The Bike

With the ever-present swoosh of cars and trucks whizzing by on the parallel Golden State Freeway, the first leg of the L.A. River Bikeway sometimes seems like just a sixth, very slow lane.

Separated from the real slow lane only by a few feet, a chain-link fence, and a thigh-high concrete crash barrier, the newly opened bikeway gives cyclists, skaters and joggers plenty of unwanted opportunities to interact with stranded motorists who have pulled over to use emergency phones.

But when bikeway users just look the other way, they are in for some surprising riparian treats.

Ducks, herons and cranes populate the bikeway’s other bracket--the river that is home to just a trickle of waste treatment plant water most of the year, but that can turn into a torrent when storm drain covers are opened to let in the accumulation of heavy winter rains.

The 51-mile-long stream, which starts in Canoga Park and ends in Long Beach, was mostly paved after devastating floods in the 1930s.

But this concrete-banked three-mile stretch, along the northern and eastern edges of Griffith Park--from Riverside Drive to Los Feliz Boulevard--retains a sandy bottom that is home to a wide variety of migratory bird and plant life, including willow and sycamore trees and stands of cattails and bamboo.

In this mix of small-scale natural wonder and big city grit, a few wild red lilies lend some color, along with a discarded highway worker’s vest or two, and the storm drain covers themselves--brightly painted as cartoonish cat faces by an enterprising artist who reportedly noticed that they already bore a certain feline quality.

As with all new transit projects, the bikeway is scheduled to progress slowly, reaching eight miles to Elysian Park in the millennium and downtown sometime in the next century.