If you haven’t read the tweets or facebook posts, the location for Saturday’s clean up has been changed. Normally, a story like this is hidden under a shroud of secrecy, but today you get to see beyond the looking glass to understand why.
We didn’t have a lot of time to put this together, so we thought it would be natural to partner with Councilman David Ryu’s office since Phil lives in his district. They were real amenable to the idea, the main work we had to do was to find a spot in his district that needed cleaning up that had a high use of cyclists.
Although I ride the Hollywood Hills all the time, you never look for trash with a fine tooth comb. I first went down Nichols Canyon because it would be great to tie in with La Grange’s Sunday Ride, but surprisingly, there wasn’t that much trash there, except near the bottom where it’s difficult to get to.
Next, I headed down Mulholland to Cahuenga figuring there would be a buildup at Runyon Canyon. Somehow, it was relatively clean there. On the 1.4 mile descent, there were pockets of trash, but getting there was difficult because of parking restrictions.
Not completely satisfied, I climbed back up to check out Mulholland to Laurel Canyon, but saw sparse results. As you reach that intersection, the road become part of Paul Krekorian’s district, so were trying to keep out too many cooks.
Ryu’s picks up more in it’s entirety again around Coldwater Canyon, but we wanted to avoid that area out of respect to Raoul, the trash picking up machina!
The best we could do was to use the Hollywood Bowl Lookout and we’d deal with the tenuous parking situation somehow.
Fast forward to Tuesday, when LACBC Board Member Doug John and I did a circuitous route to downtown to check out our cleanup area. Hmmm. It looked like someone had cleaned up a bit more. There was still work to be done, but not as much as we had anticipated.
The next day, I did a ride taking me along Mulholland from Coldwater to Benedict Canyon and noticed around the Melhorn Overlook that there was trash to be found. I thought it would be nice to change the location, but maybe it was too late.
Right before I drove to work, I got a text from Phil thinking the same thing. Oddly, before I could do anything about it, I got a phone call from Alice Roth, one of Ryu’s Field Deputy, and figured it was kismet.
Bottom line, Phil isn’t doing this for the press photo, he really wants to clean some trash. And eat some cookies.
It’s not too late to sign up. RSVP here for tomorrow’s cleanup.