Getting Started at L.A. Creek Freak
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Some of our favorites: >Jane’s >Jessica’s >Joe’s
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L.A. Creek Freak 
Hi Joe!
This is great stuff. Would you be interested in sharing links? Seems like we’re on the same team. Take a look:
http://www.lariverflyfishing.com
best,
Jim Burns (jburns84@hotmail.com
Cooool! I added you to our “Fellow Creekfreaks” link listing.
Hi, Joe. I’m a fellow K-towner working on a project to plant an historic grape garden in South LA, to be used as a primary source for the study of L.A,’s earliest agricultural, social and economic history. I think the renaming of (N-word) Slough would tie in nicely with the project. This page is “still under construction” but I would love to be on the mailing list. My e-mail is nedsdesk@gmail.com. Thank you, and keep up the great writing!
Hi! My daughter and I started working with Heal the Bay on Stream Team in the Malibu Creek Watershed about 9 months ago. Talk about a great way to see the creeks and meet other “creek freaks”. It has been an awesome experience and led us to all kinds of opportunities. Stream Team work led us to helping Sierra Pacific Flyfishers and Mountains Restoration Trust with a Crayfish Removal Project and we look forward to an amphibian counting project coming up. We’ve also found our way to creekside/wildland restoration projects with Treepeople/MRT.
The HTB Stream Team training session is coming up in May. They’ll train you to collect data and samples for their Citizen Science program. I HIGHLY recommend it. It’s been a boon for us to get to learn our way around to all kinds of places we never would have found on our own, and how to collect data to protect the streams, plus we keep meeting the nicest people.
Yvonne
I’m very glad to find this website. I explored LA creeks as a kid. More recently I have worked in LA creeks for 12 years, mostly in the Santa Monica Mountains. I know the streams within the Malibu Creek watershed better than anyone else alive. I am a compulsive writer and am glad to help out with this project. Give me an email and hopefully we can discuss this further.
I have today run across an exhibit at UCR/California Museum of Photography called “RiverRun” which is an exhibit by Sani Khalsa about the Santa Ana River. It runs from May 7th to August 13th. I believe this would be of interest to you. Keep up the good work for our L.A. River! I really enjoy your blog and have learned much. Thank you.
I saw you speak Jessica at the AltBuild Expo yesterday and yes, you really were inspirational! I have had a long time interest in local waterways so when I saw your talk listed on the program I had to check it out.
Your presentation was well organized and you are able to articulate your knowledge with a passion that is compelling. You mentioned a couple of times that you could talk about a certain subject for hours, I could have listened for hours 🙂
I wanted to say hi after and let you know how much I enjoyed it but I was with my son who had to get somewhere. I am looking forward now to exploring this site and to see how I can get involved.
Glad you were at Alt Build and hope LA Creek Freak gives you info that is helpful. Please let me know if you have any particular topics of interest or any local creek related stories of your own you’d like to share.
I’m very glad to find this website. I explored LA creeks as a kid. More recently I have worked in LA creeks for 12 years, mostly in the Santa Monica Mountains. I know the streams within the Malibu Creek watershed better than anyone else alive. I am a compulsive writer and am glad to help out with this project. Give me an email and hopefully we can discuss this further.
+1
Good morning!
I am a 5th grade teacher at Camino Nuevo Charter Academy located in the MacArthur park neighborhood of Los Angeles. My colleague and I are starting an interdisciplinary unit in which our students will study biographies about environmental activists and issues. We want our students to see that these people are not of the past but are working on similar issues within our local communities today!
In order to bring this idea to life, we want students to have an opportunity to interview activists from organizations like yours. We are searching for someone who considers him or herself an environmental activist, currently working on a project, and who would love the chance to speak about what they do while inspiring children within a classroom environment.
Is there someone in your organization who fits this description? We hope so! We would love to invite him or her to our classroom the morning of Thursday, November 17th. Please let us know if there is someone who is available that day so we can get in touch with him or her.
