Erica Ponygirl: Another Take On Horse Controversy
This is an issue that too few LA residents are really aware of or understand. Horses are a small blip on the radar of our citizenry for the most part but we horse people are hanging onto our last corners of town to keep the hobby alive !!! A small price to pay for the hundreds of square miles bikes can go and horses cant in LA. We are trying to keep the horsie lifestyle alive as long as we can!!!!
Hope alls well with you! I always enjoy reading your Boryanabooks! I had to comment on the piece about the Burbank horse bridge since I’ve been in that group for the last 40 years and have been privy to all the emails back and forth about their meetings and encounters.
The bike people will never give up on harrassing the horse people on the subject of bikes on the horse trails. It never ends and at least now there is an official motion to end the conflict for a while in Griffith park! That bridge was built for HORSES only! No one ever rode bikes on park trails back when it was built, but now with the big bike craze in our modern culture, the bike people want to go wherever they like. Unfortunately horses havent changed in the last millenia and the bike people dont get it. That bridge goes only to a dedicated, fenced in horse trail that has been there since 1938!
There is NO bike path on that section of the river bank !!!! I just hope that the city can continue the bike path past the Victory Bl end point and build it somewhere in a proper and well designed manner for all constituents at some point! It would b nice if the bike path went all the way up the flood channel to Balboa park one day! They did a fabulous job down below Victory, complete with flashing lights at horse trail crossings, bridges, landscaping, historic plackards for wildlife and history buffs, picnic areas, etc. But the bike folks are never satisfied.
The whole road lane line infrastructure on the LA streets has been dedicated to them, creating less lanes for cars, more traffic congestion where the lanes neck down to allow for the bike lane, etc. It is a work in progress, but when it comes to horses and bikes, its a no win situation. Horses freak out at the drop of a hat, and all it takes is one incident where someone gets hurt, and it is game over. There have been countless “wrecks” like that on other trails with bikes flying around a corner and scaring a horse, all over our county trail network. Bikes need more education on horses in order to properly operate in their midst……. Until that day arrives, we are still trying to get along !!
Happy trails!!!
Erica
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Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
