Lifestyle
The world's largest wildlife crossing is finally standing. Here is what's coming next
• The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing now spans the 101 Freeway in Agoura Hills, but weather issues have pushed completion to sometime in 2026.
• Builders plan to cover the crossing with “engineered” soil inoculated with local microbes early next year so more than 5,000 native shrubs and wildflowers can be planted.
• But the crossing won’t be connected to the mainland until Stage 2, when many tons of earth must be moved to create a safe elevated passage over one of the state’s busiest freeways.
It doesn’t take a hawk eye to recognize that the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over the 101 Freeway in Agoura Hills is not your normal Caltrans project.
For one thing, there’s the color. Most Caltrans structures are the light gray of natural concrete. But to reduce reflectivity and help the crossing blend in more with the surrounding land, the new crossing’s 27 million pounds of concrete have been colored a shade dubbed “dusty mocha” by the project’s lead designer, Robert Rock, a landscape architect for Chicago-based Rock Design Associates.
The official name, however, is Federal Standard Color 595-33105, a hue “inspired,” Rock said, by the soil around the crossing that will eventually provide wildlife safe passage between the Santa Monica Mountains to the south and the Simi Hills and Santa Susana Mountains to the north when the project is completed.
For the record:
9:23 a.m. Oct. 29, 2024An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Robert Rock works for Living Habitats. He now has his own firm, Rock Design Associates. It also incorrectly reported that Katherine Pakradouni was the founder of the project’s nursery. She was the former manager.
When the project began in 2022, the end date was projected to be late 2025, but severe rain and heat the past two years caused delays that have pushed completion to sometime in 2026, said Rock. Weather extremes can wreak havoc on construction projects, especially when they involve so much concrete, he added.
Concrete molds for new signage on the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Nonetheless, there’s been plenty of progress. The crossing now spans the 101, and up on the deck — 21 feet and 8 inches above the freeway — there’s a marked difference from the noise on the ground, where the traffic is so loud it’s hard to have a shouted conversation (unless all you’re saying is “What?!”).
On Oct. 16, Caltrans senior bridge engineer Darwin Vargas led a group to the top of the structure, promising serenity once we stepped on the deck. He was right. At the top, the deck looks like a moonscape, and the roar of rushing cars and trucks was barely discernible, thanks to the thick, 12-foot-tall sound walls on either side of the structure, which is slightly wider than an American football field and about three-quarters its length.
Landscape designer Robert Rock looks down from the temporary stairs leading to the deck on the south side of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing. The area where the stairs are now will be filled in with soil, covering a tunnel over Agoura Road to create a gradual slope off the crossing to the Santa Monica Mountains.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
On that day, workers were using power tools (and even those sounds were muffled) to smooth the sides and surface of the concrete deck, preparing it for the next steps — waterproofing the concrete and covering it with heavy rubber sheets about 2 inches thick. After that will come a “giant mattress of gravel” 12 inches deep, Rock said, laced with perforated pipes to collect runoff and direct it into Liberty Canyon Creek.
It’s hard to tell as you’re driving underneath, but the crossing is slightly slanted, about two feet lower on the north end than the south to help drain off any moisture, because the last thing you want on a concrete structure is a lot of standing water.
This space will be off-limits to humans once the crossing is completed, with locked gates to keep people out and discreet fencing to guide wildlife away from nearby homes into the wild hills beyond. The crossing is designed to feel like an extension of the hills and valleys in the area to re-create the seamless corridor that existed before the noisy, busy freeway made passage so dangerous.
Senior bridge engineer Darwin Vargas pauses on the maintenance walkway on the east edge of the wildlife crossing, with one of the 12-foot-tall soundproofing walls to the right. The area between the walkway and sound wall will be planted; the wildlife will cross in the wide expanse on the other side of the wall.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Once the gravel is in place, the builders will add about 6,000 cubic yards of “engineered soil” to the structure, Rock said. It’s a sandy loam mixed with lightweight volcanic aggregate to provide the volume and moisture needed to support plant life while reducing the weight on the structure and allowing for easy drainage.
