There’s nothing like taking a cool dip after a hot day, especially in L.A. summer weather. As peak swimming season kicks off, the Hansen Dam Aquatic Center pool in Lake View Terrace reopened Memorial Day on weekends after being closed for the season. It will be open daily for swim and play starting Saturday.
The popular San Fernando Valley aquatic center spans 40 acres that include a massive 1.5-acre pool lined with sand like a beach. There’s also a nine-acre lake used for fishing and nonmotorized boat activities.
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1.Jaylia Martinez, 5, left, is splashed with water by Elijah Santillana, 6.2.The height chart for the water slide at the Hansen Dam Aquatic Center.3.Visitors enjoy the pool at the Hansen Dam Aquatic Center.(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
“As one of the largest pools in the U.S., capacity [being] 3,500, we get so many people from all over the city, all over the county, people coming from out of state to this place,” Edwin Realegeno, aquatic facility manager of the center, said.
Along the pool’s sandy shores, individuals can use the volleyball courts and teqball table. There are also different levels of shallow water for young swimmers and toddlers.
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Paty Santillana, a Van Nuys resident, has visited the Hansen Dam Aquatic Center for the last 15 years. “It’s perfect for little kids. I have a 5-year-old and also a 21-year-old, who we used to come here with,” Santillana said. She adds that her grandchildren are ecstatic every time she mentions a visit to the pool.
Idalia Fraga, a 12-year-old swimmer who has been to the pool twice since its reopening on Memorial Day weekend, said she enjoys the pool for its affordability.
“Prices are very cheap … it really helps those families who struggle,” Fraga said.
After some renovations to its large water slide that will be reopening Saturday, the pool is open to swimmers for an admission fee of $4 for adults and children 17 and under for $1. The center takes cash only.
The recreational lake is open year-round and is restocked with fish from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Christopher Lopez relaxes by regularly fishing at the Hansen Dam Recreation Lake on the weekends.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Along the lake, people enjoy walking the surrounding grassy pathway and fishing. Christopher Lopez, a Pacoima resident, who also goes by the nickname Squid, goes to the lake for the latter.
Lopez started fishing nearly two months ago with his longtime friend from elementary school. “[It’s about] getting out of the house and having something to do on the weekends and being able to enjoy the day,” he said. “Spending our time out here I think is just a great addition.”
For Lopez, catching bass or trout and enjoying the occasional breeze is a perfect day to absorb the beauty of nature.
Lifeguards Israel Orozco, left, and Ian Zabel, right, watch the pool as visitors cool off at the Hansen Dam Aquatic Center.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
The recreational center is hosting fundraising 1K and 5K runs on Sunday followed by a party with free access to the pool. Realegeno said the fundraiser is to help fund public pool centers across L.A. County and to promote swimming safety lessons.
The idea grew as organically as the purple cauliflower at Erewhon. One day, I walked from my place in Los Feliz to the beach. I stopped at two Erewhon locations on the way to refuel. I made a reel about my journey and posted it to Instagram. My friend Fish saw it and said, “You should walk to all the Erewhons.”
I thought: I don’t have time to do that. I’m a very serious person who needs to write her novel.
But later I found myself mapping out an 89-mile hike in my Notes App, starting in Pasadena and ending in Calabasas, stopping at all 10 Erewhon locations on the way. (My route did not include the Palisades, which is closed because of the fires; nor did it include LACMA or the new Glendale locale.)
“I need to write my novel” is a thought I have a lot. I usually heed this thought and sit at the desk like a soldier, imagining the wonderful day when I’ll sell said novel — for an amount that would probably be comparable to a fraction of an Erewhon employee’s yearly salary.
Erewhon Trail map illustration by Swan Huntley.
