Fifty-one Miles: Walking the Los Angeles River

Honor Award

Student Collaboration

Los Angeles, California, United States
Leslie Dinkin, Associate ASLA; Hannah Flynn, Associate ASLA; Nina Weithorn, Student ASLA; Camille Shooshani; Rio Asch Phoenix;
Faculty Advisors: Alexander Robinson;
University of Southern California

A team of landscape architecture students, a documentarian, a photographer, and community researchers followed the entire Los Angeles River on foot.

Over 51 miles and 44 neighborhoods, the team encountered and documented what has died, survived, and thrived in this industrial and wild landscape.

Image Credit: Rio Asch Phoenix
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The Los Angeles River serves as the hydrological bedrock upon which Los Angeles itself was built.

At one time, the area was covered with willows, cottonwoods and oaks, supporting one of the largest populations of Indigenous People in North America.

Image Credit: Library of Congress; University of Southern California Libraries and California Historical Society; Leslie Dinkin.
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Over one million people live within a ten minute walk of the Los Angeles River, but the 51-mile channel was not designed for them.

Since it was armored with concrete in 1938, the river’s singular purpose has been to defend the city from flooding.

Image Credit: Library of Congress; University of Southern California Libraries and California Historical Society; United States Army Corps of Engineers; Leslie Dinkin.
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Upon completion, an engineer commented that the early Spanish explorers “would never recognize the Los Angeles River as it is at this writing.”

Only three segments—the Sepulveda Basin, the Glendale Narrows, and the Long Beach estuary—retain a soft, muddy bottom instead of a concrete floor.

Image Credit: Hannah Flynn, Leslie Dinkin, Rio Asch Phoenix
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The act of walking embodies a form of meditation, enabling the team to track minute changes in the landscape.

It offers a visceral experience of the river's complexity, fostering a deeper understanding of its ecological, cultural, and historical significance.

Image Credit: Hannah Flynn, Rio Asch Phoenix
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While the river is fifty-one miles long, our group meandered in and out of the drainage channel and sometimes needed to take long detours.

In total, we walked 63.32 miles over six days from Canoga Park to Long Beach.

Image Credit: Nina Weithorn
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To simply walk next to the river, we had to jump over fences and wear construction vests as a precaution.

The trip required extensive scouting, gathering insights from river experts, and meticulously studying Google Earth.

Image Credit: Nina Weithorn, Leslie Dinkin
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Despite flowing through the heart of the city, for many Angelenos, the Los Angeles River is as unknown as an arctic glacier.

Utilizing multiple documentation methods gave us the broadest qualitative and quantitative view of the river.

Image Credit: Rio Asch Phoenix, Leslie Dinkin, Hannah Flynn
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Curious by the prospect of experiencing a landscape typically observed only in pieces, we documented from the headwaters to the estuary.

In some stretches, the character of the river changes significantly. In other stretches, walking along the river feels like walking along a treadmill.

Image Credit: Rio Asch Phoenix, Leslie Dinkin
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Day one begins at the Headwaters in Canoga Park and ends in the Sepulveda Basin, where the concrete gives way to a wild soft bottom riparian forest.

Within the Sepulveda Basin, shopping carts are eaten up by plants, soaked mattresses resemble rocks, and plastic bags look like spider webs.

Image Credit: Nina Weithorn
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As we walked, we observed patterns along the Los Angeles River, such as shopping carts and informal access points.

Locked gates were a constant obstacle, and signage was inconsistent. Many access points were simply informal holes in fences.

Image Credit: Hannah Flynn, Rio Asch Phoenix
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When debris and discarded items from the surrounding areas make their way in the river channel, they become entangled with the riparian vegetation.

The trash can be seen as an archive, offering Los Angeles a reflection of itself.

Image Credit: Leslie Dinkin, Nina Weithorn
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Despite the efforts to inhibit the growth of vegetation, we noticed fissures in the concrete, bursting with plant life.

Riparian grasses emerge from every crack in the riverbed and thick bright green layers of algae swim along the bottom of the channel.

Image Credit: Rio Asch Phoenix, Leslie Dinkin
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As we walked across Los Angeles, we passed under a hundred bridges, some of which were built a century ago.

In this urban understory, we ate our lunches, applied sunscreen, adjusted our layers, and admired sights we had never seen from above.

