Visited Mount Washington parks - Elyria Canyon
In my quest to visit every major hilltop park - or "park" in Northeast LA, I visited Mount Washington, another hilltop neighborhood in the same region.
I checked out two separate places. One, Elyria Canyon Park, was extremely nice canyon park with a lot of locals walking around, and a ton of plants I haven't seen anywhere else. The other was Kite Hill - another not-officially-a-park strip of undeveloped land with incredible views, just over the hill from Elyria canyon. I'll get to that one in a second post.
Getting to Elyria is easy. There are multiple roads you can use to walk into the park - I chose to enter on Wollam Street, where I drew the blue arrow.
The entire park slopes downward from the Elyria Drive access point. If you want to walk down into the park and then back uphill to your car, go to Elyria Drive, I guess (no clue if it's easy to park there). If you want to walk uphill into the park and downhill to your car, choose Burnell, Wollam, or Bridgeport.
We visited on an extremely cloudy day, so I completely missed my opportunity to get any additional weird shots of Downtown LA - if it's possible to get one from this park, which I'm not sure it is. It mainly faces Griffith Park. Here is my phone camera struggling to make the view across Atwater Village to Griffith look as vibrant as possible:
Here's a shot from my digital camera, which is IMO more accurate to the mood of the day:
The park was extremely damp and quite chilly, and we saw a ton of bugs and plants here that I haven't seen anywhere else in NELA. Specifically, I saw a ton of Milk Thistle:
The center of the park is at the bottom of the canyon, which makes it a lot shadier and clammier than the other hilltops I've been visiting. It felt like I was entering a bizarre little microbiome with its own climate. I expect this, plus the damp weather, is what made my time here feel so different from the other places I've visted over the last two weeks. It's really interesting to go to a place like this and see plants at various stages of flowering/fruiting based on how much sunlight they're getting and where precisely they're located in the canyon.
I love hiking on rainy or cloudy days in Los Angeles because when you're in a canyon like this one, the clouds make it feel like someone has gently placed a lid on top of the landscape. It makes the canyons feel very, very different - your eye is no longer drawn upward to the blue sky, and everything feels a lot closer and more claustrophobic. It's a very cool perspective-shift.
This was perhaps the nicest "actual park" I've been to so far. It is very small but very dense. I felt that if I'd just sat down for a few hours, I could have photographed dozens of different organisms and slammed them all into iNat to blow out my yearly record all in one place, haha. Ascot Hills was great for hiking - it's much bigger and the walks you can do are a lot longer - but it didn't have this density of things to see.
I'll have to go back when it's sunny!