A Roundabout Bikeway From Pasadena to Downtown : NEXT L.A.: A look at issues, people and ideas helping to shape the emerging metropolis.

Riding the proposed Pasadena-to-Downtown bikeway in its current state is an adventure--but also surprisingly doable, even for a woefully non-athletic reporter.

Dennis Crowley, 47, gray of beard but fit of body, is an eager tour guide.

He leads the way on his mountain bike through a genteel neighborhood of Pasadena, at the bottom of the deep, leafy cleavage of the Arroyo Seco. He follows the mossy trickle in the concrete channel south, under the graceful arches of the Colorado Street bridge, under the 110 Freeway and onto a road skirting the Arroyo Seco Golf Course in South Pasadena.

Where the road veers off into a parking lot, he tosses his bike over a low stone wall and rolls it down a steep concrete embankment into the Arroyo channel. It’s actually kind of pleasant pedaling down this giant drainage ditch, dappled with shade and graced with sandpipers scurrying in the narrow ribbon of water.

Suddenly, a 10-foot-wide carpet of concrete appears on one side of the bumpy channel bottom. This, according to city maps, is the existing “bike path.” Hidden from view and extending 1 1/2 miles from nowhere to nowhere, it’s more of an urban artifact than an effective bikeway. Crowley points out that the bottom of a river (this is all deep underwater several months a year) is rather an odd location for a bike path.

Where the bikeway should go, he says, scrambling up the steep concrete embankment, is up on the right of way along the channel. Arroyo Seco Park and Ernest E. Debs Regional Park have plenty of room for a bikeway at their edge, he says.

But at the 43rd Street entrance to the Pasadena Freeway, there’s a problem: Private homes run right up to the channel. Crowley envisions making the bikeway cantilever over the channel from here until perhaps Heritage Square, the collection of relocated Victorian buildings beside the freeway closer to Downtown. “Wouldn’t this be a great place for a cappuccino shop?” he says, gesturing at an antique train depot--”a refueling station.”

Then he clambers over a chain-link fence and heads back down into the channel, pedaling the two miles to the spot where the Arroyo Seco’s flow runs into the Los Angeles River.

From down here, the far wall of the Los Angeles River channel looms several stories high dead ahead, a Grand Canyon of graffiti and concrete. All it would take here, says Crowley, is a bridge to connect his dream to reality.

For just across the river lies Elysian Park--and the soon to-be-completed Los Angeles River Bikeway.