battling

For the handful of skiers gliding across a sun-drenched ridge high in the San Gabriel Mountains, the wide expanse of the Inland Empire stretched to the Pacific Ocean nearly two vertical miles below.

Across sparkling water, the rugged spine of Catalina Island graced the horizon.

The view rivaled anything at the posh, world-renowned ski resorts of Lake Tahoe, but this was humble Mt. Baldy — the familiar local mountain that, for a few precious weeks each year, becomes a downhill skiing destination that holds its own with anything in the American West.

A sign inside Top of the Notch restaurant at Mt. Baldy.

Last week — after the 10,000-foot summit that looms above Los Angeles emerged from storm clouds blanketed in white — was one for the ages.

But in a rapidly warming world, and in an industry dominated by two huge and growing conglomerates that are crushing the competition, every run feels fleeting.

These days, managing a small ski business is like trying to keep a mom-and-pop general store afloat after Walmart comes to town.

By noon last Wednesday on Mt. Baldy — a little more than an hour’s drive from downtown L.A. — it was getting pretty hot, and the snow was melting fast.

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For a skier racing between towering Jeffrey pines and plummeting through soft, slushy piles of forgiving snow, the hardest part was dodging exposed rocks and random tree limbs that appeared underfoot with alarming frequency.

The hardest part for the business is the fact that one of the conglomerates, Alterra Mountain Co., essentially surrounds Mt. Baldy.

Zac Chambers and his daughter Whitney, 6, of Upland, snowboard together at Mt. Baldy.

It owns Big Bear Mountain Resort and Snow Summit in nearby San Bernardino County, and Mammoth Mountain, the closest big resort in California’s High Sierra.

Although a season pass at Mt. Baldy is a relative bargain at about $300, it’s good only when there’s snow.

For about $800, you can get an “Ikon Pass” from Alterra, which offers access to all of its resorts in California and dozens more across the country and around the globe, including South America, Europe and Asia.

All of which makes keeping the lights on and the chairlifts spinning at beloved, but beleaguered, local resorts an exhausting labor of love.

Last week, Robby Ellingson, president and general manager of Mt. Baldy Resort, drove two hours to a rival resort in Big Bear Lake to pick up spare parts for an old chairlift that had broken down. He thanked them with a few cases of beer.

He planned to grab some tools and install the parts himself, with the help of an electrician.

Michael Phelps, left, and Seven Foster, of Riverside, take the chairlift up to Mt. Baldy Resort.

“I climb the lift towers, I drive snowcats, I do pretty much everything,” he said, chuckling at all of the hard, physical labor despite his executive title. “There’s a lot of things I do that none of the other dudes who hold my position would dream of — out of necessity.”

Another Mt. Baldy executive, Ellingson’s brother Tommy, turned up for an interview on the mountain in a camouflage hoodie, clutching an electric hand drill.

“Everybody’s like a Swiss army knife up here,” he quipped. “It’s awesome, it’s organic!”

It’s also very old-school.

While resorts like Mammoth invest millions in state-of-the-art chairlifts that whisk six people at a time up the mountain with astonishing speed, Mt. Baldy relies on slow, creaking two- and three-person lifts reminiscent of the 1980s.

A lot of the ski gear, ski fashion and the skiers themselves seemed proudly rooted in a bygone era too.

A skier carves down the mountain at Mt. Baldy.

Chris Caron, a 65-year-old retiree who lives 20 minutes down the road, stood at the top of the experts chairlift with a beard as white as snow, a black plastic sun shield across his nose and a cold craft beer in hand.

“There’s big conglomerates trying to buy everybody up, and I don’t want that,” he said, shading himself beneath the bill of his Pliny the Elder ball cap. “That’s what I love about here. It’s not so commercialized.”

Caron said he snowboards at Baldy every chance he gets — 20 to 30 days in a good year.

“I grew up here. We used to ride our bicycles and hike these mountains,” he said. “It’s like home.”

Driving back from visiting family in Missouri recently, Caron stopped at Taos Ski Valley in New Mexico, a bucket list destination for people who don’t shy from pricey vacations. He couldn’t help himself, he said — they’d just had a big dump of fresh powder and it wasn’t too far out of his way. But it didn’t feel right.

“It’s pretty posh,” he said with a resigned shrug. “That’s just not me.”

Also enjoying the uncrowded slopes and gloriously short lift lines on Wednesday was Tommaso Ghio, 28, an aspiring filmmaker from Italy who spent much of the afternoon snowboarding shirtless and looking like an extra from a Visit California commercial.

Old skis adorn a light fixture at the Top of the Notch restaurant at Mt. Baldy.