(Erewhon Trail map illustration by Swan Huntley. )
I really wasn’t in the mood to write the novel, though. When I imagined myself pecking away at the keyboard, I felt bad. When I imagined myself walking around L.A. in my Home Depot gardening hat, I felt good. So, I put on my hat, got into an Uber headed for Pasadena, and texted my sister, “Carpe diem, bitch.” Or at least that was my intention. What I actually sent was, “Carpet diem hitch.”
Over the summer, I hiked a little bit of the Pacific Crest Trail. A few years ago, I biked the Camino in Spain. I’ve walked from Los Feliz to the beach a handful of times. I’ve traversed the length of Manhattan thrice. Before that, when I was a teenager, I used to trek from La Jolla to Del Mar while drinking beer (I carried a cooler; yes, I’m sober now) and listening to Sarah McLachlan on my Discman. I’ve always been drawn to activities that many people find tedious. Like walking forever. Or writing a novel.
Starting in the fourth century, pilgrimages were served up by the church as a way for Christians to pay penance for their sins. They were hard and dangerous and a lot of people died. Fast-forward to now: Such treks have taken on an “Eat, Pray, Love” aura. Or a “Wild “ aura. They live in the realm of self-help and of sport. They’re a way to create friction in an increasingly frictionless world. By walking from Mexico to Canada, or from Erewhon to Erewhon, I wonder whether we’re trying to get back to the part of ourselves that wants to try harder.
Or we just want to become more valuable dinner party guests.
What do you do?
I do really long walks.
I ordered a Goddess Smoothie in Pasadena, and then I repeated this tradition at every store thereafter. The smoothie costs $19, tastes like heaven, and it’s green, which my brain reads as “good for me.”
It took me a little over three hours to walk 11 miles to Silver Lake. I got a Vegan Avocado Sandwich for lunch, took an Uber home and posted a reel on Instagram about my first day on the trail. A lot of people liked it. Some of them called me a genius.
In the last 10 years, I’ve published four novels and two illustrated books for adults. I was naïve and just totally blindly happy about the publishing process in the beginning. People wanted to buy my work? Other people wanted to read it? Cool.
The first book, “We Could Be Beautiful,” did well because the publisher put real money into the marketing of it. Then that stopped happening. At a certain point, I realized that expecting too much was unwise. It was up to me to market my books myself. Which meant: social media.
They say you have to see a book cover six times before you buy the book — or consider buying it. There are a lot of book covers on Instagram. Actually, there’s a lot of everything on Instagram, and out of all the everything, is a book cover that exciting?
No.
My second reel, which depicted my journey from Silver Lake to Studio City, went a little bit viral. To date, almost 10,000 people have shared it with their friends. Why? I think the answer has something to do with a desire for levity.
If the atmosphere of the world could be depicted by an Erewhon beverage, it wouldn’t be a vibrant, cheerful one, like the bright magenta Pitaya Smoothie. It would be the dark and brooding Germ Warfare Shot. I find it perplexing that people talk about the apocalypse as if it’s happening later. It’s happening now. If we were really thinking about how climate change is affecting us, we’d be out in the streets screaming. All the time. But we’re not doing that. We’re carrying on with our usual lives. Apparently, for me, that includes walking to Erewhons.
Any long-distance trek is as much an internal journey as it is external. As I continued the trail, I started to think that maybe my endeavor was a reaction to my feeling of total powerlessness. I can’t save the polar bears. I can’t force the president to go to therapy. But I can add some levity to the brooding atmosphere.
Recently, someone commented on one of the reels, “Transplants make LA locals look bad.” This person, and many others, hear the name Erewhon and assume I’m poking fun at it. Erewhon has become a joke about L.A. — a joke that was amplified after Hailey Bieber invented her smoothie in 2022 that Erewhon dubs the “Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie.” I’ve never had it, but I can tell you that it looks like a sky full of strawberry clouds. According to an Erewhon employee I spoke to, this smoothie was a turning point. It aligned the brand with wealth and power. Now, Erewhon evokes the image of smooth-skinned, health-conscious Angelenos with money to burn.
