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Want Adventure Without Leaving The City? Kayak The LA River

LOS ANGELES (CBS/AP) — This weekend city officials will begin offering canoe and kayak trips along parts of the Los Angeles River, a long maligned waterway that winds through the region as a concrete flood-control channel.

Beginning Aug. 13, kayakers and naturalists will take participants along a stretch through the San Fernando Valley's Sepulveda Basin flood control channel where the water is 10 to 15 feet deep.

The trip "Paddle Down The L.A. River" begins in Balboa Park just off of Balboa Boulevard in Encino.

"What you're going to see is an opportunity for a handful of people every single day...to be able to visit this river and to be on it -- not walking alongside it, not looking at it from a helicopter, not looking at it from a bridge, but actually be on the water," L.A. City Councilman Tony Cardenas said at the program's debut this weekend.

Tickets will be $50 on weekends and free on Fridays to local youth programs. The program could later be expanded to include other scenic portions of the river.

The announcement comes a year after U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson declared the entire concrete-lined river "traditional navigable waters," a designation that allows the application of Clean Water Act protections.

The program will reportedly run until the end of September.

For more information, visit Paddle The LA River.

(TM and © Copyright 2011 CBS Local Media, a division of CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2010 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

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