Stan’s Obligatory Blog

A week or so ago, I saw an item in the Los Angeles Times about how they had planted a new tree in Griffith Park in memory of George Harrison. The former tree had died last year after being infested with beetles, which of course made the news around the world. We’d gone to see the stump of the old tree, so I thought we should go see the new tree today. Also, I’d read recently that the city is doing an experiment with allowing car traffic on Mt Hollywood Drive for the first time since 1989 in an effort to relieve congestion brought on by the crush of cars bringing people to the park to see the Hollywood sign. So I wanted to take a ride up there so we could see just how bad it was, and decide for ourselves just what we thought of it.

The day was cool and overcast. It was actually quite pleasant for riding. We headed out by our usual route across Eagle Rock. We had a relatively big group today, and we even picked up a couple new riders on the road who joined us for a part of the ride. We went up into Griffith Park to the observatory, where we saw the new tree.

Leaving the observatory, we went down to Mt Hollywood Drive. We were expecting the gate to be open. GT had been riding up there during the week, and he told us about the traffic on the road then. But the gate was closed, and there were no cars. There were cones and signs directing traffic everywhere, but for some reason, they did not open the gates today. So we rode up to the spot they had designated for people to park to see the sign. And while we were there, we looked back for the first time ever, and we saw that that spot actually has a nice view of the observatory and downtown L.A. We’d never looked back from there before.

Continuing on, we got to the top of the hill, where we regrouped before heading down the other side. Along the road there, we saw movie trailers parked on the road, and then, just around the bend, we saw two wrecked cars. Apparently, they had been filming something that involved those cars, and I guess they weren’t done with them yet. The one that was completely upside-down had a hose connected to it. I presume that this was to pump fuel into it so that it could explode in a fireball, like cars always do in movies.

At the bottom of the hill, we rode into Burbank for our snack stop at Priscilla’s. Then we headed back by way of the L.A. River bike path. Since the Riverside Drive bridge isn’t quite finished yet, we tried an experiment and rode back up Fletcher, but then cut across on a small street we’d never ridden on before to get to Cypress and Figueroa. Then we took Figueroa back up through Highland Park, cutting over on Ave 57 to get to South Pasadena. It turned out to be a pretty good way to go, so we’ll probably do it again in the future.

47 miles.

Here’s the route map and elevation profile: http://1134.ddns.net/routemap.php?xmlfile=georgeharrison