A single-day distance record hike. Other than the length and leg-burn, this hike has just about everything that makes hiking in Southern California great. Stream crossings and boulder scramblings, sycamore groves and chaparral, shady canyons, waterfalls, mountain peaks and more. And you don’t even have to hike the whole way to see it.
Monthly Archive for February, 2007
I still remember the first time I saw the Los Angeles River.
It looked and smelled like a sewer, walled-in by concrete and lined with garbage, beer cans, shopping carts and mattresses. A chain link, barbed-wire fence surrounded both sides, not that anyone would ever want to get down closer to it.
Not surprising, I guess, for a city with such a history of Paving Over Everything, but still a shock to a transplanted New Englander. I only knew cities that grew up around rivers because they provided for them, not any that grew near rivers in spite of them.
Due to a series of massive floods in the early and mid 1900s, Los Angeles and Orange Counties went through an expensive and lengthy surgery, courtesy of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Rivers were dammed, banks were filled in with concrete, and in the end we were left with quite possibly the ugliest urban river in America. Hooray.
Los Angeles, in its Infinite Wisdom, finally noticed that just about every other city with a river integrates it into its infrastructure, making parks, centralized living and commercial spaces, and generally pleasant, unifying urban areas. Now we want that, instead.
End Pavement links to an L.A. Times story about a new $2 billion plan to tear down the concrete and turn our glorified drainage ditch into “one of the city’s most treasured landmarks.”
Or, visually, from this:
to this:
The plan would also raze many nasty industrial and abandoned areas along the river and replace them with small, dense residential and commercial neighborhoods and public gathering spaces, which are sorely lacking in the current sprawl.
Obviously, the price-tag and timeline (25 to 50 years for full completion) seem steep, but the potential to drastically change the very makeup of Los Angeles for the better is unbelievable. Much of the money needed has yet to be secured, but the Times points out the plan has some serious political momentum behind it. Most of the City Council supports it, as does Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who launched Million Trees L.A. last year.
And anything that makes L.A. even a tiny bit greener is alright by me.
If you’re into official city documents, you can read the full plan in PDF format here.
So you know all of that ‘uncertainty’ that supposedly exists among the scientific community regarding climate change? Well, not only did it not exist five years ago, but now it really doesn’t exist.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its Fourth Report today, which says humans are “very likely” the cause for global warming, indicating a 90% certainty among scientists.
The report also said even if we did take drastic measures to curb our greenhouse gas production, rising temperatures and sea levels would still “continue for centuries.”
By 2100, the increase in temperature will be about three to nearly-eight times what the increase was from 1901 to 2005, and a conservative sea-rise estimate would displace over ten million people worldwide.
More reports are scheduled for release later in the year, which will deal with possible solutions and approaches to dealing with our impending doom. Good times.
Rocky from The Goat sent me a heads up on newly-svelte ACR MicroFix Personal Locater Beacon due out this spring.
In case you don’t know, these little gizmos are basically the outdoorsman’s Ultimate Panic Button. If you’re about to kick the bucket in the Great Outdoors, you activate your beacon and it sends out an S.O.S. that alerts local authorities to your exact location (within about 100m). It doesn’t tell them exactly what the problem is, but it let’s ‘em know you need help.
When I first read this, I - like Rocky - was worried more people would be picking these things up and using them the second they wander twenty feet off-trail and panic. ACR hasn’t published prices yet, but most beacons will run you anywhere from five to seven hundred bucks, so I’m betting the Casual Hiking Crowd isn’t running down to REI for an impulse buy anytime soon.
And as we all know, in technology, the smaller, the pricier.
We’ve all had that experience. We get a nice snapshot lined up, we bunker down, hold our breath, and hit the shutter. The pic looks fine on the LCD, but when we get back home, it’s full of blurs.
Bummer.
The venerable Digital Photography School has a quick post on how to easily tell if the blur’s the result of your camera’s settings or just because you had seven cups of coffee that morning and can’t stop vibrating. And, because it’s a helpful site, it links to quick tutorials you can use to fix whatever’s causing your problem.
Nice folks over there.
The 60% Geek in me has been wrapped up in work and the exploding Aqua-Gate scandal. I’ll be back with some hikin’ news soon.
Promise.
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