That quantity of soil is enough to cover three-quarters of an American football field in about 2.5 feet of soil, he said, but on the crossing, the “ground” will be higher in some places than others, contoured to mimic the dips and dents one might find on nearby hills.
The engineered soil will also be inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi spores collected within five miles of the crossing, the same spores added to the soils growing the 5,000-plus hyper-local native shrubs and wildflowers that will be planted on the crossing. The plants are considered “hyper-local” because they are grown from seeds that were collected within a five-mile radius of the structure, Rock said.
Soil scientist Ted Hartsig at the special nursery growing native plants for the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
“We’ve got to have the right microbes in order for these locally sourced seeds to flourish,” said Ted Hartsig, a soil scientist for the engineering company Olsson, one of many contractors working on the crossing.
If all this sounds a little fiddly, well, just understand that it’s tough to mimic Mother Nature. Success is in the details, and there are more than a 100 people led by Rock trying to ensure that every detail is done correctly.
After all the soil is in place, they plan to start planting early next spring, Rock said. The project has two nursery sites now: a seed bank near Paramount Ranch and the main nursery off Las Virgenes Road in Calabasas, where thousands of seeds have been planted in tiny flats and then repotted to grow large enough to be planted.
Jewlya Samaniego and Jose Campos, co-managers of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, prune one-gallon containers of white sage slated for planting on the crossing next year.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Those seeds were collected in 2022 by the nursery’s former manager, Katherine Pakradouni, who has since moved on to another position. The people who helped her set up the nursery, Jewlya Samaniego and Jose Campos, now run the site together and put in so many long hours that some people have questioned whether they live there. They don’t, Samaniego said laughing, but there are time it feels that way, especially during the heavy rains last winter and the scorching heat this summer.
Native plants don’t need much water once they’re established in the ground, but growing in little pots that dry out quickly, that’s another matter, Campos said. During the highest heat, they had to water the plants twice a day to keep them alive, and they finally created a shaded area to protect tender seedlings from the heat.
Most of the plants growing at the nursery will be planted on the structure next year: native shrubs such as white sage, California fuchsia, California buckwheat, sagebrush, purple sage, black sage, toyon and laurel sumac, along with a variety of native grasses.
The hope is that the plants will be robust enough — thanks to the beneficial microbes — to crowd out the black mustard and other invasive plants growing nearby, Rock said. Once established, the plants shouldn’t need much water, but the crossing will have an irrigation system installed that can be activated to wet down the crossing in the event of a wildfire.
Stage 2 involves creating a tunnel over Agoura Road to the south to create a gradual slope that will allow animals to wander off the crossing into the Santa Monica Mountains. To the north, a deep gash in the hill will also be filled with soil, to create a sloping entry from the Simi Hills onto the crossing.
Soil scientist Ted Hartsig holds a handful of soil teeming with beneficial mycorrhizal fungi that will be used to inoculate the wildlife crossing growing media.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Those areas will have similar plantings along with native oaks and other native trees, which can’t be planted on the crossing because their roots run too deep, Rock said.
The nursery is growing those plants from seed too. The plants have been moved to the growing area called the “seed bank” near Paramount Ranch, he said. The goal is to collect seeds from them until they’re ready to be moved to their permanent homes on the shoulders that link the crossing to the hills, which likely won’t be until 2026.
Rock said they’re doing the planting in stages so the plants on the crossing have a year to get established before wildlife can reach them. Otherwise, the young plants could be nibbled to death by hungry travelers.
The design work for Stage 2 is nearly completed, Rock said, but it will likely take a good part of 2025 to get the tunnel over Agoura Road completed.
A view of traffic on the 101 Freeway, looking west, from the top of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing. Once the work is completed, the 12-foot-tall sound wall will obscure the sight and sounds of the freeway from animals crossing between the Santa Monica Mountains and the Simi Hills.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Then there will be lots of earth to move. Much will come from the north side of the crossing, where fill dirt was deposited from the 101 expansion in the 1950s and 1960s, said Rock.