He and his friends drove up through the desert where it was, “like 80 or 90 degrees, and then we just ended up on top of a mountain,” covered in snow, he said, grinning as if he had won the lottery. “You can’t get this anywhere else.”

But the balmy weather that made the afternoon feel so decadent, and otherworldly, also poses a serious threat to Baldy’s on-again, off-again ski season.

It started with a surprise early storm in November — one that had locals dreaming of a record-breaking year — followed by a bone-dry December.

Then at Christmas, an atmospheric river that dumped several feet of snow on Northern California resorts arrived at Mt. Baldy, which tops out at 8,600 feet, as “catastrophic” rain, Ellingson said.

Rain washes away existing snow and destroys the quality of anything left behind.

And since Christmas week crowds generate about 30% of annual revenue at many U.S. ski resorts, the storm soaked Mt. Baldy in more ways than one.

Things stayed grim until last week’s storm, which dropped more than 2 feet of snow at the base of the resort and up to 3 feet at the top.

With limited snow at lower elevations, people make the up-and-down trip from the chairlift at Mt. Baldy.

It took some time to recover from damage done by the howling wind and make sure none of the enormous piles of snow on the upper reaches became life-threatening avalanches. When the resort finally opened, the skiing was as good as any in recent memory.

“I’ve lived in Mt. Baldy almost my entire life,” said Ellingson, who is 50, “and last Friday was one of my top five days ever.”

He’s hoping the storm delivered enough snow to stay open for at least a month, but the heat is not helping.

Ellingson’s family bought the Mt. Baldy Lodge, a restaurant in the village far below, in the late 1970s. They started running the ski hill, which they own a substantial share of, in 2013.

Increasingly fickle winters have forced the resort to branch out in an attempt to boost summer earnings and attract non-skiing customers: hosting moonlight hikes with live music in the restaurant at the base of the lifts, renting “glamping” tents on wooden platforms — with beds and locking doors — to tempt uneasy campers to sleep beneath the stars.

And in what Ellingson called a “swing for the fences” move, the resort recently bought a microbrewery in Upland. After serving beers at the restaurant for decades, it seemed like a natural next step.

Anything to avoid getting trapped in a “desk job,” Ellingson said, like his friends working as middle managers at the big, corporate resorts.

“I hate to throw shade,” he said, but do those guys ever go skiing?

Independence is priceless to Ellingson because, when you’re the boss and the snow is good, nobody can order you to stop throwing tricks in the terrain park and flying off jumps.

“I grew up during the X Games boom. That’s my identity,” he said. “I still get rad every single day.”

WASHINGTON — President Trump just can’t seem to choose among friends in the Texas Senate Republican primary.

So when he travels to the state on Friday for his first post-State of the Union trip, where he plans to promote his energy and economic policies, Trump will have all three candidates in the competitive race join him — just days before his party casts ballots in the primary race.

Sen. John Cornyn is battling for his fifth term and is being challenged by state Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton and Rep. Wesley Hunt in a primary fight that has become viciously personal. And all three men, missing the coveted endorsement from Trump, have been trying to highlight their ties to him as they ramp up their campaigning ahead of Tuesday’s vote.

For his part, Trump will be seeking to ride the message of his State of the Union address from Tuesday, where he declared a return to economic prosperity and a more secure America — two centerpiece arguments for Republicans as they campaign to keep their congressional majorities this fall.

Trump’s hesitation to endorse in the Texas Senate primary speaks to the tricky dynamics of the race.

Cornyn is unpopular with a segment of Texas’ GOP base, in part for his early dismissiveness of Trump’s 2024 comeback campaign and for his role in authoring tougher restrictions on guns after the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. But Senate GOP leadership and allied groups see Cornyn as the stronger general election candidate, in light of a series of troubles that have shadowed Paxton.

Paxtonbeat impeachment on fraud charges in 2023, and has faced allegations of marital infidelity by his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, have urged Trump to endorse Cornyn. They and allied campaign groups argue that the seat would cost the party hundreds of millions more to defend with Paxton as the candidate.

“It is a strong possibility we cannot hold Texas if John Cornyn is not our nominee,” Scott told Fox News on Wednesday.

Hunt, a second-term Houston-area representative, was a later entry to the race, but claims a kinship with Trump, having endorsed him early in the 2024 race. Hunt campaigned regularly for Trump and earned a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

If no candidate reaches 50% in Tuesday’s primary, the top two finishers will advance to a May 26 runoff.

Cornyn’s campaign and a half-dozen allied groups have poured more than $63 million into the race since last fall, chiefly trying to slow Paxton but recently attacking Hunt in an effort to keep him from making it to the runoff.

