New Elysian Valley Bike Path Getting Asphalt

Fresh new bike path asphalt behind the Great Heron Gate

The Los Angeles River Bike Path under construction through Elysian Valley is looking more and more complete. Biking past it at Fletcher Drive today, I saw the city’s contractor’s crews putting down its new dark black asphalt surface. The new surface replaces a worn and root-rutted old access road with various dips and cracks.

After the jump are more details about the bikeway construction schedule, and some observations bicycling along the river today.

In case you want all the glorious details on this bikeway project, LA Creek Freak has ’em. We wrote about the overall project including legal struggles, then the groundbreaking, the start of construction, and the new undercrossing at Fletcher Drive. We figure we can milk this one for a few more articles as construction is completed, and ribbon-cutting ceremonies commence.

I was happy to run into the city Bureau of Street Services Ferdy Chan out at the river today. He’s the engineer who oversees a lot of the city’s bike projects. I asked him when he thought construction would be complete on this bikeway. At the groundbreaking ceremony, the target completion date had been announced as  February 2010. Ferdy was hesitant to commit to a specific date as there was a recent change order. The soon-to-be installed lighting was upgraded to be energy-saving LEDs, and that change order is resulting in some delay. Public Works inspector Tony Rios said that the path should be complete in about a month.

Tony Rios (left), Ferdy Chan (right) and a city staffer who declined to let me know his name (center)

I asked Ferdy about the bikeway fence-poles that had been knocked over in the high water flows during last week’s rains. He responded that the poles worked as designed. They’re built on hinges, and when water and debris press against them, it breaks a small bolt at the base allowing the pole to lie down, instead of bending or breaking.

One of the downed bikeway fenceposts, earlier this week

A closer shot of the hinge at the base of the post; the broken screw is visible on the right

 Today the asphalt crew was only surfacing the stretch from Fletcher Drive to the 2 Freeway. They’ll be making their way downstream for the next week or so.

I continued biking downstream through Elysian Valley. After rains, the river has a sort of bathtub ring of debris (mentioned before), which shows the high water mark from the last storm.

The debris line a little above halfway up the channel walls

In addition to folks walking and bicycling, there were quite a few out fishing. There weren’t any spectacular barehanded fishing adventures, but I did come across a couple of men who, sans fishing pole, were using a small handheld net to catch lots of fish that had been trapped in a side channel area that had become separated from the main stem of the river.

Fishermen and their catch

They’d already caught about 40 fish!

The day's catch - as far as I can tell, all smallish golden carp. Each fish about 6-10 inches long.

Egrets were out fishing too, in similar isolated side channel ponds (though they’re a bit shier about having their picture taken.)

In January, the river looks a little more ragged than usual . The foliage is at its thinnest and shows a lot of yellows and brownish grays. There’s more visible trash at this time of the year. Some of the trash will dry up and fall down and be swept out to sea – causing lots of problems there.  Much of the remaining trash will become less visible as the trees leaf out in the spring.

The mighty Los Angeles dressed up in her winter colors

This year’s El Niño is predicted to keep showering us through at least March, so I expect that there will be more high waters, more debris, and, soon, three more miles of bike path to bring folks down by the Los Angeles River.

One more shot of the newly asphalted bike path