Into the Wild Blue to Look for Green Below

The small plane lifted off the Pacoima airstrip with the wiggle of a simpering dog. The engine groaned as the gravel pits and taco shops melded into the gray dinginess below. Donald Dawson worked the controls, gunning for nearby mountains yet to be seen through a late summer dishwater sky.

The Cessna Turbo Centurion was headed over the Arroyo Seco, where three of Dawson’s passengers, all environmentalists, wanted to survey the terrain for undeveloped pieces of land that could be tied together in a belt of open space from the San Gabriel Mountains to the Los Angeles River.

The flight over the nation’s second largest city marked a new direction for LightHawk, a nonprofit flying service more likely to be found surveying clear cuts in Northern California or tracking caribou herds in northern Alaska.

For more than 20 years, LightHawk has provided flights for environmentalists who, for whatever reason, wanted to see an area from above. The volunteer pilots have helped keep track of deforestation in Central America, toxic waste dumping in Missouri and whale migration in the Pacific.

Now, with a growing movement to preserve open space in Los Angeles, LightHawk’s services are in demand here.

“A lot of our flagship issues were way out in the Pacific Northwest,” said Terri Watson, the executive director, who is based in Wyoming. “Now we’re also showing the importance of green space, or the impact of sprawl moving up into the hills.”

Although LightHawk does not take on causes of its own, it provides services to environmentally minded scientists, political leaders and activists. With a staff member, Maureen Smith, based in Los Angeles, the peripatetic group plans to begin operating more often in the area.

“People just don’t know us in Southern California yet,” Smith said.

Pilot Michael Stewartt established LightHawk in 1979 to spot clear cuts, which are often hidden from the highway. He and mountain climber Bruce Gordon began flying two Cessna 210s over forests in the Pacific Northwest.

“Clear cuts usually can only be seen from the air,” Gordon said. “The roads are left as scenic corridors lined with trees.”

When winter weather interfered with flying, the pair flew down to Belize and began conducting similar missions in Central America, monitoring deforestation. In the mid-1980s, they started picking up grants and donations while recruiting other pilots to volunteer their planes, fuel and time. An old friend of Gordon from Aspen, Colo., the late singer John Denver, became a spokesman for the group.

According to LightHawk, its aerial reconnaissance has helped catch a Chicago politician who was taking public money for a recycling facility, while just dumping the recyclable items on his farm. LightHawk flights spotted chemical dumpers at a lead mine in Missouri. And Gordon and Stewartt noticed an extraordinarily pristine slice of rain forest in Belize that they later helped save as a national park.

Now the group has about 120 volunteer pilots. They are doctors, pharmacists, teachers, oil field roughnecks, hunters and retirees like Dawson. LightHawk requires them to have at least 1,000 hours of flying time. It wants pilots who can maneuver a plane for a photographer’s best angle in tough conditions but who won’t test the aircraft’s limits for the sake of a picture.

Dawson fits the bill. All business, with no tolerance for PR stunts, he has a bitter taste in his mouth from one mission over the Silicon Valley to view the site of a controversial high-tech facility. He felt that the flight was staged by environmentalists just so they could hold a news conference and get publicity for their cause.

“I like to do something useful,” he said. “It’s not a joy ride.”

‘Not a Red-Hot Activist’

Dawson is 81 and appears as fit as a 60-year-old. The wiry member of United Flying Octogenarians has only flown a few missions for LightHawk, all in Northern California, and was itching to take off in L.A.

Dawson used to volunteer for Air Lifeline, flying people who needed medical attention. Several years ago, he decided to sign up for LightHawk .

“I’m not a red-hot activist,” he said. “I’m an old engineer who wants to help people do things on a considered, analyzed and studied basis.”

Robert Gottlieb, a professor of environmental policy at Occidental College, approached LightHawk about working locally on issues related to land preservation along the Los Angeles River. The Arroyo Seco River, a tributary, offered the best opportunity for a maiden flight.

“How better to view a watershed than to see what it encompasses from a LightHawk flight?” he asked.

The flight provided a broad perspective of the terrain that would have been impossible to get from the ground. And it yielded information that a map could not. A blank spot on a map, after all, might look great for a park, but in reality be a landslide or already graded for homes.

At the Pacoima airport, Dawson forked over his own credit card for the gas, as is routine for LightHawk pilots. With three urban park proponents and a reporter in tow, he planned to fly over the Arroyo Seco River from its headwaters in the San Gabriels to its outflow into the Los Angeles River.

“I want you guys to tell me exactly what you want to see and how you want to see it,” Dawson said. “I’ll try not to jiggle the plane around. If you get uncomfortable, there’s sick sacks behind all the seats.”

Bouncing off thermal updrafts like a boat in rough seas, the plane was headed for communication towers on top of Mt. Wilson. Below, bony fingers of rocky debris reached down shadowy ravines, but soon gave way to rolling carpets of pine in the higher reaches.

Stomachs Roiled

Timothy Brick of the Arroyo Seco Foundation narrated from the front seat. He and Lynne Dwyer, executive director of the nonprofit group Northeast Trees, wanted to see the 21-mile arroyo from above as part of an effort to link natural areas along it and improve wildlife habitats. The trip could help map out potential acquisitions, as well as expose major degradation of the watershed, such as erosion.

Not long into the flight, the passengers found themselves in a sweltering cabin, hovering over the shoulder of Mt. Wilson before an awesome, swooning drop into the arroyo watershed. Dwyer immediately noticed the debris let loose by the road cuts along Angeles Crest Highway. The plane was descending at about 120 mph into Pasadena when Dawson banked hard to the left to circle in the canyon, bumping off the rising thermals, roiling stomachs.

“I was thinking, ‘My God, we’re going to hit the mountain,’ ” Dwyer said later.

He pointed out erosion that had resulted from brush clearance in La Canada Flintridge. But the bump-and-roll was creeping up on the two other passengers, who were now dead silent, drenched in sweat and eyeing their sick bags.

The watershed passed in a matter of minutes--then came Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Rose Bowl, the Pasadena Freeway and, at last, the L.A. River. A helicopter might have been better for viewing such precipitous terrain, but as far as Dwyer and Brick were concerned, the flight was worth the discomfort.

“It’s big if you’re walking in it,” Dwyer said. “But it’s very small, you realize, flying over it. Projects seem more doable.”