Earlier this month, Trump feinted toward weighing in on the race when he said he was taking “a serious look” at endorsing in the Texas primary. He has since reaffirmed his neutrality.

Still, you wouldn’t know it from watching TV in Texas. Cornyn has been airing ads since last year touting his support for Trump’s agenda, even though his relationship with the president has been cool at times. Paxton and Hunt both have ads airing now featuring them standing with Trump.

“I like all three of them, actually. Those are the toughest races. They’ve all supported me. They’re all good. You’re supposed to pick one, so we’ll see what happens. But I support all three,” Trump said earlier this month.

The GOP battle comes as Democrats have a contested primary of their own in Texas between state Rep. James Talarico, a self-described policy wonk who regularly quotes the Bible, and progressive favorite U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett.

Trump hasn’t been shy about wading into other contested Republican primaries in the state. Parts of Corpus Christi fall within Texas’ 34th congressional district, where former Rep. Mayra Flores is fighting to reclaim her seat against the Trump-endorsed Eric Flores. (The two are not related.) The winner of the primary will face off against Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, long a target of the GOP, whose district was redrawn to make it easier for a Republican to win.

Eric Flores will be at the Trump event at the Port of Corpus Christi, which technically is located in a neighboring district.

Elsewhere in the state, the president has also endorsed Rep. Tony Gonzales, who is fighting calls from his own party to resign from Congress after reports of an alleged affair with a former staffer who later died after she set herself on fire. Gonzales is refusing to step down and has said that there will be “opportunities for all of the details and facts to come out” and that the stories about the situation do not represent “all the facts.”

Gonzales is facing a primary challenge from Brandon Herrera, a gun manufacturer and gun rights influencer who Gonzales defeated by fewer than 400 votes in their 2024 runoff. The White House did not return a request for comment on Thursday on whether Trump stands by his endorsement of Gonzales.

Kim and Beaumont write for the Associated Press. Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Ia. AP writer Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix contributed to this report.

Tayari Jones was feeling intense pressure to deliver a follow-up to her 2018 bestseller, “An American Marriage.” She was three years past her publisher’s deadline. Worse, she had begun to suffer symptoms of what was ultimately diagnosed as Graves’ disease, a serious autoimmune condition that attacks the thyroid. At the time she didn’t know what was causing pain in her right leg and the intense itching on her arms, legs and torso — or why her handwriting had “gone funky.” Meanwhile, 200 pages in, the novel she owed Knopf Publisher and Editor in Chief Jordan Pavlin wasn’t coming together.

She confided to a close friend, “This book got me feeling like a clown right now.” Jones began to doubt that she was ‘worthy’ of another literary success.

“You know how musicians say ‘that band was swinging’? I wasn’t swinging,” Jones, who lives in Atlanta, tells me during a recent phone call.

She says she turned to an empty notebook, and began word doodling — scrawling random words, going wherever her pen took her. “Kin,” the magnificent novel that emerged, is out now. Oprah recently announced that it’s her latest book club pick (the second time Jones has been honored with the selection).

“Kin: A Novel” by Tayari Jones

(Knopf)

“Kin” was supposed to have been an entirely different book — an of-the-moment novel about gentrification in the New South — but what materialized from Jones’ creative experiment was a tiny Louisiana town called Honeysuckle, amid the 1950s and Jim Crow. Then, as Jones puts it, “Annie and Vernice [her main characters] introduced themselves.” All of Jones’ previous fiction has been contemporary, and at first she didn’t know what to make of the path Annie and Vernice were leading her on. “I don’t write historical,” observes Jones, “I’m a writer of my own era.” Not to mention she’d always been suspicious of writers who claim their characters came to them fully realized.

Even at that point, Jones still believed Vernice and Annie might just be part of a larger backstory, perhaps parents to protagonists she had yet to conjure. “So I stuck with it to find out.” The more she wrote, the more the puzzle pieces began to fit together. Annie’s journey out of Louisiana takes her through a sharecropping brothel in Mississippi, then on to Memphis where she is convinced she will find and reunite with her mother. Meanwhile, Vernice attends Spelman (the HBCU Jones is a ’91 graduate of).

Jones began to suspect that she’d had a previously undetected ulterior motive for moving her book to the past. She wondered if “Kin” was actually an effort to better understand her parents, particularly her mother, a former economist who’d been active in the civil rights movement. “My mother is a very tight-lipped person,” Jones says. “I knew very little about her life, and maybe this was my imagination trying to crack the code.”

Jones’ progress wasn’t without its setbacks. She was deep into the writing of “Kin” when her Graves’ disease flared in earnest. Her blood pressure spiked. She got winded just climbing the stairs to her bedroom. She landed in the emergency room with a life-threatening “thyroid storm,” requiring surgery and daily medication. Then her eyesight deteriorated, which necessitated a month of radiation. But she powered through, and sent off the manuscript.

