In December 2020, a reader suggested we contact a young Pasadena man named Edgar McGregor, who is completing his 500th consecutive day picking up trash in local parks, including Eaton Canyon. I contacted McGregor via email, but then, like him, I got sidetracked by other things.
McGregor, now 25, still picks up trash and also earned a degree in climate science from San Jose State University in 2023. He runs a weather forecasting service out of his home, focusing on communities in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, and has a keen interest in Santa Ana winds. This led to people paying close attention to his predictions, especially in January.
McGregor studied computerized weather data in his home office and saw the monster for himself. He posted a video imploring his followers to “run away” after a fire started in Eaton Canyon, likely from power lines arcing, because he knew the Santa Ana storm that would hit the Altadena area would be devastating. His warning is credited with sending a caravan of cars out of the hills and saving lives.
A few weeks ago, McGregor and I finally went out to pick up trash. We met at the Santa Fe Dam Recreation Area, where he pulled plastic bags, bottles, cans, food wrappers, and other trash from thick, dry brush. He said the Irwindale location will offer sweeping views of the San Gabriel Mountains, which dramatically form Los Angeles’ vast backwall, and will serve as a reminder that natural beauty and risk are inseparable, along with this towering seismic sculptural creation.
Part of the risk, McGregor explained, is that when high-pressure air from the north and northeast is drawn by low-pressure air along the coast, it becomes compressed as it funnels through valleys and accelerates as it moves down the Southern California Mountains, becoming dangerously dry and threatening everything in its path.
“So I think it’s thanks to scavenging that we were able to predict January 7th,” McGregor told me, explaining that he was paying close attention to the devastated ecosystem in Eaton Canyon, where two consecutive years of drought had led to mass burning.
“I knew it was going to be a disaster. … Even before I ran outside and saw the hill behind my house on fire, I knew it was over. It was completely over. The whole valley was going to rise,” McGregor said. “I spent a lot of time in that park, learning about its natural history, learning when the mudslides happened, when the wildfires started, what caused my house to burn down in a wildfire in 1993… From that moment on, this was the beginning of a new era for Altadena.”
The San Gabriel Mountains can seem unreal when viewed from your front porch on a sunny morning. Incredibly steep rock walls tower over the canyon, as if a Hollywood film crew had stayed up all night assembling the backdrop for a movie set. In just a few minutes I can disappear into a mirage and trade the traffic for peace and quiet.
But gravity has not been kind to the San Gabriel Mountains and their foothills. There, majesty and turmoil coexisted, surviving decades of deadly fires and floods. The new year of 1934 began when a 20-foot wall of mud and rubble roared down from the fire-scarred slopes, incinerating much of La Crescenta and Montrose, burning 400 homes and killing 45 people. In 1968 and 1969, 200 homes were similarly destroyed and 34 people were killed.
The persistent threat along these steep slopes is reminiscent of the deadly 1978 La Crescenta landslide, which picked up more than a dozen vehicles and parked them downstream while also destroying homes.
The story’s title, “Los Angeles vs. the Mountains,” had a clever opening line: “When it comes to Los Angeles vs. the San Gabriel Mountains, it’s not always clear who’s losing.” The film begins with the travails of Robert and Jackie Genofile and their two teenagers, Kim and Scott, who were nearly buried alive in their La Crescenta home.
Kim Genophile was 17 years old at the time of the storm. When I looked up a woman’s phone number in Orange County, I wasn’t sure if I had the right person, but Kim Flotron answered and said she was indeed a former Kim Genophile and that she was thinking of the thousands of unfortunate souls who lost everything in the Eaton Fire.
Flotron, who has retired from his medical career, spoke as if the ordeal of 1978 was still fresh in his mind. She said she couldn’t sleep the night of the disaster and went into her brother Scott’s bedroom to watch the storm from the window. Flotron remembers telling her mother, “You should see all the rain that’s falling.”
A series of debris basins protect neighborhoods in the San Gabriel foothills and catch storm runoff, including mud, wood, rocks, and boulders. The house above Genofile’s was jammed in the storm, sending an avalanche of debris sliding down the hill.
