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Los Angeles is not in a desert, but people think it is, and to an extent can be forgiven for thinking so. To avoid the inconvenience of nature, we have engineered away the true flows and patterns of water, corralling it into the limits we believe we can place on it.
Despite how thoroughly we’ve paved the LA basin, and despite active attempts to engineer the desiccation of the landscape, water from rains is still stored in the earth, and still makes its way slowly from the hills toward the plains, following the pull of gravity toward valleys and then down into aquifers, surfacing in some places as waterways that flow oceanward. The cycling of water through our land, bodies and sky will continue for longer than any of us are here in our current forms. Creeks that have been routed underground into pipes still flow, and will continue to flow longer than any of us will exist in our current forms.
Posts to the L.A. Creek Freak blog are infrequent, but now span several decades of important writing on the ways water—and our interventions against it—shape Southern California.
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Next steps include releasing the draft environmental impact report later this year, holding public hearings on that report, determining a preferred project option between several different alternative designs, and finally, releasing the final environmental impact report by 2026 or 2027, two years after bikers and pedestrians were supposed to be on the path. At the same time, LA Metro is still searching for an agency to take over the project’s ongoing operation and maintenance.
Fresh-faced and naive to the pace of Los Angeles politics, I attended a public meeting about extending the LA River Path in 2017. I had just moved to LA the year prior and while I knew what I was getting into, I couldn’t help but bemoan how far behind LA was in taking advantage of its waterways for recreation and alternative transportation. I’d come from Boulder after growing up in South Denver and LA felt at least 20 years behind those towns in so many ways, but bike paths were particularly emblematic of the setback.
Not to worry, we were told at that meeting, this path extension would be a crown jewel of the region and it was definitely going to happen in just a year or two, but maybe by 2020, at the latest, not even the later 2024 date, inferred from the above quote… [insert heavy eye roll emoji]
And now, here we are, almost a decade later, without even a final EIR, which, in California’s standard bureaucratic morass, will predate actual construction of any public project by years. How did we get here? But more importantly, why don’t we expect any better from our public officials?
Aside: props to SFGATE for the story here when it should have been front-and-center for an LA publication.
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The San Gabriels, in their state of tectonic youth, are rising as rapidly as any range on earth. Their loose inimical slopes flout the tolerance of the angle of repose. Rising straight up out of the megalopolis, they stand ten thousand feet above the nearby sea, and they are not kidding with this city. Shedding, spalling, self-destructing, they are disintegrating at a rate that is also among the fastest in the world.
The mountains that ring LA are somehow both rising faster and falling among the fastest as compared to any other mountain range on the planet.
From base platform to summit, the San Gabriels are three thousand feet higher than the Rockies.
A friend once said to me, “LA is the mountain city Denver wishes it was”.
It burns as if it were soaked with gasoline. Chaparral plants typically have multiple stems emerging from a single root crown, and this contributes not only to the density of the thickets but, ultimately, to the surface area of combustible material that stands prepared for flame. Hundreds of acres can be burned clean in minutes.
This essay is simply one of my favorite pieces of writing.
Mystically, unnervingly, the heaviest downpours always occur on the watersheds most recently burned. Why this is so is a question that has not been answered. Meteorologists and hydrologists speculate about ash-particle nuclei and heat reflection, but they don’t know.
I can’t remember when I first discovered “Los Angeles Against the Mountains”. After each heavy period of rain in LA—especially when paired with a previously-dire fire season—it makes the rounds on social media, offered as if it contains a fresh perspective on the predicament we have decided to live within. It was first published in 1988, but geology has its own timescale. In human time, it is always evergreen.
I finally bought the book it was also published in, The Control of Nature, and I highly recommend it. In our hubris, humans may ultimately shape our planet in ways that make it uninhabitable by us, but nature will always play a longer game.