The shoulders will have to be filled in slowly, a little at a time on each side, said Vargas. Too much soil on one side could destabilize the structure, causing it to topple, he said, “which would be really, really sad.”
Once the fill soil is in place, the builders will add a final layer of top soil, a rich mix that was dredged from the bottom of Malibu Lake 70 years ago and has been resting near Paramount Ranch ever since, teeming with the beneficial microbes so important to this project’s success.
All that won’t happen for another year at least. On Oct. 16, the only animals on the structure were human, but high above, circling in the brilliant blue sky, a hawk was keeping tabs.
Azar Nafisi on the set of Eran Riklis’ Reading Lolita in Tehran
Marie Gioanni/Greenwich Entertainment
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A new film version of Azar Nafisi’s critically-praised, worldwide bestselling memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, is now in theatres.
The film shows a group of women meeting clandestinely in Nafisi’s home in the mid-1990s, to read forbidden books. They read classics of the West, like Madame Bovary, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, and Lolita.
Education had become dangerous and even deadly during the Islamic Revolution, and reading forbidden books was Nafisi’s way to fight back.
The film, directed by Eran Riklis, begins with Nafisi as a university professor and ends with her exiled from her homeland. Nafisi told Scott Simon about the experience of seeing herself and her story depicted on the big screen, “I feel towards it the way I feel towards my children.”
The film is directed by Eran Riklis and won the the Audience Award and a special jury prize at the 2024 Rome Film Festival.
It stars Iranian actors Goldshifteh Farahani, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, and Mina Kavani. Like the author, some of the actors are exiled from Iran.
Actor Golshifteh Farahani stars as Azar Nafisi in Eran Riklis’ Reading Lolita in Tehran.
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Greenwich Entertainment
“These girls were very different, one from the other,” Nafisi said of the students who studied with her in Tehran. Remembering them now, and seeing them depicted on the screen, Nafisi saw anew the power of great literature.
“Outside the classroom, they probably wouldn’t talk to one another. But in that class, they learned to communicate and to connect,” she said.
Through the stories in the books, Nafisi said each woman could find more and become more herself. “It reached a sort of magic,” she said.
The magic was brutally broken by a government that was desperate to quiet the voices of dissenters. Nafisi’s homeland changed quickly into a place she barely recognized
“This wasn’t my land,” she told Simon. “This was a country ruled by a regime that stoned people to death.”
When the religious hardliners in the government banned women from appearing in public without a headscarf, the film shows Nafisi, played by Goldshifteh Farahani, agonizing in front of a mirror with a black headscarf.
“The expression on her face is fear, because by and by, she disappears into this garment,” Nafisi said. For some, the headscarf was a symbol of the place of women in society, but for Nafisi the stakes were even higher.
“This is not a political fight. This is an existential one,” she said. “Our identity as human beings, as women, has been taken away from us.”
When fighting against covering her hair became too dangerous, Nafisi found small ways to rebel. “I never wore my scarf properly. I would always show a few strands out of the scarf to tell them, ‘You don’t own me.’”
Nafisi’s book about fighting the Iranian Revolution through the simple act of reading was an international bestseller, won numerous literary awards, and was named as one of the “100 Best Books of the Decade” by The Times (London).
Nafisi now lives in Washington, D.C., and continues to make a passionate case for the role of artists and writers in society.
She shared with Simon an illustrative story from the beginning of Islamic Revolution. The new leaders tore down the statues of the king and the royal family and changed the names of streets. But when they tried to bring down the statue of Persian poet Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi, and erase his place of honor within the culture, the people opposed it.
“I thought how fantastic that they can bring down the statue of the Shah, but they can’t touch the poet,” she said.
Get ready to catch a whiff of stink. Not one, but two rare corpse flowers are set to bloom at the Huntington in the coming days, with one of them making its first-ever public bloom.
If both plants unfurl on the same day, it would be just the second time a double bloom has ever occurred at the Huntington.
For those unfamiliar with these funky flora, be warned. Corpse flowers bloom for just 24 to 48 hours, and once opened, they reek of gym socks, rotten eggs and decaying flesh … or, well, a corpse.