The Erewhon Trail, then, inevitably becomes a conversation about privilege, my own included. Instagram hid my two favorite comments, because it was worried they’d be too rude to show, but I think they’re the funniest ones.
This is what white people do on Prozac.
This is what happens when a liberal arts teacher gets fired.
To both of these comments, I say: Yes.
I’m not on Prozac yet, but maybe after I get fired, I will be.
In order to get fired, though, I’d have to get an actual job, which might never happen.
The most intense leg of the trail was from Santa Monica to Calabasas. My friend Fish joined me. Google said it would take 27 miles. After marching through the mountains, I decided to use my own intelligence to make the route shorter. This cut out four miles, bringing the total to 23. For long stretches, Fish and I walked in the bike lane, or in the bramble by the side of the road. That’s the penalty for straying from Google. Your sidewalks disappear and your chances of getting hit by a car go way up.
My legs were noodles by the time we got to Calabasas. I crawled across the parking lot to show my viewers how weak they’d become. The employee at the door smiled at me and handed me a basket, and I thought about the pain of my legs, which no one could see, and about all the secret battles people are fighting all the time, and I wished that we cared about each other as much as Erewhon cares about us. Multiple employees were perfecting the already-perfect plateaus of bell peppers and apples in the produce section. Their thoughtfulness was the opposite of the vibe I encounter in most public restrooms, which is that the strangers who were there before me didn’t have many thoughts about my experience. As lame as the fact that an Erewhon smoothie costs $19 is that so many of us need to be paid to be nice to each other.
When I tell people about my love for Erewhon, they either say, “Duh, I know,” or something along the lines of, “That place is ridiculous, right?” This is almost always followed by the mention of a food item and some amount of money. Like, “Doesn’t a carrot cost $12,000?”
Actually, I tell them, no. Although sometimes, yes. There is a Japanese strawberry that’s famously expensive ($20), but that’s avoidable. I then explain that contrary to popular thought, there is a way to shop at Erewhon on a budget. A jar of soup, for example, costs $15.50. If you return the bottle, you get $3 back. In my opinion, the soup can be two meals, so that’s $6.25 per meal. A lot of the produce is either the same price or only a little bit more expensive than at other health food stores, and it’s in consistently better shape. The most important piece of making Erewhon more affordable, though, is becoming a member. You get 10% off, a free drink of the month and discounts on a bunch of items.
You might be wondering: How many Erewhon memberships has she personally sold?
She’s lost count.
The other reason to go to Erewhon is the environment. It’s visually appealing and the employee-to-customer ratio is notable, and the result is that you feel like you’re at a resort. And frankly, these simple things — a nice environment, high quality food — should be available to everyone.
Back to the question of whether or not Erewhon is ridiculous — yes, of course it is. If you sit at any of the locations and listen to the conversations around you, you’ll probably feel like you’re an extra in a satirical movie. At Studio City, I overheard two moms in white pants and cashmere sweaters talking about how, based on their Instagram recon, they figured out that so-and-so was sitting next to so-and-so at a benefit dinner. Another snippet I overheard in Studio City: “You gotta make music from the heart, man, and the label will feel it.”
It didn’t occur to me to ask for free merch until after I’d finished the trail. Armando at the Santa Monica location was the lucky recipient of my request. I explained my uniquely heroic feat to him, and then wondered aloud if perhaps I could get a sweatshirt, or at least a hat.
Sadly, Armando was unauthorized to give me merch, but he did offer me a gift card in a tiny envelope. I was very grateful. I assumed the card was worth $50 at least.
After we parted ways, I opened the envelope.
Ten dollars.
Enough to put a down payment on a smoothie.
My dreams now are so different from when I was younger. Back in grad school, I imagined that maybe I’d write a bestselling novel, and maybe it would be adapted for the screen, and maybe my tombstone would read: She contributed very serious literature to civilization.
