paris Review. Seeing this, she decided to collect and revise half a dozen of those stories, which cover ground from a daughter’s troubling fugue states to the immigrant nannies who must leave their own children behind, to Alice Munro’s daughter, whose claims of sexual abuse went unheeded yet regularly resurfaced in her mother’s fiction.
Country People, by Daniel Mason (July 7)
In Mason’s first novel since North Woods, 2023’s critical darling and book club stalwart, readers are plopped right back in the New England woods but the time scale has shrunk considerably. Whereas North Woods spanned centuries, his new novel confines itself to a single year, during which Miles, loving family man and lackadaisical Ph.D. candidate, plans to finally buckle down on that derelict degree of his and reassert his worth to one and all! At least, that’s the idea. But plans don’t stand much of a chance when there are eccentric neighbors to befriend and mysterious local legends to investigate.
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast, by Pamela Colloff (July 14)
This is the first book from Colloff, a veteran investigative journalist for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine. She has won multiple National Magazine Awards for stories focused on miscarriages of justice – such as her 2019 piece about Paul Skalnik, a grifter, fabulist, sexual predator and snitch, whose fabrications can be linked to dozens of wrongful convictions in Florida, including some sending the innocent to death row. Here Colloff expands upon that investigation, which gets a lot more room to breathe in the transition from magazine article to full-length book. What emerges in this disturbing account is a portrait of one man’s callous cruelty, and the law enforcers who had no problem tolerating a deal with the devil, provided it kept juicing the conviction rate.
Cloudthief, by Nathaniel Rich (July 14)
Though it’s his fiction we’re discussing here, it’s important to note Rich’s reporting has earned plaudits, too, as well as a few film adaptations. No matter the medium, climate change is usually on his mind, as well as the blunt, rather bleak, prognosis he offered on Fresh Air in 2019: “There’s a huge range of outcomes … ranging from the not very good to the apocalyptic.” Which is to say I’m surprised to find myself describing his newest response to global catastrophe as a rollicking good time – and not just because I’ve never said those words, in that order, in my life. This spry, funny caper features a freelance environmental reporter who inadvertently breaks bad, careening under the influence of lust and a light wallet toward the novel’s big centerpiece: the planned heist of a massive data center.
Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate, by Roopika Risam (July 14)
And now, for another book centered on data – albeit from a rather different angle. This illuminating history from Risam, a Dartmouth professor, traces the practice of collecting information – and the power conferred by possessing it – from the bones that were humans’ first archives, to the omnipresent systems that shape (or outright determine) life today. As Risam asks, “What has it meant – and what will it mean – when records that once served only to help us remember, come to rule?” A pressing question (see: those data centers), which you’re probably better served trying to answer with the help of Risam than, say, Alexa or Claude.
It Will Come Back to You: Stories, by Sigrid Nuñez (July 14)
For someone with nine novels to her name, Nuñez got a later start than you might expect, having published her first book when she was already in her mid-40s. More than three decades later, now a spry 75 years old, the National Book Award winner has gotten around to publishing her first collection of short stories. The 13 stories here have been culled from across her career, but each one resonates clearly with the warm timbre of her voice: simple, unadorned prose and mundane setups, from which she consistently manages to tease out glimpses of truth, elusive and profound.
They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy, by Lauren Collins (July 14)
The only coup d’etat to succeed on U.S. soil is, at most, a distant historical afterthought these days. To be honest, I can’t recall reading a single textbook entry that even remarked on the 1898 race massacre in Wilmington, N.C., an action led by white supremacists that left many (historian estimates say up to 300) Black Wilmingtonians dead and permanently scarred a community newly aware of its simmering animus and vulnerability to violent overthrow. So I’m grateful for Collins’ new chronicle of the infamous event, which fills in some serious gaps in the American collective memory and explains how its perpetrators cultivated the disorienting silence that persists in the historical record today.
Yellow Pine, by Claire Vaye Watkins (July 21)
I don’t think I’ve ever actually laid eyes on the Mojave Desert but after reading Watkins’ latest novel, it feels like I can picture it more vividly than some streets I’ve actually lived on. No, it’s “not a beginner’s wilderness,” as Watkins concedes in Yellow Pine, but this landscape so redolent of death is also deceptively robust with life, if only you’re patient enough to find it. Too bad, then, that it’s also on fire. And choked by drought, irradiated by military test sites and soon to be sacrificed to a massive new solar array named, inexplicably, Yellow Pine. But those aren’t the only complications confronting the book’s main character, Rose, whose aspirations of becoming a kind of climate hermit warp a bit under the pressure of a rekindled love and the pendulum swing of rage and despair at the state of the world.
Cool Machine, by Colson Whitehead (July 21)
Ray Carney is back, for what regrettably appears to be the last time. The lifelong Harlemite, hard-luck furniture dealer and ambivalent crook starred previously in Harlem Shuffle and its sequel, Crook Manifesto. His perspective is our window on the changing eras of the historically Black neighborhood, from the mid-1950s on. In this, the final installment in Whitehead’s brisk, exceedingly entertaining Harlem Trilogy, readers catch up with Carney around the start of the 1980s, following him deeply into Reagan’s decade. The novel also represents the end of an era for Whitehead, whose attention has been exclusively occupied with these characters since he won Pulitzer Prizes for consecutive novels, The Underground Railroad and Nickel Boys.
Beginning Middle End, by Valeria Luiselli (July 28)
The gifted young Mexican writer returns this month with her fourth novel, the second she has written in English and her first since Lost Children Archive launched to widespread plaudits more than seven years ago. Her new book, like her previous one, also concerns the travels of a small family – only this time, the road leads not through the American Southwest but Sicily. And the history sought by its mother-daughter main characters is not a record of bureaucratic cruelty but something much more intimately personal: the links shaped and tested by generations of shared heritage and experience.
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