Brandon Tam, associate curator of orchids for the Huntington, speaks to reporters in front of two corpse flowers as they prepare to bloom.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Couple that with their tropical native climate of Sumatra, Indonesia, and you’re in for a sweaty, stinky viewing experience.
The stench is important for pollination, said Brandon Tam, the Huntington’s associate curator of orchids. It attracts carrion beetles and flesh flies, which lay their eggs on rotting animal carcasses.
At the Huntington, pollinators aren’t the only thing it entices. Since the garden exhibited its first corpse flower in 1999, thousands of people flock to its conservatory every summer, just to smell these putrid plants.
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It smells like rotting flesh, but thousands of people will be lining up to catch a whiff.
“The kids that first came in 1999 are now bringing their kids — their own kids — to experience this over 20 years later,” Tam said. “It’s amazing, this plant, the impact that it has had over many generations.”
Glendale resident Trinity Shi, 42, witnessed three blooms at the Huntington in 2022 and 2023 and compared the smell to rotten fish: pungent, but not unbearable. She was excited to feature such an unusual specimen on her Instagram plant blog, @cubehousejungle, and hopes to make it to this year’s bloom too.
“It feels really prehistoric to look at this plant, because it is so giant,” Shi said of the corpse flower, which can grow over 12 feet tall. “It’s become kind of like a mascot for the Huntington.”
Thanks to cultivation techniques, the Huntington coaxes the plants to bloom every two to three years, not four to six like they do in their natural habitat, where they’re endangered.
Still, the blooms are notoriously unpredictable, Tam said. He guessed one of the plants will bloom in the coming days.
This upcoming bloom spotlights a plant nicknamed Odora, who last opened in 2024, and Odorysseus, a rookie public bloomer. Visitors offered name suggestions for Odorysseus on the Huntington’s Instagram page, where contenders included Stinkerbell, Gagatha and Count Flatula, among others.
It’s not unusual for the Huntington to have multiple soon-to-be bloomers on display. But only once, in 2018, did two plants actually unfurl on the same day.
A detailed view of a corpse flower as it prepares to bloom.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
For Odora and Odorysseus, siblings from a 2002 pollination, a double bloom is unlikely, Tam said. The plants are inclined to bloom out of sequence, “because they want to pollinate another plant that’s in the vicinity.” That can’t happen if they bloom simultaneously.
Though many refer to these plants as “flowers,” they are actually an “inflorescence,” a flowering structure containing hundreds of smaller blooms inside.
When it’s almost time for the plant to open, the spadix — a conic protrusion from inside the plant — emerges and accelerates in growth, climbing up to six inches per day. After a few days, its growth slows down.
“When it gets to about the one-inch range, we’ll know it’s about to bloom for us fairly soon,” Tam said.
When it does bloom, the spathe — leaflike structures encasing the plant — unfurl around 3 or 4 p.m., reaching maximum size in the early hours of the morning. The odor comes from the spadix, which heats up to about 98 degrees to strengthen the smell.
Brandon Tam, associate curator of orchids at the Huntington, walks past the corpse flowers as they prepare to bloom.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
From there, visitors have until about 3 to 5 p.m. to smell the plant before it closes back up and collapses, losing its odor. Eventually, the plant returns as a leaf or a flower, photosynthesizing energy in preparation for its next bloom.
Today, the Huntington houses 43 corpse flowers, making it one of the largest corpse flower collections in North America. The Huntington cultivates them on-site and has distributed many to botanic gardens and zoos across the country.
“It’s important when it comes to conservation that we make plants accessible,” Tam said. “If we’re able to share these plants with other organizations and other hobbyists, we’re able to decrease the amount of plant theft that occurs in the wild, where a lot of conservation work is much needed.”
Eager sniffers can visit the Huntington from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday to Monday. Be sure to stay hydrated, cool and patient, as it’s humid inside the conservatory and lines can be long. For those who want to track the blooms’ progress from afar, catch the Huntington’s online livestream.
Library, art museum, botanical garden
The Huntington
Address: 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino
Admission: $13-34; children 3 and under, free; “Museums for All” (SNAP EBT) program, $5.
