The River That L.A. Forgot

Left to ramble, it ranks among the steepest rivers in the United States, plunging from 9,900-foot headwaters to the ocean in about 70 miles. Five major dams are required to brake its wet-season sprint from ponderosa peaks to sandy outfall.

The river tumbles year-round through the high country, carving white-rock canyons deeper than sunlight’s reach. Below the pine line, it fills reservoirs for an always thirsty metropolis, a place better known for importing water.

And yet the San Gabriel River gets little notice and even less respect.

This is Los Angeles’ other river -- its grander, cleaner and more useful river. It meanders in the public relations shadow of the region’s signature waterway, the Los Angeles River, a paved darling of conservationists and environmentalists.

The San Gabriel is the river that Los Angeles tamed, plundered and forgot. In terms of stature -- and overall health -- it’s a victim of its own quiet utility as one of the hardest-working urban rivers anywhere, a portrait of the West’s brute harnessing of precious H2O.

That’s unlikely to change, unless the San Gabriel is allowed to keep more of the water it delivers in abundance. The immediate odds don’t look good.

“We have this jewel of a river, and we’ve just let it go,” said Rep. Hilda Solis (D-El Monte).

Solis is leading a fledgling campaign to spruce up its industrialized stretches, especially the parched course that parallels the San Gabriel River Freeway. Her bigger dream is to secure federal protections for the river’s wild forks in the San Gabriel Mountains, where cascades slap through bouldered gulches and trout flash in currents clear as cellophane.

“You’re amazed to see what we have there as opposed to the L.A. River,” said Solis, who told of picnicking along the San Gabriel as a child. “It’s a part of me, part of my soul.... We haven’t paid attention to it.”

The San Gabriel would get plenty of loving attention, Solis and others say, if it could complete its natural, fall-to-spring journey from summit to surf. Instead, before the river can spill into the flatlands, it is sucked nearly dry, almost every drop of it dammed or diverted.

Just as the Los Angeles River’s water is hurried in concrete to the sea -- squandered in the interest of flood control -- the San Gabriel’s is siphoned and sold to homes and businesses, the overflow peril converted to dollars.

And while the Los Angeles River is a usually visible stream from the San Fernando Valley to Long Beach, the San Gabriel’s profile evaporates as it emerges from the mountains, 40 miles from the coast.

“On the San Gabriel side, there was foresight,” said Martin Moreno, who manages river operations for the Los Angeles County Public Works Department. He was directing a driving tour of the San Gabriel. “The early settlers went after the water.”

Moreno stopped his van at the mouth of San Gabriel Canyon in Azusa, and pointed to a rusted, twin-pipe conduit snaking down a hillside. It ferries river water from canyon reservoirs to wholesalers and retailers in the valley.

“That conduit was built in 1897,” Moreno said.

Water rights to the San Gabriel date to that era, and remain in force. The dams started to go up in the 1930s.

Today, the river and the aquifers it feeds serve 2.4 million people in the San Gabriel Valley and southeast Los Angeles County. Dozens of municipalities and obscure water companies hold title to the river’s bounty.

Pebble-rinsing gravel mines and a Miller brewery also tap the water. A giant nursery has claim to 10% of the “base flow” through San Gabriel Canyon, enough for hundreds of households.

The relentless capturing of water has cut the river in two, leaving its ends to probe for one another in vain across a sprawl of suburbs, factories, interstates and refineries.

Storms can restore the river to its full length, but only briefly. The same is true for discharges from sewage treatment plants and shipments from the State Water Project and the Colorado River. The latter splash into the San Gabriel from long-distance pipelines, then get routed by inflated rubber dams to spreading grounds, where the water percolates into the earth for storage.

On most days, though, the river barely moistens the valley floor. Its soft bed yields to flood-control concrete for 10 of its final 13 miles (38 of the Los Angeles River’s 51 miles are paved). Tides backwash the desiccated San Gabriel as it “empties” at Seal Beach.

“To have an actual river with water in it -- that’d be nice,” said Juan Munoz, 18, who lives in an El Monte mobile home park on a ridge above the San Gabriel.

He peered over a backyard fence at the river, a muddy trickle choked by tree-sized weeds. Vaulting electrical towers marched along its dusty banks. The view is so unappealing that many residents have walled it off.

“It’s always pretty dry,” said Munoz’s neighbor, Andy Valencia, 21. He shrugged. “Another messed-up river.”

The drive to lessen the mess is just beginning, 10 years after a similar effort got underway for the Los Angeles River.

“The San Gabriel is playing catch-up,” said Kathleen Bullard, chief of the watershed division of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.

The Rivers and Mountains Conservancy, which focuses on the San Gabriel and the lower Los Angeles River, is buying property along the San Gabriel, envisioning riparian greenbelts teeming with the terns and egrets that flock to the river’s wet patches.

“We want more use of the river,” said conservancy executive director Belinda Faustinos, who joined Moreno’s tour. She eyed the San Gabriel as it oozed past the quarries in Irwindale, shriveled and foul. “It’s a challenge for us.”

A Solis bill approved by Congress commissioned a three-year Interior Department survey that will examine whether the San Gabriel’s mountain forks should be designated a national recreation area or wildlife refuge.

Meanwhile, the county is drafting a master plan that will propose more riverside bike paths, hiking trails and parks.

None of those pursuits, however, will make the San Gabriel whole again. What they lack is a provision that enough water will be freed to replenish the river from top to bottom.

