Tour de Orange County : Santa Ana River Trail Takes Bicyclists From the Canyons to the Coast

Ed Campagna is ready to roll.

He wears a pair of pricey bicycling eyeshades to protect his eyes from insects, road debris and glare. He has a helmet and padded gloves in case of a fall. Mounted on his handlebars is a small computer that will tell him how far and how fast he is traveling on this Sunday morning.

Then there are the extra batteries taped to the beefy steel frame of his Schwinn cruiser. “That’s because I listen to the radio while I ride,” says Campagna, 44, a Yorba Linda doctor. “Usually KOST, something real relaxing.”

With that, Campagna pushes off for his 20-mile spin from Yorba Linda to Anaheim Stadium and back, along a path that is the backbone of Orange County’s impressive network of bicycle routes: the Santa Ana River Trail.

“It’s pretty good here. . . . You can really get those endorphines going,” says Campagna, whose ride is a weekly ritual. “The only thing that’s bad is when the wind’s blowing--when the Santa Anas blow, it’s murder.”

But today, only the slightest breeze blows inland along the trail. For Campagna and the hundreds of other cyclists on the trail, it’s a perfect day for a ride.

Stretching 22 miles from the hills and canyons of Yorba Linda to the sun-splashed sands of Huntington Beach, the river trail is the county’s longest cycling route uninterrupted by traffic lights and speeding trucks and cars.

With spring bringing warmer temperatures and longer evenings, the ever-popular river trail turns into a mecca for cyclists, with about 50,000 people pedaling along the flat, 10-foot-wide strip of pavement each month, according to county transportation planners.

Every kind of cyclist can be found on the trail: racers spinning along on luscious Italian frames at 30 m.p.h., powerful tandems, doughy couch potatoes on clunkers, parents pulling kids in trailers. Some ride just a few miles; others ride all 22 miles--and back.

Then there are the equestrians riding on parallel dirt trails and the folks taking poodles and schnauzers out for a walk along the river.

Along the way, bicyclists see a representative cross section of the county. The trail meanders through or alongside the county’s largest and oldest cities, Anaheim and Santa Ana, plus parts of Yorba Linda, Orange, Costa Mesa and Fountain Valley before ending in Huntington Beach.

It winds past two golf courses, a baseball stadium, a jail and several parks. Plant and bird life abound. Sometimes water rushes in the river on the inland half of the trail, while a cool breeze lets you know the ocean is fast approaching on the trail’s lower half.

The trail also takes riders from the bucolic to the industrial: Along one stretch in Anaheim, corrals, stables and a small house with roosters and chickens line the trail; in Costa Mesa, the bike path passes the sprawling United Rock and Concrete Corp.’s yard and a lot filled with fiberglass spas and tubs.

Finding the trail head at the inland end is a bit complicated. When the Gypsum Canyon Road bridge is completed this fall, the trail will cross over the river, extending through Featherly Regional Park, along the Green River Golf Course and into Riverside County.

There is now no way to cross the riverbed at Gypsum Canyon (although cyclists can get off the trail at Weir Canyon Road and ride along Santa Ana Canyon Road to reach Featherly Park).

The easiest place to pick up the trail, starting at the inland end, is along La Palma Boulevard, between Weir Canyon and the bridge project, in Yorba Linda.

Riding southwest, the trail crosses under a bridge where Yorba Linda Boulevard becomes Weir Canyon Road, and the river is suddenly full of water--at least when the engineers at the Prado Dam decide to release some. On a recent Sunday, the water was flowing freely, a faint reminder of the powerful river the Santa Ana was before it was tamed. (During a storm in 1938, its swollen waters killed 45 county residents. A year later, the dam was built.)

At Imperial Highway, the trail switches from the north to the south side of the river, which here runs downstream nearly due west. Past Imperial Highway, a 2 1/2-mile stretch of the path through Anaheim is called the Imperial Woods Trail. Built by the Orange County Flood Control District and Water District, the Imperial Woods portion is one of the most scenic parts of the trail.

Great blue herons stand motionless in the shallow water, then execute their graceful, slow-motion takeoffs. Mallards, gulls, swallows, egrets and red-winged blackbirds are also plentiful along this stretch.

Mat Vallance, 30, a lawyer from Yorba Linda, has extra time to enjoy this part of the trail while he is fixing a flat tire on his new aluminum racing bike.