Info: huntington.org
Entrepreneur David Huang tests out a VR headset while conducting demonstrations of the social dance lesson app Dance Guru at the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, Calif., June 17, 2026.
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Chloe Veltman/NPR
Wedding season is in full swing, bringing with it a familiar sense of dread for anyone who fears the dance floor.
But relief may finally be at hand with the help of a new app, Dance Guru, and a virtual reality (VR) headset.
The social dance instruction app transports users to a spacious, digital dance studio. Waiting inside is a computer-generated coach: a handsome, male avatar wearing a shirt open to his navel. He speaks with a slightly gravelly English accent.
“Watch me now,” he instructs at the start of a waltz lesson — which NPR tried out at the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, Calif., an annual conference showcasing the latest developments in virtual and augmented reality.
The avatar then demonstrates a basic box step.
From there, the lesson becomes interactive. The coach tells the user to hold his hand while an electric pinging sound tracks the student’s foot placement.
“One, two, three, four, five, six,” the virtual teacher counts down.
When the user stumbles, he remains remarkably patient. “Do not worry, foundations take time. Let’s try that again. Work on grounding your steps more intentionally.”
Solving the beginner’s dilemma
Dance Guru creator David Huang said he came up with the idea for the app a couple of years ago out of frustration.
“I always wanted to learn to dance and I was always terrible at it,” Huang said. “And I always ended up stopping midway through the lessons.”
He soon realized that many beginners hit the exact same roadblocks.
“Private lessons are too expensive, and you feel like you’re always forgetting the dance steps,” Huang said. “You cannot find a partner to dance with. So I figured maybe I can create something like this.”
The Dance Guru platform currently offers tutorials in salsa, bachata, waltz, and cha-cha, in both lead and follow modes. To make the digital instruction feel authentic, Huang used motion-capture technology to record the movements of real-life dance teachers — with their permission.
Building on the legacy of online tutorials and video games
Dance Guru belongs to a small but growing wave of apps using VR to demystify social dance. At a nearby booth, conference attendee Victor Chen is testing out a competing app called Trip the Light. It currently offers salsa lessons, as well as freestyle options, where a user can dance with a partner without having to learn specific steps.
Trip the Light’s booth at the Augmented World Expo included posters of the app’s virtual instructors. Real-life performers, who gave Trip the Light permission to motion capture their movements, were used as a basis for these avatars.
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“A lot of times when you’re trying to learn a choreography, it’s watching a YouTube video and you have to pause it, rewind, and play it,” Chen said. “If you were to have a virtual avatar dancing in front of you and correcting for any parts that you missed, it might be a lot easier.”
Interactive video games like Dance Dance Revolution and Just Dance, and YouTube tutorials have been helping people improve their skills in private for years. But those games are mostly aimed at solo players. Unlike the new generation of immersive VR apps, they cannot simulate the mechanics or confidence required for partner dancing on a live dance floor.
The reality check
But this kind of app won’t work for every dancer.
“Everyone learns a little bit differently. And so unless you have a game that has lots of different ways of teaching, you’re going to have things that work for some people and don’t work for others,” said Ariana Katana, a trained contemporary dancer and dance content creator who’s active on YouTube, Twitch and other platforms. “Also, it’s hard to dance with a headset on.”
And then there’s the issue of not being able to physically feel a virtual partner’s hand or shoulder while dancing with them. Patrick Ascolese, the creator of Trip the Light, said the experience could become more tactile in the future. “Haptic suits and wearables will be coming, but I think we’re a little away from that,” he said.
Ascolese said even with their limitations, immersive tools like Trip the Light have immense potential as judgment-free training grounds — giving reluctant dancers the baseline confidence they need to eventually step onto the dance floor with real partners in the real world, including at weddings.
“Just like anything else, practice makes perfect,” said Ascolese. “So the more time you spend in VR with a virtual partner, it works towards helping you get over that social hurdle. We are teaching you the moves that you have to do in order to go out and have fun.”
Jennifer Vanasco edited the broadcast and digital versions of this story. Chloee Weiner mixed the audio.
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