It’s a sweltering summer day, no rain for months, but Nichols Canyon Creek is gurgling merrily on its two-mile journey from a rocky outcrop high in the Santa Monica Mountains to the white-hot sidewalk of Hollywood Boulevard.
As California languishes in drought, the spring-fed creek is cool and shaded by sycamore, oak, sumac, and laurel. Houses overlook its banks. Birds and insects flit above the water. Frogs croak. Deer, coyotes, and other animals quench their thirst.
Amid this riparian splendor, the creek feels like a fever dream of a greener, more sustainable city that lies maddeningly out of reach for most Angelenos. Maybe that’s because, instead of winding through the Los Angeles Basin, Nichols Canyon Creek becomes a canal two-thirds of the way down, then disappears altogether into a storm drain as it hits Hollywood Boulevard.
After a series of destructive floods in the early 20th century, the city encased the Los Angeles River in concrete and channeled most of its creeks into concrete ditches or underground rather than restrict development in flood-prone areas. And so Nichols Canyon Creek, which flows year-round and ranges from a trickle to a four-foot-wide stream, depending on the season and terrain, completes its journey through the L.A. Basin in underground pipes before ultimately dumping into Santa Monica Bay. Its fate mirrors that of all the other creeks and springs as well as the excess groundwater and runoff that a county of 10 million people generates. Engineers have done an efficient job of removing water from this urban landscape.
Too efficient, according to coastal agencies, conservationists, and the passionate advocates for re-wilding the region’s streams and creeks who are known affectionately as creek freaks. They say that as water becomes scarcer, more of the local supply must be captured in the region’s aquifers instead of being diverted into storm drains and concrete channels and routed to the sea. Capturing rain and runoff higher up on the watershed would also keep it out of the L.A. River and Ballona Creek, the 8.8-mile concrete-encased river that flows through Culver City and Playa Vista on the Westside of L.A. before emptying into the sea.
“You don’t want water to move quickly,” says Melanie Winter, director of the nonprofit the River Project, who visited Nichols Canyon Creek one recent day to point out its benefits. “You want it to meander through the landscape, interacting with the plants and soil.” That, says Winter,
