Archive: Outdoors

Endless Summer changed the image of surfers and surfing culture in the 1960s and made Brown a legend on the beach.

"Before John Severson, there was really no surf art, no surf magazines, no real surf films, no surfwear industry, no pro surfing, no Surfrider Foundation, no surf culture as we know it."

Nick Johnson likes hiking so why not do the whole Santa Monica Mountains. Alone. Starting at night on P-22's turf.

Bear playing in the swimming pool in Bradbury during Sunday's heat.

The American snowboarder who we like at LA Observed added Sunday to her legacy as the woman with the most X Games medals.

LA's closest ski area doesn't make snow so it's all about the weather.

Google Doodle honors 125th birthday of the Olympic champion swimmer and father of surfing — the subject of an upcoming biography by David Davis.

Sunday's South LA event will be held on the 40th anniversary of the first ciclovía in Bogotá, Colombia, and the cofounder will be on hand as an honored guest.

Dorian Paskowitz was a Stanford-trained doctor who raised nine children on the beach in Orange County, surfed the world and even tried to make peace on the Gaza Strip. He "lived the ultimate surfing life."

Alter opened the first surf shop in Dana Point in 1954 and became "the godfather of the surf industry." A memorial paddle out will be held in front of his family home in Laguna Beach.

The high pressure ridge keeping us dry also left Mavericks with the ideal combination of big swells and no wind or weather.

This might be the most beautiful surfing video you have seen (and heard.) Meanwhile, the National Weather Service warns of very big waves on all of Hawaii's islands this week.

A pod that has visited SoCal waters the last three winters jumped, surfed the boat wake and made a kill while researchers watched. "They were making eye contact with us. I don't see how it can get any better."

Michael Schneider's Great LA Walk marked its eighth year on Saturday with an 18-mile trek from Echo Park Lake to the bluffs in Santa Monica, along Sunset Boulevard and Wilshire.

The Angeles Crest 100 is a 100-mile endurance race through the mountains from Wrightwood to Pasadena. The runners take off in the dark and run on trails for 24 hours. Or so.

Brazilian extreme surfer Carlos Burle may have successfully ridden the biggest wave known to have been surfed — estimated at about 100 feet high. But first he saved top female surfer Maya Gabeira, unconscious and drowning after a wipeout.

Sunday's "heart of LA" CicLAvia route drew a good crowd. The Metro trains in and out of downtown were certainly hopping.

You might remember that after the recent Ciclavia event from Downtown to the beach along Venice Boulevard, USC professor Clifford V. Johnson had some constructive criticism — some advice to help the organizers of Ciclavia regain some of the day's mojo. Well, Sunday's event was "almost perfect," he says. With photos.

Wilshire Boulevard will be closed two extra hours for this Ciclavia. On Thursday evening, I will take part in a panel put on by Ciclavia and Hidden LA for the Getty's Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in LA.

You may have never thought you would see this. As of Monday, a 2.5-mile stretch of the Los Angeles River was officially opened to recreation: kayaking, fishing, or just walking along and checking out the blue herons and the floating trash. Here's where.

The easy trail hike to Eaton Canyon's lower falls above Pasadena isn't the problem. It's the climb off-trail up to the upper falls where people slip and fall.

June Mountain, the once-popular ski area that is about 30 miles beyond Mammoth up highway 395 in the Eastern Sierra, did not open this past winter. But June will be back later this year, the operator announced.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa congratulates the winners of the Los Angeles Marathon on Sunday. But wait — is that....? Yes it's Frank McCourt, the former Dodgers owner who retained his participation in the marathon.

The Los Angeles Marathon begins at Dodger Stadium on Sunday morning and ends on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica. Most runners will start at 7:28 a.m. Streets and freeway ramps will reopen across the cities of Los Angeles, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, and on the federal VA campus near West LA, on a rolling basis.

Sports writers, of course, aren't the only journalists who claim to know that their favorite sources and heroes are honest and, above all, wouldn't lie to them. The big sports stories of this week serve as painful reminders that the media are all too willing to build up people they know know little about for the sake of the story — and it's only getting worse as more web "content producers" get rewarded for eyeballs and going viral but not for, you know, being right. Today it's Rick Reilly's turn to admit that when he was defending Lance Armstrong through the years, he didn't actually know bupkus.

It sounds as if one of the great lying acts in the history of sports will come to an end in Oprah Winfrey's televised interview with Lance Armstrong.

Discredited cycling champion Lance Armstrong reportedly will tape an interview with Oprah Winfrey in Texas on Monday and "give a limited confession to Winfrey and will not provide details of the doping that antidoping officials have said occurred throughout his cycling career," reports the New York Times reporter who got the scoop last weekend that Armstrong was considering changing his tune.

The New York Times is reporting that Lance Armstrong "has told associates and antidoping officials that he is considering publicly admitting that he used banned performance-enhancing drugs and blood transfusions during his cycling career."

A race in the streets, downtown, at night, in the middle of winter. It's a concept.

On Tuesday afternoon, volunteers at the ACS/LA Gray Whale Census and Behavior Project at the Point Vicente Interpretive Center spotted a mother and three orca calves patrolling off the PV peninsula. Nice underwater video.

By the time Metro decided to schedule the 405 freeway shutdown for this weekend, the Herbalife Triathlon Los Angeles was already on the calendar for Sunday. So there will be closed streets and a lot of people in town.