“I can still hear it,” Flotron said.
Mud crashed into the house and drove up, climbing up the wall. Flotron said her father told everyone to jump on the bed in the master bedroom, and she and her brother tried it out.
“But my foot got stuck in a rock and I got stuck,” Flotron said.
The Genophiles dug their way to safety, but the teens suffered only minor cuts and scrapes. Flotron said her father, a contractor, built a house, but it was destroyed, and the family decided to rebuild on the same site, even though they went through a nightmare.
As McPhee said, there’s Los Angeles versus the mountains, but there’s also Mother Nature versus human nature, and home is home. When I asked one Altadena fire survivor if it was safe to rebuild in a historic site that had been shaken, burned, and so many other hazards, he shrugged me off and said, Risk exists everywhere, he said. And, sure, if you don’t like one thing, you might as well do another. crime, accident, illness.
In his new home, Flotron said his bedroom was placed on the second floor so he could sleep more soundly.
“We are very strong-willed people and tend to be more positive,” Kim said of his decision to remain at La Crescenta. “My parents thought we had our own lives and weren’t separated. We thought we had lost two cats, but one was found on a surfboard in the reservoir and the other in a cupboard.”
But post-traumatic stress disorder runs in her family, and she suspects her late father was never quite the same after losing his home and then going out of business. Then, in 2009, Genophile was spared, but nearby damage occurred.
“It was scary because it was like, what do we expect?” Flotron said. “It was fine there. You could see the sumac exploding and you could feel the heat.”
Her brother still lives in La Crescenta, Frotron told me.
“Every time it rains, we seem to talk,” she said.
And one day I was walking from La Cañada towards the Gabrielino Trail, talking about the various threats that beset us in Southern California, testing both our preparedness and our sanity. She used to live pretty close to Genofile and was evacuated from her home there for three days during the station fire, hoping and praying that the storm-filled debris pool near her home would hold up the following year. It was.
Before that, Mr. Jones lived in the same neighborhood I live in, and he told me that there had been a huge earthquake with a magnitude of 5.0. After her La Cañada Flintridge adventure, she and her husband, also a seismologist, began buying real estate to be closer to their jobs at Caltech. Jones said he took advantage of the ultimate insider advantage and gave Home a pass after observing that Home was perched atop the Raymond Fault escarpment.
“He may have been willing to gamble, but that didn’t happen,” Jones said. “You’ll never be able to invite a geologist to dinner.”
As Jones winds his way down to the trail, he spots something on the face of a sheer rock wall.
“It looks like a fault gouge,” Jones said, examining the bleached, sandy material sandwiched between darker, harder rock.
Despite seeing what Jones said was an example of ridge fracturing that could be related to seismic activity, she didn’t seem particularly alarmed. And we were near the Sierra Madre Fault. This fault conspired with the San Andreas Fault in prehistoric times to form the San Gabriel Mountains.
Millions of years ago, the San Gabriel Mountains didn’t exist, Jones said. This landmass was flat until a lateral twist of the San Andreas Fault separated two large tectonic discs, one sliding slowly to the southeast and the other to the northwest, but the pressure began to build up and form mountains. The San Gabriel Mountains are still climbing and are among the fastest rising mountains in the world.
When I talk to Jones, I often feel like I’m asking a question that might get me kicked out of the class. But I tried something different with her.
Why is this mountain range so steep?
“Rather than mountains collapsing due to erosion, earthquakes are pushing mountains up,” Jones said, reminding us that the San Andreas is on the north side of the range and the Sierra Madre is on the south side. “About every 5,000 years, the Sierra Madre Fault moves again and pushes us up another 10 feet.”
The Big One is certainly scary, but the timeline is unrecognizable, so it’s easy to push it out of our heads. The next destructive earthquake could be in 5,000 or 10,000 years. Or maybe you’ll visit us before you finish reading the next sentence. No one knows. And there is no earthquake season.
But with fire season on the horizon, things could get worse, especially after the events of January, and Los Angeles’ proximity to the wilderness seems increasingly worrying.
“Look at that hillside in front of us,” Jones said, looking out over the canyon. “It burned down in the station fire. It’s been 16 years of regrowth and it’s still struggling.”