What I never accounted for was, of course, the unknown. Maybe one day, over a decade after school ended, I’d get a lot of attention for making performance art about walking to grocery stores.
Huntley’s novels include “I Want You More,” “Getting Clean With Stevie Green,” “The Goddesses” and “We Could Be Beautiful.” She’s also the writer/illustrator of the darkly humorous “The Bad Mood Book” and “You’re Grounded: An Anti-Self-Help Book to Calm You the F— Down.” She lives in Los Angeles.
Before authorities charged him with attempting to assassinate President Trump and top administration officials in a brazen attack at the Washington Hilton, Cole Tomas Allen lived what those who knew him described as a quiet, simple existence.
He worked as a tutor and enjoyed video games, manga and riding his blue scooter. Acquaintances said Allen rarely talked about his political views through much of his adult life.
But on social media, he appears to have expressed concerns about the morality of U.S. policy, particularly its role in the wars in Ukraine and Iran.
Now, those who crossed paths with him are struggling to square the accusations against him with the man they knew as an unassuming student, gamer and teacher.
Allen grew up in a middle-class, suburban part of Torrance, one of four siblings who would each go on to study at reputable universities.
His parents were both teachers and “really solid members of their community,” according to Paul Thompson, a Los Angeles County prosecutor who lives next door to the family’s two-story house. Allen’s father knew many people on the block of single-family homes by their first names, Thompson said, and the suspect’s mother once saved Thompson’s dog when it ran into the road.
As a high school junior, Allen led Pacific Lutheran’s volleyball team in a three-set win over Junipero Serra High School. He was homeschooled, but was allowed via a special program to take a class at Pacific Lutheran in Gardena and to play for its respected squad, according to the private school’s principal.
Allen was “a godly person” who never cursed or shared his political views at the time, a former teammate told The Times, but he was also “very competitive.”
That drive extended to academics. After finishing his homeschooling, he was accepted into Caltech, one of the best universities in the nation for aspiring engineers like Allen.
He joined the Caltech Christian Fellowship, taking on a leadership role in which he organized Bible discussions, as well as the fencing team and the Nerf Club. He interned at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge for three months.
In 2016, he was part of a five-person team that won an annual robotics and design competition in which teams built robots to play in soccer matches at Caltech. Allen was a teaching assistant at the Pasadena school, where he graduated with a mechanical engineering degree the following year.
Elizabeth Terlinden met Allen through the Caltech Christian Fellowship, where she was co-president during the 2014-15 school year.
“Quiet guy, kind of nondescript, generally polite, got good grades,” she told The Times, describing her impression of Allen. “Christian definitely, but that’s because I interacted with him primarily in that context.”
Michael D’Asaro, who coached fencing at Caltech around the time Allen was in college, said that he didn’t remember Allen but that generally none of the students attended practice regularly.
“Those kids were more interested in studying than sports, as you can imagine,” he said in a text message. “They would spend days and nights in the lab.”
After Caltech, Allen went on to work as a mechanical engineer for a South Pasadena firm called IJK Controls.
Kevin Baragona said he and Allen worked together “making stabilized gimbals for Hollywood” at IJK for about six months.
Baragona, who left IJK in January 2018 to found the company DeepAI, said in an interview via FaceTime from rural China that Allen seemed “kind of tired, unmotivated, like he didn’t want to really work hard, and maybe depressed.”
Baragona said that Allen was mainly interested in video games, and that Allen even showed him a couple of games he had made or was working on.
Allen was at IJK for less than a year and a half, according to his LinkedIn profile, which states that he worked as a self-employed “Indie Game Developer” from September 2018 to March 2020.
In 2019, he registered a trademark for an esoteric video game called “Bohrdom,” a “hybrid of a bullet hell and a racing game” based on atomic theory, in which electrons and protons compete. “Bohrdom” languished on the Steam gaming platform. Three other projects Allen detailed in his professional bio remained unfinished.
