Los Angeles Basin

This is the first part in my "WiLA" series.

Quite a large part of the population that makes up the "Greater Metropolitan LA Area" (much of Los Angeles County and the majority of the population in Orange County) lives on a flat plain in between the rugged mountains and the ocean. This plain is surrounded by the canyons around Malibu, the mountains that house the Getty, the hills with Griffith Park, the mountains that have Mt. Baldy and line the 210 freeway, and is eventually closed in by the hills south of Irvine in Mission Viejo.

The generally flat plane is 70 miles long by 35 miles wide. It's called the LA Basin.

Basin like these--between mountains and the ocean--are formed the same way as similar geological formations: with the depositing of silt by rivers.

If you take a moment to look at a map of the Los Angeles area, you'll see in the north-west the beach towns starting south of Malibu with Santa Monica, and along that stretch of beach you can find Venice Beach, Manhattan Beach, and Redondo Beach among others. A mountainous formation called the Palos Verdes Peninsula breaks up the smooth beach line, and sends it east for a ways before it starts south again. This is where you get Long Beach, Seal Beach, Huntington and Newport and the Orange County coast.

Palos Verdes blocks us in Long Beach from bad weather. Today it houses wealthy enclaves and beautiful views of both the ocean and the basin.

The thing is, is that Palos Verdes used to be an island.

Over the eons the silt has built up and filled up the space from where the rivers poured out of the mountains all the way to this lost Channel Island.

Human reliance on rivers is nothing new. It makes a kind of sense in the heart knowing that the entire area that this mostly urban blight ans sprawl exist on, this flat plain of Western Civilization, was all created by rivers.

Say "rivers" and "Los Angeles" in the same sentence to folks who aren't from around here and the idea that's conjured is usually the paved-in-concrete mostly empty dumps. There may be a trickle of water, there may be the T-1000 in a semi chasing the Governator on a hog.

Unfortunately, this is pretty accurate. The people of Los Angeles, a while back, decided (I'm guessing) that since they couldn't control earthquakes, and exerted so little control over the mudslides and wildfires, that maybe they could control the flooding of the LA River (and some of her sisters) by paving the path and ending the occasional shifting of the waterway.

Unlike places like Denver and Atlanta, which have no natural water sources, Los Angeles happens to be blessed with a three large rivers and one large tributary. They are: Los Angeles River, Rio Hondo, San Gabriel River, and Santa Ana River.

Historically the two biggies have been the LA River and the San Gabriel River. A flood in the San Gabriel River in the 1850s shifted it's path to where it is today, and it's old path is now known as Rio Hondo ("deep river" in Spanish).

It's funny to think that the Rio Hondo is the old path of the San Gabriel--until you notice that the geographic center of the LA Basin, the very center point of the 70 mi x 35 mi plain that is "LA" is the confluence of the LA River and today's Rio Hondo.

The very center of it all:



Once I read the fact that the meeting of the rivers was the center of the basin, I got busy looking at Google maps. I tried to follow the path of the LA River. It merges with another concrete monstrosity at one point, and a little zooming-out shows the names around this confluence of "Old River Road" and "Old River Elementary School". Bingo.

After the flood in the 1850s and the shifting of the San Gabriel to a path somewhat aways, the names of things in the neighborhood around the older "original" (to white American settlers) San Gabriel changed to "Old River" this and that.

I'd found the confluence of the LA River and the Rio Hondo. Zooming out on the map gave me directions, and when the time was right, I was off. It only took me eight minutes to get there. Traffic was generally accommodating, but it turns out we're not so far.

When I got there, the scene struck me as, well, strangely spiritual.



Yes, it's an almost nightmarish scene of concrete, but it's quieter that it seems it should be, and somehow tugs at you. After a moment I noticed some folks climbing up a retaining wall leaving the river "bed" area, and realizing that I could just get down into it, I scrambled for the opportunity.

The LA River is seen as the one behind the protruding concreted peninsula; the Rio Hondo is in the foreground.

In the first picture here, "The Center of it All" picture, the LA River is on the left, the Rio Hondo on the right.

Here's a similar picture to that looking directly at that peninsula, LA River on the left, Rio Hondo on the right:



I climbed up the peninsula and looked back. Here you can almost see the actual LA River flowing well in the tiny trough in the center of it's path. The Hondo is barely a trickle, but it's there, flowing.



Not even concrete can stop mother nature and gravity. Here's a "Continual Birth" shot:



None of these pictures really yield the sense of wonder that is found in the midst of the concrete. I wasn't joking about the heart-tugging sense of awe, the grip this "concrete monstrosity" had over me. I've been to the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, the Palisades on the Hudson in early October when the trees make it look like it's on fire, and somehow felt a similar pull out off the Imperial Highway and the 710.

Obviously there's no real comparison between those Wonders of the Natural World and this concrete confluence, but the grip it had on me was in the same family of awe-grip.