By Terelle Jerricks, Managing Editor and Micah Smith, Editorial Intern
San Pedro’s land barons and iconic founding fathers, advocates for green open spaces for the public were concerned about the speed of urbanization and city sprawl robbing this city’s citizens of their access to nature.
In this town, Peck Park and its crown jewels, Alma, Rena and Leland parks, named after Peck’s three children, had been the beneficiary of that interest for more than a hundred years.
In this town, every generation, civic organizations, the chamber of commerce, and residents poured themselves into protecting this town’s open spaces, with this moment being no different.
San Pedro resident Gwendolyn Henry and a merry band of cohorts called the Friends of the Canyon are no different.
Henry has worked as a volunteer at a number of different parks throughout the Los Angeles Basin and has served in the forestry service. So her perspective on parks and open spaces is informed by experience.
Henry, a lifelong camper who served as a YMCA youth counselor, and like-minded friends and others rattled by last year’s shooting at the park and the series of fires in the canyon area before that, have stepped up advocacy on behalf of the park.
She says science is one of her passions, and believes it is best taught outdoors.
“Most scientific principles, in regards to biology, you just start understanding when you learn more about the environment around you and how nature works,” Henry said.
The park was renovated 12 years ago as part of a $4.8 million project that cleaned up stream water runoff that courses through the bottom of the canyon, installed new hiking trails and foot bridges over the stream, replaced weeds with native plants and vegetation and educational signs.
Also known as Mira Flores Canyon, the 3-mile ravine cuts east from the back of Peck Park toward the harbor. Goats and cows once grazed on the property, which was near a dairy farm that long ago shut down.
But after a series of fires and a shooting, residents and civic leaders like Henry have become reengaged in this town’s natural resources.
“[Those fires] … it was through human behavior that this happened,” Henry said. “There were people who parked nearby and there’s a lot of inlets where they shoot fireworks. That’s how one of them started.”
Alluding to transients without shelter who are known to camp out in the canyon, Henry believes there are cases in which they start a campfire that ignited something else.
“There were other people who were concerned about public safety,” Henry explained. “But many of us are of the mind that if we care for the park and we manage the park and manage the native plants, and the overgrowth of grasses, the dangers would be minimized.”
Henry noted that like parks throughout Los Angeles County and the rest of the country, open spaces and parks like Peck Park and Mira Flores Canyon are supported by community people who create trusts and 501(c)3s in order to create funding sources and a pool of people who become educators, docents who put on programming.
“We’re just trying to revitalize the canyon,” Henry said. “There’s a lot of exciting programming going on such as pickleball, which has really taken off.
“Grass, of course, is not native to the Americas. There were a lot of other plants that weren’t those fast growing, fast drying grasses. Most of them were European imports.
“Even before climate change became more of a thing where we’re having longer summers, and drier longer, dry periods, and the grass gets dry very quickly … Even before then, the California climate allowed fires to happen very quickly, and it’s a fuel that really takes off and it’s very damaging,” Henry said.
One of the initial goals of Friends of the Canyon has been the restoration of Mira Flores canyon. Henry was particularly inspired after visiting the community gardens in East Los Angeles on Cesar Chavez Day, where farmers were growing vegetables.
“I got into a whole dialogue with one of the main people who helped spearhead the Avalon Gardens and a local farmer recounted giving some high school kids a tour of the garden,” Henry said. “When he got to the tomato plants, he said, ‘Here, do you guys want to try this?’ It was a tomato of course. It was the most amazing tomato… it was going to be sweet. It was summer, straight off the vine and the kids went, ‘no, it’s dirty. We’ll go to McDonald’s and they got clean tomatoes they made themselves,’ and a whole conversation ensues. And I was like, ‘What?!’”
Henry noted that people are living a very odd urban experience that is further away from what we’ve always been part of.
The veteran forestry worker said that open spaces are more than just places to decompress, noting there are studies that show that people who are in natural open places have better mental outlooks, lower blood pressure and slew of other well documented health benefits.
Aside from the human health benefits, there’s the protection of endangered animal species in their natural environment like the Palos Verdes blue butterfly.
There’s a lot of little butterflies all over the coast. Their host plants are the rattlesnake plant, like the one Henry recently bought, which has little pods that mimic the sound of a rattle (it’s also called locoweed by ranchers. The scientific name is Astragalus). The Palos Verdes blue butterfly relies on that plant, Henry explained.
“Over time, a lot of [those plants] had been removed,” Henry said. “They actually thought the blue butterfly had gone extinct. And it just so happened that in Friendship Park, there still happened to be some of that plant available and they actually rediscovered the Palos Verdes blue butterfly.” The Palos Verdes blue butterfly was actually found at the Naval Fuel Depot on North Gaffey Street
At the end of the day, Henry sees herself and her comrades in the Friends of the Canyon as (what she called) a bunch of old farts who just want to inspire kids to do the thing and know about the natural environment. And not just that, but to know what generations of San Pedrans have had the luxury to do, know the treasure that is Peck Park and Mira Flores Canyon.
“There’s lots of things to be done,” Henry said. “But if we could all spend a day in the park, dig a couple of holes and put some plants in them, and then every so often come back and pull some weeds around it, we’d be closer to our goals.”
The nature lover noted that the park, above all else, is a place for kids.
“I have heard countless stories of kids who knew very little about nature coming to the park and it changed their lives, leading to a few of them taking up biology and environmentalism later on,” Henry said.