Image Credit: Rio Asch Phoenix, Leslie Dinkin
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The Los Angeles River is at an important crossroads with multiple entities and stakeholders reconsidering its design.

To amplify community voices and gain insight into Angeleno’s existing connections to the river, we hosted two story slam events.

Image Credit: Hannah Flynn, Nina Weithorn, Andie Dinkin, Camille Shooshani
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We invited community members and river lovers to share and listen to stories about the LA River to a collective audience of nearly 1000 people.

17 different storytellers, including a Gabrieleño cultural keeper, two urban fly-fishers and a city ecologist, shared their personal narratives.

Image Credit: Hannah Flynn, Robert Flynn, Rio Asch Phoenix,
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“

What a journey! The collaboration of the team and stakeholders shows an authentic commitment to the river. The river is a massive infrastructure when viewed from above. We applaud you for bringing us down to the life flourishing in even the cracks in the concrete and everything in between.

”

- 2024 Awards Jury

Project Statement

Over six days in early August 2023, our team, led by three landscape architecture students specializing in ecology and mapping, urbanism and access, and heritage conservation and narrative ethnography, embarked on a journey following the length of the LA River. Joined by a photographer, a documentarian, and community researchers, we chronicled the 51-mile trek from Canoga Park to Long Beach. Contrary to the prevailing notion that the LA River is desolate and lifeless, we witnessed a different reality—thousands of birds enjoying accidental algae mats from low-flow spillovers, native shrubs and trees bursting out of cracks in the ground, and clear groundwater bubbling up through the very concrete designed to keep it hidden away forever.

Project Narrative

Before it was the Los Angeles River, it was Paayme Paxaayt, the “West River,” a meandering, transient body of water that brought alluvium-rich soils to the Los Angeles Basin. However, as settlers arrived and developed the region, the river became a potential threat—its natural variability posing risks of flooding. In response, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began a monumental project in 1938, encasing the entire 51-mile river in concrete to protect the surrounding urban sprawl. The massive undertaking severed the river’s connection to its groundwater and erased its identity as a living waterway. Since then, the river’s singular purpose has been to defend the city from flooding, channeling rainwater into the Pacific, with freeways constructed both above and beside it.

The complete transformation of the LA River symbolizes an outdated perspective—viewing dynamic, complex ecosystems as fixable or controllable. The river’s evolution reflects not only a city’s complex relationship with the wild, but also the lengths we go to inhabit certain spaces. Following the completion of the channel in the 1960s, most of the river was enclosed by fences, and all access to the water was strictly prohibited with heavy fines.

Despite these obstacles, there is a rich history of fighting to reintegrate the river and its people. In 1986, Lewis MacAdams, writer and founder of Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR), cut a hole through a fence and declared the river “open for the people.” After the Army Corps announced the channel was unsafe for recreation in 2008, George Wolfe and Heather Wylie kayaked down the river over three days and released a documentary called “Rock the Boat—Saving America's Wildest River.” Two years later, the EPA declared the river as “traditional, navigable waters” and it was protected under the Clean Water Act.

Future planning for the Los Angeles River is at a crucial crossroads. We could continue as we have, treating the river as a regional-scale storm drain, fortifying it with yet more concrete. Or, the river could become a city-wide corridor that reconnects fractured communities and ecosystems. The struggle today to revitalize the Los Angeles River mirrors larger debates about sustainability and resilience in face of climate change. As communities continue to grapple with increasingly severe and frequent natural disasters, the river serves as a microcosm of broader social and ecological challenges. The river’s fate embodies the tensions between development and conservation.

Currently, there is no official continuous path along the LA River. With support from Art-in-Action and USC's sustainability fund, our team was curious about what it would take to navigate the entire river on foot. Throughout the week, each member recorded unique data sets; for example one focused on the fugitive plant life emerging through the concrete, while another documented both sanctioned and unsanctioned human access points along the waterway. We are eager to share what life on the river looks like right now, how it feels to interact with it so intimately, and to imagine its future.

We believe that on-the-ground, qualitatively-focused documentation of the river is vital to the current revitalization process. By increasing awareness, we create opportunities for individuals to discover their personal connection to the river. In the face of the climate crisis, a personal connection to shared natural spaces is key to transforming apathy into care.