Then, in March 2020, he took a job as a tutor at C2 Education. In December 2024, he was named teacher of the year at the test preparation and tutoring company in a Spanish-tiled Torrance shopping center. People who knew him through his work there described him in interviews as intelligent and professional.
In May 2025, Allen received a master’s degree from Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson, six miles from his parents’ home in Torrance.
Bin Tang, a professor in the university’s computer science department, described Allen as a “very good student. … Soft-spoken, very polite, a good fellow.”
“I am very shocked to see the news,” he told the Associated Press.
Joaquin Miranda knew he recognized the photo circulating online of a man posing in a graduation gown at Cal State Dominguez Hills, but he couldn’t quite place it. So on Monday, the 48-year-old showed the picture to his 13-year-old daughter, who told him it was of Allen, “my tutor guy,” who had tutored her in English at C2.
“She can’t believe it, because he was very nice, very professional and a very cool guy,” Miranda said of his daughter. “So yeah, it’s crazy.”
The Torrance home connected to Cole Tomas Allen.
(Robbin Goddard / Los Angeles Times)
At the heart of the case against Allen is a document federal authorities allege he sent family members.
The writer of the document apologized to his parents, colleagues and others before laying out his “rules of engagement” — guests, hotel security and staff and other people not in elected office or government were “not targets.” The author says he was targeting top Trump administration officials because he was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”
If the document was indeed written by Allen, Baragona said it would represent a fundamental change from the person he knew when they were making gimbals together at IJK Controls.
“It’s kind of sad, really,” Baragona said of the transformation Allen’s worldview apparently underwent in recent years. “It’s tragic and sad.”
The document was signed “Cole ‘coldForce’ ‘Friendly Federal Assassin’ Allen,” echoing the usernames the FBI in a court filing said Allen used online.
Federal authorities have not identified the specific accounts, but The Times found multiple similarly named social media profiles likely used by Allen, with close variations of the same distinctive username, @coldForce3000, that Allen used on a chess account created with his confirmed email addresses. The accounts have been taken down, but much of their contents remain accessible on the Internet Archive.
Across more than 5,000 posts extending from 2021 to days before last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Assn. dinner, where the attack attributed to him took place, Allen’s social media history shows that what started as a singular immersion into the online gaming world became consumed in condemnation of Trump, his administration and war. The rhetoric was often harsh — likening the president to a mob boss or calling him a sociopath — but did not espouse violence.
A sketch of Cole Tomas Allen in court.
(Dana Verkouteren / Associated Press)
For years, SoCal Twitter user @CForce3000, under the name “coldForce,” posted almost exclusively about gaming, and “Super Smash Bros. Ultimate” in particular, the same fighting game Allen played competitively as an online brawler.
The account changed abruptly the day after Russia’s April 2023 missile attack on Slovyansk, in eastern Ukraine. Eleven people, including a toddler, died in the shelling of a residential building. The feed from @CForce3000 carried images of the bloodshed.
Subsequent Ukraine-related posts followed, along with pleas for donations to buy jeeps, equipment and supplies for combatants in the country. By early 2024, the account had broadened to domestic concerns, including opinions on student activism at Columbia University in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
“Everyone makes mistakes in college,” @CForce3000 wrote in May 2024, criticizing the activists, who risked expulsion. “Burning down your parents’ life accomplishments and your own future to demonstrably degrade the image of your (presumably) recent cause is not really one I’d recommend,” the user posted, “like, my parents woulda *buried* me if i picked this as a ‘hill to die on.’”
For the next year, @CForce3000 shared hundreds of posts from sources as diverse as Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance), Republican former Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and former Ukrainian diplomat Maria Drutska. The account became a repeater of condemnations by Trump critics calling the president an ally of Russia and decrying his failure to support Ukraine and his involvement with late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
In November 2024, @CForce3000 announced the account was migrating to BlueSky, saying of X, “I don’t think there’s much reason to be on here anymore.” In early 2025 on BlueSky, coldForce chose an avatar plucked from the anime series “Gintama”: the heroine Kagura in her berserk state, insane with rage.
