Homeless campfire scorched half the ”greenway.”
Sigh.
I went over to check the the other side — and sort of cheered up…
Mulefat — Baccharis salicifolia. Salicifolia = ‘leaves like a willow.’ The gorgeous pink flower — somewhat a variation from the usual white — was the last bloom of summer on the Wash. The other blooms had already gone the way of all pretty pink panicles.
Cholla. Sweet and tasty; eat like watermelon. Peel the red skin and spit out the pits. 
Growing up and through the arms of a sheltering white sage, I found a saltbush. I had just seen one on Sugarloaf last week, and tried to research the species name by using the usual head-banging method: stabbing words into the search engine, which you think would describe the plant to a botanist, if you were trying to think as botanists think. Chaparral erect shrub; numerous spikes cones inflorescences small yellow flowers; leaves dull green like oak but pointy spiny spiked pike-shaped lobed; September flower. Try! If you pull up saltbush I’m a Dutchman. I finally gave up and went to check the Linnaean for mulefat; and up came a random nature page that said it featured mulefat — but not showing mulefat at ALL. But there was a saltbush in the corner of the shot, and they, mentioned it the caption. So now I know! You too. Check out the fabulous leaves. They’re soft, not sharp at all.
Like almost every plant in the CFP this could easily be a prized garden ornamental. I went to Home Depot today on a yard-redo-job, and in their entire enormous garden wing, they had NOT ONE CFP plant for sale, except the remote possibility that some of the succuulents might be CFP cactus. But they didn’t even carry cholla! (I doubled right back to the Theodore Payne Foundation, nevermind the traffic, and got the right plants for a California garden…) My California Initiative — PLANT YOUR FUTURE! STATEWIDE, NO SALES TAX ON CFP PLANTS! Write your assemblyman. California plants hardly need water and don’t need any fertilizer or soil amendments WHATSOEVER. Every nursery in California should have them on prominent display, instead of their fifteen aisles full of butterfly bushes and pesticides and hi-nitro jump-juice that are poisoning the world. A CFP yard is practically free and brings butterflies and birds and bees TO LIFE and TO YOUR DOOR; a ‘conventional’ garden (lawn; plus your normal hyper-toxed beds-and-borders full of showy exotics) is expensive and KILLS LIFE DEAD. It’s as simple as that.
Toyon, Heteromeles arbutifolia. Gasp. 
LA’s official city (native) tree!
Holly-leaf cherry 
Yummy. An Indian staple. The flesh is a thn rind, sweet for sucking when almost black. Inside is a nut like a macadamia. eaten ground as flour for atole. 
Prunus ilicifolia. (Holly is an Ilex; hence, ilicifolia, ‘leaves like holly’.
This looks like blueschist, super-metamorposed from Pre-cambrian Mendenhall gneiss. ”Fancy Rock” from the Limerock Cyn assemblage? 
I don’t know why I never looked at the rocks and boulders on the surface of Tujunga Wash, since this has been the main drain for some of the most fascinating and complex geology in the country for millions of years. Many of the rocks are a very sophisticated gray-blue granite or granodiorite. Of course the Army Corps and the Greenway builders displaced the whole site of then concretized River; but it defies Occam’s Razor to imagine they carted in a bunch of rocks from upstream or off-site. I’ve read reminiscences of Baby Boomer local kids, who remember whining with boredom when their parents shopped at Valley Plaza, so they’d send kids off to play in the parking-lot-adjacent Wash.
The Valley Village View 