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The secret? Ruin their habitat.

The concrete rivers all over southern California really trip me out. Everyone’s seen the LA River in movies, right? The Terminator most quickly springs to mind. I’ve always felt weird even calling it a river. It’s like, a giant ditch.

There’s a river closer to us called the Santa Ana River that is also made of concrete. I looked up what it’s called when they pave a riverbed: channelization. (Or river engineering.) I thought this was mostly unique to California, but apparently it’s been done heavily in other parts of the US, too.

The Santa Ana has a biking trail along it. Like, the whole way. You can ride from the beach to the mountains and back again. I took Nathaniel and Dillon over to it yesterday for a quick bike ride. I’m sure everyone’s getting sick of my videos by now but I’m still enjoying them, so you’re stuck with it.

Song: Pride Tiger - “The Lucky Ones”

Man, I love that song. If you pay attention, you can see Dillon taking pictures as he’s riding. When Nathaniel disappears for awhile, he’s actually down in the riverbed.

We ended up at a railroad bridge that is no longer in use. (Well, it’s in use by a homeless person—there was a mattress and some things down underneath it. That’s gotta be some prime real estate.) So we took some pictures and then headed back to the car.

Nathaniel’s smiling at me, Dillon’s taking a picture. Dillon was taking his in black and white so I thought I’d try converting some of mine.

That’s Dillon above, Nathaniel was already up around the bend. I kept stopping to take pictures and they’d get way ahead of me. Plus I couldn’t always make it back up the inclines and would have to walk my bike! The trail is slightly uphill on the way back, and that combined with the headwind did me in.

Nathaniel and Dillon waiting for me to catch up. I told them they didn’t have to wait for me, they just had to come back and find my dead body if I didn’t show up after awhile. Nathaniel said if they didn’t wait for me they’d already be back at the car waiting there.

There were some hawks down in the river bed, which is what they’re looking at. The birds looked weird to me. Had huge bunches of tail feathers—almost more like a vulture or something. But I didn’t stop to check them out.

Dillon brought along his new camera and got some excellent shots, which I’d link to if he’d set up a flickr account, but he hasn’t.