Diana Nyad's team says that she has swum 46 miles since leaving from Cuba on Saturday, and has made it through a storm and several jellyfish stings. Tonight she was joined by a pod of dolphins.

Jim Drake is another example of an aerospace industry worker who pioneered the Southern California outdoor sports scene. Drake, an engineer who worked at RAND and elsewhere, didn't invent the sailboard, but he and a partner, Hoyle Schweitzer, perfected the design and got a patent for the Windsurfer.

The venerable but money-losing June Mountain Ski Area will not operate this summer and, more pointedly, will not have a ski season this coming winter. The future beyond that was left unclear in today's announcement. "June was perceived by many to be a more remote gem for skiers and snowboarders," says outdoors writer Peter Thomas.

Video: Two-time Olympic champion Kerri Walsh of Manhattan Beach tells NBC 4 that she and beach volleyball partner Misty May-Treanor are going for the gold again in London.

I didn't really know the Jill Kinmont story until reading today's LA Times obituary, but it has so many noteworthy elements. I've spent an hour reading about her.

The 29-year-old freeskier from Canada who suffered a head injury and brain damage during a Jan. 10 training run on the superpipe at Park Mountain Resort in Utah, died this morning. Her organs and tissues were donated in accordance with her wishes.

They paddled out Sunday by the hundreds in Huntington Beach to chill for a few moments of silence in memory of pioneering wave forecaster Sean Collins — followed by a ritual splashing of water and cheering that could be heard from shore.

Take My Picture Gary Leonard.

Sean Collins, a self-taught wave forecaster who changed the way that surfers find out where to take their boards, died yesterday after collapsing of a heart attack while playing tennis in Orange County.

The National Weather Service update for Mammoth Mountain contained a startling fact.

The folks at Mammoth Mountain must want people to come ski and board, since they send out pics like this.

Locals saved a juvenile shark that became tangled in fishing line over the weekend.

Nyad got out of the water at about 8 a.m. Pacific time, after swimming 67 nautical miles from her starting point in Cuba.

Diana Nyad ran into some Portguese Man-of-War and endured several stings, but her team says she is still swimming toward Florida and gaining strength.

Zac Sunderland, the Southern California sailor who navigated solo around the world at age 17, and his father Laurence will be on the new season of the CBS reality show,...

The Special Olympics will return to the United States for the first time in 16 years.

Diana Nyad was almost 24 hours into her Cuba to Florida swim and losing the battle with the Gulf Stream. An inside look.

Nyad was vomiting when she was pulled onto her support boat at 12:45 a.m. Eastern time on Tuesday.

Nyad, the KCRW columnist and extreme swimmer, played "Reveille" on a bugle then at 4:45 p.m. L.A. time plunged into a Havana marina to begin swimming from Cuba to Florida.

Kathy Kohner-Zuckerman, Gidget herself, will be a guest of honor at Saturday's Santa Monica Pier Paddleboard Race and Ocean Festival.

Outposts will drop from the L.A. Times blogroll due to "committee" decision, blogger Kelly Burgess says in her final post.

Armstrong's lawyers reportedly demanded that "60 Minutes" make an on-air apology for last month's report, and called the story "extraordinarily shoddy to the point of being reckless and unprofessional, or a vicious hit-and-run job."

Actually, tonight's "60 Minutes" says it's the testimony of Lance Armstrong's former teammate and confidante, Tyler Hamilton, that threatens to rewrite the story of bike racing and its biggest American legend.

Yosemite National Park was cut off to road traffic by snow and downed trees on Monday, but highways 120 and 140 reopened into the park this morning.

In all the decades that Mammoth Mountain has been a destination for SoCal skiers, this looks to be the winter with the most snowfall. At least since they began keeping records in 1969.

ESPN Los Angeles discovers the Woodley Park cricket field in the Sepulveda Dam Basin, "a Shangri-La to cricketers around the world."

Markos Geneti of Ethiopia, running his first marathon, set a course record 2 hours, 6 minutes and 35 seconds. It's the fastest marathon ever run in California and the second fastest in the world this year.

The tennis star had treatment last week at Cedars-Sinai, and on Monday was treated on an emergency basis for a related hematoma.

Every summer the boat captains say this is the year the blues are amazing. But this year the numbers are staggering, says outdoors writer Pete Thomas.

Abby Sunderland told her news conference in Marina del Rey this morning that, now that she's home, she'll concentrate on school and getting her driver's licen

News out of Reunion tonight is that the French vessel carrying 16-year-old Abby Sunderland will dock at 8:30 Saturday morning local time. (Reunion is 11 hours ahead of Los Angeles.)

A representative, presumably from Ventura County, met with Abby Sunderland at home for two hours before she sailed from Marina del Rey on her attempt to circle the world. More from blogger Pete Thomas, who sailed with Sunderland.

Abby Sunderland, the Thousand Oaks teenager who is sailing around the world, set off her emergency beacon in the Indian Oce

Pete Thomas had one of those newspaper reporting jobs that many lust after. Now he blogs.

Nic Fiore taught skiing at Badger Pass in Yosemite National Park for more than 50 years, but Scott McAuley of Angel City Press remembers his friend as the summer impresario...

This winter skiers and snowboarders will be able to fly to Mammoth for the first time in years. Tickets go on sale Monday for new Horizon Airlines service from LAX...