Jones’ editor, Pavlin, admits the novel she received was a surprise. “But it was as perfect a novel as I’ve ever read,” she says. “No publisher in their right mind would stand on anything as insignificant as a contractual description in the face of such a work.”

“Kin” deftly alternates points of view between Vernice and Annie, narrating events by way of a vernacular that would be at home on a front porch rocking chair. When Annie takes a job at a nightclub in Memphis, she says of its penny-pinching owner: “The man was tight as a skeeter’s teeter.” Jones is equally adept at the delicate prose, as in this description of a well-worn family Bible: “The paper, thin as butterfly wings, was heavy with wisdom.”

While Jones had Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” in mind while writing “Kin,” her take on the subject is singular. “Vernice and Annie remain friends because each of them is the keeper of the other’s true self,” she says. “Friendship is particularly meaningful because it’s a relationship you’re constantly recommitting to — reupping.”

Now that “Kin” is out in the world, and Jones has weathered the bumpy road to publication day, we asked her if she’s nervous about how it will be received eight years after her previous novel was published. “I am not ambitious now in the way I was then,” she says. “I’ve learned what success can and cannot do for a person. You have to learn to be satisfied. People say ‘don’t rest on your laurels,’ but what are laurels for?”

Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist, and co-founder of the Ink Book Club on Substack. She was director of Oprah’s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.

BUD Cort, best known for his role in the 1971 cult classic Harold and Maude, has died aged 77.

Writer and producer Dorian Hannaway, a close friend, said he died after “a long illness”.

A veteran of stage and screen, Cort appeared in more than 80 films and TV series across a career spanning five decades.

He became indelibly linked with his performance in Harold and Maude, Hal Ashby’s offbeat romance about a young man obsessed with death who falls in love with a free-spirited 79-year-old Holocaust survivor, played by Ruth Gordon.

Released in 1971, the film was initially a commercial and critical flop.

It later found a devoted following in repertory cinemas during the 1970s, cementing its status as a cult classic thanks to its dark humour and unlikely love story.

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“A young man obsessed with death falls in love with an old woman obsessed with life. She dies and teaches the kid how to live,” Cameron Crowe described it for AFI in 2011.

“And it’s done with music [by Cat Stevens] that scratches at your soul… that movie holds up – to this minute.”

Director Edgar Wright paid tribute to Cort’s work, calling him a “welcome and magnetic presence in every film lucky enough to have him”.

On his performance in Harold and Maude, Wright said: “Not only is this beloved film a pitch perfect black comedy-cum-love story for the ages, but Bud Cort delivers one of the greatest looks to camera in film.”

The role earned Cort nominations for a Golden Globe and a Bafta.

Born Walter Edward Cox in Rye, New York, in 1948, he later changed his name to avoid confusion with character actor Wally Cox.

He went to school in New Rochelle and developed an early passion for performance, appearing in school productions and frequently travelling into Manhattan to see Broadway shows.

Hannaway remembered him as a “passionate theatregoer” who would sneak off to Manhattan to see Broadway shows and wait at the backstage door hoping to catch a glimpse of Barbara Streisand after watching Funny Girl.

Roslyn Kind recalled meeting him as a teenager. “I was only fourteen when I met Bud at the backstage door at my sister’s play,” she said in a statement.

“He was majoring in art at the time in high school. We became close friends who shared our interest in entertainment.

“When I got married, Bud and our songwriter friend, Bruce Roberts, wrote a special song that was performed at the ceremony. His unique spirit will always be with me.”

Cort moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s to pursue film work.

He had a small role in MASH before being cast by Robert Altman in the title role of Brewster McCloud.

His co-star Sally Kellerman later recalled: “We were in the line for lunch when I spotted him.

“Although I didn’t know who he was, I said ‘Oh, boy. We’re going to be best friends.’”

He continued to work steadily, with supporting roles in films including Heat, Dogma, Coyote Ugly and Pollock, as well as The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

On television, he appeared in series such as Arrested Development, Ugly Betty and Criminal Minds.

He also voiced Toyman in animated series including Superman: The Animated Series.

In 1979, Cort narrowly survived a devastating car accident that required multiple surgeries and affected his career.

He is survived by his brother Joseph Cox and sister-in-law Vickie, along with their daughters Meave, Brytnn, and Jesse.

He also leaves behind his sisters Kerry Cox, Tracy Cox Berkman, and Shelly Cox Dufour, and his many nieces and nephews.

A memorial will be held at a future date in Los Angeles.