“It’s going to take a lot of brainpower and money to make that happen,” Faustinos said. “It could take 25 to 50 years.”

She said the No. 1 problem is the water rights: “We’ve been pretty much stonewalled by them.”

The so-called Western water law that governs California’s rivers sprang from the Gold Rush, when water was sought for hydraulic mining -- blast-hosing hillsides.

Essentially, water rights were granted to whoever asserted them first. They permitted the damming and cleaving of rivers from Montana and Arizona to Colorado and Oregon.

“The county maintains the river, but it’s not our water,” said Moreno, as he drove into the mist-cooled San Gabriel Canyon, the road bending with the river.

Rights holders to the water say they’re not interested in relinquishing them simply to enliven the San Gabriel’s moribund sections.

“We have a right to that water, and it is our every intention to continue to use it,” said Don Berry, administrator of the San Gabriel River Water Committee, which represents five claimants to the river. “The intent is not to lose any water to the ocean.”

The Monrovia Nursery Co., a committee member, keeps some of its share of the water to nourish its 500 acres, and sells the rest to the cities of Azusa and Covina.

“How would you feel if you had the water and depended on it, and then someone moved in and wanted to acquire it?” said nursery facilities manager Reiner Kruger.

Like others, he notes that the San Gabriel often breached its banks before the dams were built.

“To make that river flow to the ocean, you’d have to fill the San Gabriel Valley with water,” Kruger said. “It’d be a flood everywhere.”

Rama Tallamraju, a county engineer who is compiling the master plan, sees a smaller risk, but says the dams are vital because the river can swell so quickly. From Moreno’s van, she gazed at the cracked silt flats in the canyon, where the San Gabriel had retreated.

“When we get water,” she said, “we get a lot of it.”

Conservationists say throwing open the dam gates wouldn’t be necessary. The state Water Resources Control Board, they say, could order rights holders to release modest amounts of water, although that would involve a hearing process that could drag on for years.

“A river needs water,” said Betsy Otto, a senior director of American Rivers, a conservation group. “Without water, it’s not a river.”

The San Gabriel is every inch a river where the black bear roam. Charged by snowmelt and fierce rains, it takes shape in three forks that drain a lacework of mountain creeks. The forks converge in San Gabriel Canyon, six miles above the valley.Before the confluence, much of the river is pristine. Only sure-footed hikers, anglers and gold panners venture into the San Gabriel’s outback, which is characterized by deadfall chasms in moody light. The river there hastens along in all seasons, chirping through skinny rapids, whispering where it widens in the shade of alders.

“I never really knew we had this back here,” said Shandon Silva, 22.

The Azusa resident was on his first hike near the Sheep Mountain Wilderness Area, where the East Fork vanishes in the wooded folds of the terrain. He had stumbled upon the river, literally, at the end of a rutted downhill trail.

“It’s beautiful,” Silva said.

Higher on the trail, Edward Howland and Cheryl Leyba were trekking in for an overnight fishing trip. The river rustled beneath a layer of canyon-trapped clouds.

“It’s like a getaway in your own backyard,” said Leyba, 44, of Paramount.

“A piece of heaven,” said Howland, 38, who came from Long Beach.

Trudging behind them was Mike Eubank, 43, who pushed a wheelbarrow laden with panning gear. The La Habra resident has been prospecting the East Fork for 15 years. Professional gold miners gave up on the river in the early 20th century, but amateurs still try their luck.

“Most people never even heard of this area,” Eubank said. “It’s one of L.A.’s best-kept secrets.”

It’s less of a secret on the West Fork, a popular spot for picnicking and fishing -- perhaps too popular, judging from the beer cans and chip bags floating in the water.

“The trash needs to be cleaned up,” said Jason Conway, 27, who traveled from San Bernardino for the trout. He had just reeled in a six-incher.

A mile downstream, the Forest Service operates an off-road vehicle area. On this weekday, no SUVs or motorcycles were spinning dirt, but tire tracks scarred the levee like a whip.

“We have concerns about that,” said Moreno, as he drove by on the way to Cogswell Reservoir, the oldest on the river.

The access road to Cogswell twists along seven unspoiled miles of the West Fork, where the water burbles through a sheer, neck-craning canyon studded with oak and pine. The reservoir spreads silent and blue behind a dam of piled rock. A jet of water sprays from the base of the dam.

“That’s leakage,” Moreno explained. “A rock dam is constantly leaking.”

Moreno’s tour took in the other barriers that bottle up the river: San Gabriel Dam is constructed of soil and gravel, as ugly in places as a landfill. Morris Dam a couple of miles south is an Art Deco-influenced structure. Both create boat-less lakes in San Gabriel Canyon.

In the valley, beyond where the water has been drawn off, the Santa Fe and Whittier Narrows dams rise above empty basins. They stand ready for the next big storm that, in their absence, would flood the neighborhoods that crowd them.

“Everybody would like to see the river returned to its original state,” said Moreno, as he steered the van atop the Santa Fe Dam, a curving heap of crushed rock that had little to leak. “But the river’s been squeezed in by the city.”

Thirty-five miles south, Fred Molina was fishing for sea bass. The Downey resident had set his poles a short walk from the outfall, his habit of 10 years.

In all that time, Molina, 33, had no idea that the channel marked the amputated end of a mighty river that gathers itself from snowcaps.

“This is coming from the mountains?” he said. “Wow.”