“Hi! I’m a random Californian guy with posts about American politics, support for Ukraine, and observations of small creatures,” read the new coldForce account bio. “I choose my own battlefields. Not through my blood, but with my heart. I stand on the battlefield to protect what I want.”
The BlueSky user continued to forward requests for donations to equip Ukrainian troops. It decried federal immigration raids and posted about a toddler who nearly died at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Texas. In reposting a feed that called Elon Musk a white supremacist, coldForce mused that the Tesla CEO and X owner was a “genius with effective(?) autism” struggling to understand humanity.
The rhetoric sharpened this spring when Trump began posting threats to bomb Iran, saying that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” On BlueSky, coldForce shared posts from Democratic pundits and leaders, including in Congress, who called for Trump’s impeachment, and those who described the president as “deranged” and “a sociopathic mob boss.”
Cole Allen reportedly purchased a handgun at CAP Tactical Firearms in Lawndale.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
“Trump must be removed from office. He has no capacity to do the job, and he’s destroying the US and the world with incoherent flailing,” read an April 12 message by Minnesota liberal activist Will Stancil that coldForce reposted. “He thinks he can bully and blackmail the whole world and will start WW3 or nuke someone eventually. He absolutely cannot [be] allowed to continue.”
To these, coldForce added:
“If we can call for russians to oppose putin, we can and must oppose trump no less.”
On April 6, federal authorities say Allen used his phone to search “white house correspondents dinner 2026” and booked a room at the Washington Hilton.
Allen allegedly traveled by train across the country from California, arriving in Washington, D.C., on April 23 and checking into his room at the Washington Hilton, where the White House correspondents’ dinner was scheduled two nights later.
At 8:03 p.m. April 25, he snapped a mirror selfie in his hotel room, according to a pretrial detention memo filed by prosecutors Wednesday. He looked into the camera, eyebrows raised with a hint of a smile. Allen wore a black dress shirt and slacks, a red tie tucked into his pants and a small leather bag prosecutors say was filled with ammunition. He also allegedly wore a shoulder holster and knife in his waistband.
At 8:27 p.m., he pulled up a live feed of Trump en route to the event. Minutes later, as the president sat on an open stage during the fete, Allen allegedly ran through a magnetometer and past Secret Service agents toward the ballroom before firing at least one shotgun round in the direction of the stairs leading down to the ballroom, the memo said.
Secret Service agents respond during the White House correspondents’ dinner.
(Tom Brenner / Associated Press)
A Secret Service officer saw him and fired five shots — all of which missed him — and Allen fell to the ground and was arrested before he could reach the event space. The Department of Justice has said it is investigating whether Allen fired the round that hit one of the agents in the chest; the agent avoided major injuries because he was wearing a bulletproof vest.
People who knew Allen before he was accused of attempting to gun down American leaders told The Times that they never would have thought he was capable of such a violent act.
Terlinden, of the Caltech Christian Fellowship, said she and Allen once got into a heated argument over how to spend the group’s charity money. He advocated for sending toys to children abroad through an organization that was explicitly Christian, whereas Terlinden pushed to feed the homeless locally, which she thought was more pragmatic.
“I think he said it’s not about helping people, it’s about showing the love of Christ,” she recalled. “After I talked about efficiency and helping people.”
She left the room and didn’t return.
“Part of the reason I’m bringing that up is to demonstrate that that’s the most scandalous incident I could come up with,” Terlinden said. “We were arguing over whether we should send toys to poor children or feed homeless people — that’s the big tea.”
Reflecting on the allegations, she said she wondered whether Allen was “acting out of perceived moral duty. … In a twisted way, there is a sense of, you know, standing up for people that can’t defend themselves.”
