Normal NELA parks: Ascot Hills and Ernest E. Debs
I mentioned that starting last week, I realized I could easily just go to every hilltop park in Northeast LA - so I did! Between going to weirder places like Flat Top and Elephant Hill, I also I visited two of the more landscaped, funded, and highly-attended parks in the area - Ascot Hills and Ernest E. Debs park.
These parks are all super closer together. In the screenshot below, the blue arrows are pointing at Elephant Hill and Flat Top, and the red arrows are pointing at Ernest E. Debs and Ascot Hills.
These two parks are Pretty Regular. They are, however, a lot quieter than places like Griffith Park... though the views they offer are probably even more dramatic.
Debs is the larger and more manicured park. It's got picnic areas, grills, non-native plant landscaping... and, when I attended, it was also home to a massive film shoot with giant trailers and a craft coffee stall and everything. It does, however, have a lot of wild-feeling trails out in the woodland on its north side.
The spine of the park leading to that northern half is a well-maintained asphalt road with views of downtown:
I'd hoped to spend longer here, but my blood sugar crashed and I had to go back down the hill and find a meal. I'll be back someday soon, I think.
Ascot Hills, to the southeast, is a lot wilder. I saw some coyotes at sundown...
And a shit ton of milk snails, which are the main (invasive) snail you'll see all over the LA area. I've visited parks in LA where they get so thick on the ground that you can't walk without crunching them under your feet. Luckily I didn't experience that here:
Ascot Hills is a park, with landscaping and educational placards and marked walking paths, but I wasn't able to find picnic spots - it's really much more about being a place you can walk around and feel like you're in nature. You can get some really nice views at sundown across the park's central canyon.
And downtown, like all these parks:
I think Ascot Hills is my favorite and most-accessible park so far of the ones I've visited. It is clearly properly supported and funded while still feeling a lot more "nature-y" than your average park. Unfortunately, getting there from where I am via bus would be a pain in the ass. Biking there would be fully 20 minutes faster than taking transit.
I've been visiting all these places by car primarily because I'm still recovering from the flu and am getting winded with even short bike rides. I've been prepping to bike all over the place again partially by going on these walks in the first place. This also means that I get to avoid the laborious uphill biking that would be required to get me into parks like Flat Top and Ernest E. Debs.
I do hope to bike to some of the remaining parks on my list - but that won't be this coming week. I'm too busy to take four hours out of my day this coming week to bike out to one of these parks, drag myself uphill, find a place to eat so I don't have my blood sugar crash, then get home.
Some of the remaining parks on my list include "Paradise Hill," which is another one of those barely-or-not-really-officially-a-park parks, with its own local supporters like Flat Top and Elephant Hill.
The reason I'm doing this is that it's just an endlessly deep and interesting well of local history in the way that developed neighborhoods are simply not. A lot of hillsides in this part of Los Angeles are privately owned and divided densely into lots that may or may to be actually developable. If you zoom in far enough on any green space, you'll see stuff like this, which I screenshot from the Mount Washington neighborhood.
Someone is walking, biking, or driving along these tracks. And the moment you start googling those labels, you'll start finding decades of weird history, like this article from last year about Eunisses Hernandez simply closing the entire road the tracks lead off from because there'd been too much nighttime crime.
I love looking at maps!!