Close your eyes, take a deep breath and listen to the sounds around your L.A. neighborhood. You can hear the glorious roar of a leaf blower. And, ah yes, there’s the thrum of a police helicopter. Are those fireworks? Sounds like the Dodgers won.
Though this city is many things, it’s not quiet. But unlike other major metropolitan areas, L.A. is blessed with several parks and mountain ranges. Within a quick drive, you can be alone on a trail in Angeles National Forest, or even just in a park far enough from the freeway to hear a bird’s song over the honking.
At some point in your time here, you’ve probably surrounded yourself in nature when you needed some calm. But did you know that there’s a way to measure that peace and quiet?
It’s all thanks to the nonprofit Quiet Parks International. The all-volunteer group’s mission is to protect quiet places. It does that, first, by conducting quiet studies at nominated parkland. After collecting that data, it awards public lands a handful of distinctions: wilderness quiet park, urban quiet park, quiet trail, quiet conservation area and quiet marine park. It maintains a map that shows spaces around the world, including more than a dozen places around Southern California, that have been nominated for one of those categories.
Gordon Hempton, the group’s co-founder, has dedicated his life to protecting the quiet, which he argues is not only important for our physical and mental health but also is a birthright of every person.
“It is not a luxury. It is an essential, just like clean water and clean air,” Hempton, an acoustic ecologist, said. “Those who live in noisy neighborhoods have every reason to be mad because that jet that’s flying to other places and passing over your house is not only taking your quiet but using a community resource. The air the sound travels through … it is owned by the people.”
Below you’ll find the majority of locations that have been nominated for a Quiet Parks International distinction in Southern California. The list includes parks and trails along rolling hillsides, beaches and forests.
Since these locations haven’t yet been evaluated by Hempton’s group, I did a bit of my own quiet study for each location. Using the National Transportation Noise Map, I assessed the average noise level of planes, trains and automobiles in the area around the nominated park. Though the information is not real-time, it is one more piece of proof that these locations can help you decompress even more than a forest visualization meditation (that will undoubtedly be interrupted by a car honking).