Boating on the LA River

If you have ever wanted to paddle along the LA River in the Sepulveda Basin, you missed your chance. A pilot program called Paddle the Los Angeles River (website here) is running weekends from August 13-September 25, 2011, but all the slots are taken. The hope is that you will get your chance next summer if this pilot program is deemed successful. Which it will be.

The Los Angeles Conservation Corps is offering the supervised educational canoe and kayak trips down this 1.5 mile stretch of the river between Balboa and Burbank Boulevards. I thought about participating but decided I didn’t want to pay $50 for the privilege of listening to docents and being restricted to this tiny bit of the river. You can kayak in Canada for only $18 an hour with almost no restrictions and no docents. Seriously, what’s with the docents?

Therein lies the problem: to open up this stretch of the river to the public requires overcoming all sorts of bureaucratic nonsense. Right now you cannot go on the river without an official permit from the US Army Corps. Even this limited experiment came with all sorts of restrictions: no plastic water bottles, no flip flops, blah blah. Can we just get past the moralizing and focus on the concept of fun?

This is a bit like the medical marijuana issue: everyone knows this is about something else. And this something else is that more chunks of the LA River may be redeveloped from a concrete spill race into riparian landscapes where kayaking might be possible seasonally. I support this goal. There are plenty of naysayers, though, who cite the potential for river flooding, the treated urban runoff, rat poop and so on. Gee, get a life.

The reality is that this will take years to establish in any successful way and that’s ok. If it makes Angelenos think of it as “their” river they won’t pollute it with plastic bags and refuse and they will be that little bit more empowered in their own city. This means that the Sepulveda Basin, the Glendale Narrows/Elysian Valley and Long Beach stretches will all be opened up to kayaks and canoes. But to be successful the preachiness has to go. While we are at it, it would be nice to see boats back on Lake Balboa, but that’s a story for another day.