In a typical cycle, it can take decades for burned wasteland to recover. But even areas not visited by fire are struggling, thanks to drought and other factors that have led to forest collapse.
We are “at increased risk of fires due to climate change,” Jones said. “Ecosystems are highly stressed because they are experiencing a climate that is different from what they evolved into.”
We reached the stream at the bottom of the trail, and along the way Jones pointed out the dynamics of change. Along the creek, in the sand and rocks the size of dump trucks, she saw a map of the historical reconstruction.
“Look at the size of the rock. It’s pretty round so it was bouncing around in the river for a while,” she said. “When there is a fire and things fall, the greenery burns and the rain flakes off the soil.”
At one point, Jones reached across a gurgling stream and handed me his trekking poles to balance on slippery rocks without spilling water. Toward the end of the hike, she took me to a spot where she had identified part of the Sierra Madre Fault a few months earlier.
“Sometimes you can see clearly,” Jones said, but the rain has changed the placement of objects, washing leaves and other material onto the rocky ground.
She glances across the stream with the help of a geologist’s magical eye and finds signs of another part of the fault. She bent down to examine the sandy material and said, “Look at how the sand is broken up on this very hard rock.”
If there was a big earthquake, Jones said, “these rocks would move about 5 meters over here and that would hit the bridge.” But in that scenario, the bridge across the creek at JPL’s back entrance could have already been damaged by the violent shaking.
Mr. Jones told me, very casually, that large earthquakes always cause fires, that wooden buildings can exacerbate losses, and that the severity of the disaster “depends on the winds that are blowing when the earthquake occurs.”
I told her I wanted to know that she was sleeping okay.
“Yes,” Jones said. “This is the geological age.”
Mr. Jones, who fondly talks about “playing in the mountains” with his grandchildren, left me with a few words of reassurance.
“I’m not moving,” Jones said. “And I’m not going to convince my son to raise his grandson elsewhere.”
The Eaton and Palisades fires would not have been as devastating without the Santa Ana winds that carried the flames farther. While there is currently no evidence that climate change will affect the Santa Ana winds that blow through parts of the San Gabriel Foothills Corridor during the fall and early winter, there is evidence that climate change will mean an increased fire risk.
“We are encountering extremely dry autumns with increasing frequency,” Edgar McGregor told me. That means if we go into Santa Ana season without enough rain to kill plants, we’re setting ourselves up for disaster. ”
Another important factor in the Eaton and Palisades fires was that the winters of 2023 and 2024 were unusually wet, creating vegetation that later became fuel during an unusually dry season. Daniel Swain and other climate scientists call these fluctuations, from drought to flood.
“When it rains, it pours more and more. This is what is happening globally,” said Swain, the researcher.
And why is this happening?
Because by playing with matches, we are burning fossil fuels, emitting more greenhouse gases, and cooking the planet.
“I don’t know if anyone realizes how dramatically it’s gotten warmer over the last 30 years,” Swain said. “Unfortunately, we’re on a trajectory that’s much warmer than we’ve seen in the past,” and future warming will be exponential rather than linear.
“It’s obviously gotten warmer, but why is that so important? Because of the sponge effect in the atmosphere,” Swain said. “As the temperature of the air increases, the metaphorical size of the atmosphere expands, and its ability to absorb water increases as well.”
Sponges can absorb and release increasing amounts of water. A paper by Swain and other scientists found that between 1980 and 2018, human-induced climate change doubled the number of “extreme fall days with extreme fire weather” in California.
Swain said there is some evidence that the timing of Santa Ana’s winds is changing, with fewer winds in the fall and more winds in the winter. This is potentially a good thing because the later it is, the more likely it is to rain.
The research ecologist, an adjunct professor at UCLA and former Altadena resident, doesn’t accept the idea of a whiplash effect as an explanation for January’s wildfires. He said climate change was a bigger factor in the fires that hit northern California’s forested areas than southern California’s chaparral terrain.
He said the main factor in January was the Santa Ana winds, which were blowing at about twice the normal speed, causing the fires. The Palisades fire was a re-ignition of an earlier fire that was allegedly started by an arsonist, and the Eaton fire may have been ignited by a spark from a power line.