We appreciate your time and effort and forward to hearing from you!
Elizabeth Salanave and Sumita Soni
5th Grade Teachers
Camino Nuevo Charter Academy – Harvard Site
635 S. Harvard Blvd.
Los Angeles, Ca. 90005
(213) 736 – 5542
Greetings, I have been enjoying this blog for over a year. It’s sweet! My daughter and I have been working with Heal the Bay’s Stream Team/ Stream water testing program. They are doing another training session for Stream Team/Citizen Scientists for the Malibu Creek Watershed if anyone is interested in volunteering. I spoke with the director yesterday and they are willing to review more applications for this weekend’s (11/10)training session–so disregard the due date in this link:
We have set the date for the next training for Stream Team volunteers. Training will happen twice a year in May and November – and the next one is on Saturday November 10, 2012 from 9am-1pm in Malibu Creek State Park. I decided to add a classroom component to this training to talk in a little more detail about what we measure, why we measure, and how the data is used. Then we’ll have the field training following that. Please spread the word and share this with friends and anyone that may be interested. Here’s a link with info and how to apply.
http://www.healthebay.org/event/stream-team-volunteer-training-0
Katherine Pease
thank you for all the fascinating posts!
Sincerely,
Yvonne B.
I always noticed this annoying pot hole on Clinton St and Cahuenga just below Melrose then realized one day it was always there year after year and always draining water. Remembered your blog and looked up the loction and behold a lost stream 🙂 Fascinating to see nature sometimes has to find its way.
Love LA history and what it was before thank you for informing us.
Baseline flows are the real dilemma for our watershed health. As a hydrographer with open channel water current metering equipment my project will be to begin an annual stream survey of most base of mountains inflows but also downstream discharges through measurable flood control channels at low minimal flows basin wide.
I grew up in El Sereno and lived on Van Horne Street. Where the street ended was the borderline with South Pasadena and when I moved in was known popularly as” The Creek” as youth we were afraid to go into it, although it was teaming with wildlife. My only attempt after a rainstorm was go get stuck in the muck and lose my shoes and socks. While this was a neighborhood in transition and considered a step above East L.A. an old white woman who lived on my block said that it was a watering hole for cattle which were drove down Van Horne to Huntington Drive for the slaughterhouse. I now know it was one of many water sources as part of the El Castillo DE Rosa land holdings. Another place were I heard was a creek was behind Cal State L.A.( which by the way was the Ranch house of the El Castillo landowners and which was demolished as a result of the college being build without a single plaque listing it was a historical site. Our white neighbor said he used to catch frogs and I guess the Western Pond turtles there.And there was plenty of wildlife. If the Environmental Act was enacted by 1960 I would have asked South Pasadena to leave the Creek area alone( they probably would not have, in fact they were so prejudiced the erected an Wall separating South Pass from El Sereno). One last piece of watershed was in Hazard Park where a small stream was behind the park and I used to catch crayfish there.I miss those times and I am so glad of finding your website. By the way, as a member of the Sediment Committee of the Sylmar Neighborhood council we are fighting the attempts to dump sediment on our North and South canyons. We use as an example your experiences at losing the Arcadian Woodlands.
It’s really wonderful to hear these stories, which show so much about the history of our neighborhoods. I hope you continue to spread the word. Also, thank you for your activism with the Sediment Committee. It’s so important to keep our voices active and out there on these issues.
So happy to have found this site! Does anyone know about the weird little spring near near the bridge at San Pascual park? It’s water bubbling out of a concrete culvert that has no ‘other side’. It’s right next to the arroyo, but the water level is 20 feet higher that the bottom of the channel, and the outflow is directly downhill from the obvious sources of water, across the arroyo! Here’s a link to it on google maps. https://earth.google.com/web/@34.12097839,-118.16777121,182.60870181a,260.30233392d,35y,0.26583911h,0t,0r
I’ve been searching everywhere for info about this mystery spring, which flows a few hundred feet before turning into a swamp and then draining into the arroyo.