Los Angeles: Bird Walks and a Car-Free Sunday

Los Angeles gives you three ways to spend a Sunday outside, and none of them needs a ticket. The slowest is the oldest: Los Angeles Audubon leads a bird walk across Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area on 8 November and again on 13 December, both starting at eight in the morning, loaner binoculars included. The second is city-scale. On 15 November CicLAvia closes 2.7 miles of Colorado Boulevard and Raymond Avenue in Pasadena to motor traffic, with no start or finish line, free water and basic bike repair at the hubs along the way. Both are quiet in different registers, one at the pace of a towhee moving through scrub, the other at the pace of a bicycle rolling past shopfronts. Kenneth Hahn charges $7 to $10 for park entrance and parking; the boulevard costs nothing. Come for the birds in November, stay for the closed street, then take the December walk as the repeat that closes the year.

The bird walks are the easier half of this plan. They start at eight, they finish before the park warms up, and the binoculars are lent rather than sold, which leaves a jacket and the entrance fee as your only extras. Kenneth Hahn's Baldwin Hills parkland is why the walk works: hawks and towhees move through open scrub instead of past a stage, and the group is small enough that a first-timer can ask what they are looking at. CicLAvia is the same idea at street scale. A 2.7-mile stretch of Colorado Boulevard and Raymond Avenue goes car-free, and because there is no official start line you join wherever you are and turn back when you want. The ride rewards the middle of the route, not the first corner, since the hubs with water and repairs sit along the way rather than at an entrance. Do the November walk first, take the boulevard when the street closes, and keep the December date as the one you repeat.