San Gabriel River (California)
The San Gabriel River flows 60.6 miles (97.5 km) through southern Los Angeles County, California in the United States. Its main stem is about 43 miles (69 km) long, while its farthest tributaries extend almost 18 miles (29 km) altogether. It drains a long, narrow watershed basin extending from high in the San Gabriel Mountains above the eastern Los Angeles Basin, across the San Gabriel Valley, to the Pacific Ocean.
The river derives its name from the Spanish Mission San Gabriel Arcángel founded in 1771, now in the present day city of San Gabriel. It was free flowing with natural banks and a riparian zone habitat lined with riparian forests, marshes, and grasslands for much of its length and a large estuary at its mouth until the last century. Today most of the San Gabriel after leaving the foothills is restrained in a broad concrete flood control channel, and impounded in places by debris and stormwater management pond dams.
Read more about San Gabriel River (California): Course, Ecology, Watershed, History, Floods, River Modifications, Crossings
Famous quotes containing the words san and/or river:
“It is an odd thing, but every one who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“This ferry was as busy as a beaver dam, and all the world seemed anxious to get across the Merrimack River at this particular point, waiting to get set over,—children with their two cents done up in paper, jail-birds broke lose and constable with warrant, travelers from distant lands to distant lands, men and women to whom the Merrimack River was a bar.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)