“Do you know how to get this tire off?” Vallance asks, explaining that he just began cycling a few months ago.

As for why he began, “I needed the exercise,” says Vallance, who grew up in Yorba Linda. “You can really let your mind go out here. . . . I remember when people used to go duck hunting with their shotguns right here.”

As the trail continues, it makes a gentle southward curve into Anaheim, crossing under Lincoln Boulevard, where a clever entrepreneur has placed the bike path equivalent of a billboard along the trail: A cardboard sign says, “Bike Shop, 2 Blocks,” with an arrow pointing the way.

Soon the path takes riders alongside a stable and small ranch-style house. The smell of horses is strong, and roosters crow loudly. A rusty, crooked hoop is nailed to a piece of fence in the house’s dirt driveway, a rustic basketball court for some young inhabitant.

The big A of Anaheim Stadium is visible in the distance. Here, the river appears dry. Actually, it is underground, in a series of spreading basins that allow the water to percolate down into the ground-water supply, to be used by nearby homes.

From Taft to Orangewood avenues, the path is closed because of construction of the Katella Avenue bridge, which will probably not be completed before early 1990. Today, however, most bikers simply ride past the signs that point to a detour along Main Street, carefully negotiating the Katella Avenue crossing.

South of Katella, the trail is back along the west side of the riverbed and passes county landmarks: a county maintenance yard, Anaheim Stadium, the Orangewood children’s shelter, the scorched county fire training tower, the Cinedome movie theaters and Theo Lacy Branch Jail--surrounded by barbed wire and signs warning people not to get too close. A lone guard sits in the jail’s recreation yard, reading a magazine.

Entering Santa Ana, the path takes the name Forrest S. Paul Memorial Trail. A worn plaque from 1966, marred by graffiti, says Paul was devoted to riding and hiking trails.

At 17th Street, the trail crosses back over the river. As it goes through Santa Ana, graffiti covers almost every inch of path’s concrete walls.

At Spurgeon Intermediate School, a baseball game is in progress. Families picnic and play soccer on the grass nearby.

An old steel girder railroad bridge with rusted, locked gates spans the riverbed just outside the school. It was once part of the old Pacific Electric, or Red Car, line that connected Santa Ana to Los Angeles.

The trail passes Centennial Regional Park--a good place to park and unload bikes to begin a shorter ride. As it nears the San Diego Freeway, some of the more interesting graffiti along the route can be seen on the far bank of the riverbed: huge, red-spattered outlines of bodies with the words Let Peace Prevail--End Gang Violence.

Just before the crossing under the freeway, there is more: an oil-soaked paw print stamped on an outline of Alaska with the words Exxon’s Smoking Paw.

A surprise greets bikers of this hot, nearly shadeless stretch after they pass under the freeway. Mike Boyle, a ninth-grader at Estancia High School, has set up a lemonade stand in Moon Park along the trail. He comes out just about every weekend and sells mineral water and lemonade for $1 a cup.

“I make about $52 a day,” Boyle says as a half-dozen thirsty bikers guzzle lemonade. “I’m putting it into my car--a ’68 (VW) Bug.”

Leaving the park, the path runs outside and below the riverbed’s eastern levee and is partly sheltered from the wind. A mile or so later, though, the path returns to the top of the embankment, and a stiff breeze slows riders down. Some afternoons, the wind makes pedaling the last few miles to the ocean extremely difficult, but today it just makes riders work a bit harder.

Two miles from the ocean, the river is crossed one more time, on a wooden bridge. It would be nicer to be back on the east side of the river here rather than riding alongside the Orange County Sanitation Treatment Plant.

Soon, however, the trail reaches the beach, and riders cross under Pacific Coast Highway, negotiating two gates installed to slow down the crowd of cyclists.

At one gate are Edward and Franca Carmona, training for a bicycle tour of France on their identical Diamond Back fat-tired bikes.

They wear radio headsets that allow them to talk to each other within a quarter-mile range. “It lets us point out the things we see if we get separated a bit,” he says.

The couple own Santino 19, an Italian restaurant in Huntington Beach. To prepare for their tour of the Loire Valley, when they will carry provisions on their bikes, Carmona has loaded telephone books in the pannier bags over his rear wheel.

Telephone books? On a Sunday? “When you’re having fun, it’s never work,” Carmona says.