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Full Moon Ride: Griffith Park & L.A. River by Bike
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7727 Reads
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 If you want to get to know the real sensuality of Los Angeles, to embrace it au naturel, then tour it at night by bicycle. You see, hear and smell things you'd never notice from the safety of your car, and you get close to the organic soul of the city, the land beneath all the commerce and development and distractions.
By the near-full moon, eight or nine of us hopped into the saddle last night and cruised up Vermont into Griffith Park, then down the back side to the L.A. River and home through Silver Lake.
Biking L.A. at night is an intimate romance with the streetscape. The smell of frying onions, the splash of tires through puddles from a carwash, the visceral WHOMP of passing boomcars ...
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Taco stand, Vermont & Prospect
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Old lamps line the road up past the Greek Theatre
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Smog moon, eucalyptus trees
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Lights were out in the tunnel. We rode through in complete darkness, singing like monks in the tunnel's echo chamber.
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Whether your ride is a finely-dialed machine with full tires and taut cables or a POS rattletrap with near-tacoe'd wheels, a night ride taps all the right primal nerves, washes away your sins and anxieties and restores you to a place where you're 12 years old and feel like you really have begun to figure things out in life.
Traffic whipped along Vermont, relatively safe since it was too early for anyone to be very drunk, and we made the border of the park by 9:45.
The Greek was dark for the night, so the ride up the long hill was quiet beneath the canopy of fragrant live oaks and magnolia trees.
A couple of brave souls from the Bicycle Kitchen were humping it on fixed-hub bikes (no gears, no freewheels). Rough work, standing most of the way, but what the hell, it's an ascetic aesthetic, and they swear by it.
The rest of us granny-geared it up to the crest to an overlook that was well worth the climb - a sea of glittering lights that rolled from east L.A. almost to the ocean and a distant hush of traffic punctuated by sirens, car horns, the occasional LAPD chopper sweeping a neighborhood with its million-candlepower spotbeam.
The cruise down the fire road to the river was spookier than the last time we did a full-moon ride. The moon hadn't risen quite far enough to bathe the Burbank side of the ridge, so we moseyed down on feathered brakes, eyes straining through the darkness for potholes.
I rode in front with the one other guy who had a headlight, the two of us yelling "HOLE!" and the like for everyone behind us. Before long, though, we doused the lamps and let our night vision build up to the point where we could move faster without the lights.
Tanker hoisted up on scaffolding. Why? Another mystery of the park.
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Boogieing down the river path, taillights akimbo
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I love the colors of different grades of industrial floodlamps reflecting in the L.A. river. The red streak overhead is a passing plane. This photo is completely unretouched.
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Moonrise over the river. Chirping frogs added a wall of peaceful, pastoral sound to the rush of traffic on the 5, up the other side of the bike path.
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Moon, neon, oglers' vehicles.
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Heaven. 17 miles of hard hillclimbing and easy cruising later, we were starving.
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You could feel your eyes trying to grow extra rods and cones in the near-blackness. One rider saw not one, but two owls perched on fences off the side of the road. A couple of times I found myself coming too fast into a curve because I couldn't quite see its edges, and then skidding back into line.
Another member of our crew (who shall, out of respect, remain nameless) biffed when a nasty uneven pavement joint sucked his wheels out from under him.
But he came up unbloodied, his bike mostly intact and we rode on along the park's borders, as the road leveled out before dumping us onto the river path.
The moon hung low over the river. I spotted an egret fishing in a pool of silver-blue light, heard frogs peeping in the streambed.
If you get close to the L.A. River, you begin to get a sense of what the river was really like before the Corps of Engineers culvertized it, and you wonder what it would be like if plans to remove the concrete and restore the river actually succeed.
We cruised on the long, gradual downslope of the river path, past the huge glow of ABC Studios, past industrial landscape on the far banks to our left, past traffic rushing north on the 5 to our right.
At Silver Lake Boulevard we hung a right and cruised back toward home, and a final stop to soothe our burning metabolisms with meatbombs and soda at Tacos Mexico.
You get a wonderful endorphin buzz when you step off your pedals and onto the pavement after a vigorous night ride, a floaty feeling that stays with you through the carbo-load and friendly sleepy 1:30 a.m. banter, and on into bed.
Can't wait for the next one.
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| Posted by: Mack_Reed on Friday, June 24, 2005 - 08:59 PM
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