Mr Keeley said when the fire broke out, the house, rather than the dried vegetation, became the fuel. More people means more power lines, triggers, and development, all of which require greater focus to lower fire risk.
“You can’t just look at climate change without talking about population growth. No one talks about population growth,” Keeley said.
Swain fully agrees that climate change is only part of the problem and that there are lessons to be learned from January’s twin disasters.
“In a world where fire danger is higher, fire outcomes can be much better if we do the right things,” he said, in terms of preparedness and prevention and how and where we build.
Swain cited Jones’ decades-long efforts to educate the public about earthquake risk and preparedness, along with her campaign to raise building standards and retrofit vulnerable structures.
“I’m almost in awe of the seismologists who convinced people to prepare for something we’ve never seen before,” Swain said. “I would like to go to a place where there is a risk of wildfire.”
Years ago, I was kayaking with a friend over the swell just beyond the pier at the entrance to Marina del Rey. It was a warm, sunny winter day. As we returned to the coast, we could see the snow-capped peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains in the distance. In less than two hours, you can go from swimming to skiing, or from seeing a dolphin slip under your kayak to having a bear dig through your garbage can.
Like many of us, it’s easy to take this natural environment for granted. One of the things I respect about McGregor is that he doesn’t do that.
I told McGregor that I spoke to two doctors about fire, one emphasizing the need to better understand the urgency of climate change, and the other focusing on reducing fire risk.
“We need to do both,” McGregor said. “At the intersection of wilderness and urban areas, we understand the importance of brush removal, burn control, and if you’re going to build a home, build a safer home.”
But over the past 119 years, Pasadena’s average daily temperature has increased by an astonishing 7 degrees, according to his calculations.
McGregor, who lives in Pasadena’s northeastern border one block from Altadena, began working as a meteorologist for Los Angeles County after the fire, but insisted he was speaking as a private citizen. One person was alarmed last January when he saw Santa Ana winds in his home office at high speeds and for long periods of time.
Typically, there are short periods of high-speed winds or long periods of low-speed winds, he said. Santa Ana comes in two flavors, hot and cold, depending on its origin and characteristics, he added.
“When we feel a cold flavor, that’s when the wind comes over the mountains. The wind hits the foothills below and spreads out. That’s what carried the Eaton Fire to Altadena,” McGregor said.
Although there was no damage to the house, the family asked if they were considering moving. He paused before saying that his grandparents built the house.
“It’s always been in the McGregor family, and it’s not an actual asset to me, it’s the house. And you don’t consider those things about the house,” he said.
“So your home is safe,” I said. “But your home may not be safe.”
He said he hadn’t thought of it that way.
At the Santa Fe Dam, McGregor filled buckets with trash and made his harshest comments about rotting plastic bags. He distinguished between native and exotic plants and said we need to better understand how some trees (for example, oaks) can be beneficial rather than dangerous as forest fires progress.
“It’s not just that it contains water and you can eat the embers for breakfast,” he says. “But it also has the effect of slowing down Santa Ana storms.”
“It’s inclusive. You predict the weather when the community needs it. You pick up trash when the community needs it,” McGregor said of why he changed his career from climate change activist to community activist.
He can become overwhelmed by the deteriorating health of the planet and the stupid indifference of the highest levels. However, he chooses not to do so.
“I protect myself with the knowledge that I’m just an individual and don’t have that much power, and I try not to let it get to me,” he said. “If I were to come out here every day and just get mad at the garbage bugs…I can’t imagine that. I’m here to enjoy the natural world and find peace of mind.
“I get out of my house, go somewhere, take responsibility for my local natural area, and set an example for others to live by. Maybe it’s fulfilling the need for a part of me that wants to have a purpose in this world.”
January’s fire was not the first in Los Angeles to occur at the intersection of the built and natural environments, and it will not be the last.
They were a humbling reminder that we are temporary residents of a place both blessed and cursed, caught between ancient peaks and a rising sea, and that there is no greater mission than to be better stewards of our heritage.
