Parks

Like nervous party hosts, Orange County parks officials unveiled plans Tuesday to reopen badly burned Limestone Canyon and Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park on Saturday after months of laborious prep work. Potential killer dead trees cleared? Check. Herbicide sprayed on exotic weeds? Check. Tons of debris cleared from trail bottoms? Check. New signs, trail makers and fencing are all in place too. Now the biggest worry may be the potentially unruly guests.

In downtown Los Angeles on Saturday there were sights and smells and sounds of a milestone event the concrete urban core had not hosted in more than a century. Fresh bark. Tinkling water cascading down a rocky slope. California sycamores and coast live oaks, an expansive meadow of velvety green grass and squealing children everywhere -- in soccer fields and on slides, clambering atop playground snakes and turtles.

Nobody knows why the birds have staked their claim on this farm town 90 miles north of Sacramento. But it's the third consecutive year and, by all accounts, the worst. "The community has had enough," said Steve Holsinger, Willows' city manager. "They're just fed up." Memorial Park, a square-block stretch of green near the center of town, is encircled with yellow police tape and is off limits to normal use.

What with all the activity, all the laughing and kids running around and families sitting on park blankets eating turkey sandwiches, this could be the suburbs. But it's South L.A., next to the Harbor Freeway and El Segundo Avenue, one of the most blighted pockets of urban America. It's 7 at night at Helen Keller Park. The baseball field and the basketball court glimmer under tall lights.

Maybe they've just scratched the surface, those who want to cover over a mile-long section of the Hollywood Freeway and create a park on top. But a group promoting construction of an airy, meandering promenade for local Hollywood residents isn't certain what its effect might be on motorists down below traveling through a serpentine tunnel between Bronson Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard.

Shards of glass, bumpy grass and rocks are what Jose Serna was used to as a kid. Lights and modern turf on a baseball field were luxuries. "If the ball took a bad hop, you lose a tooth," the Roosevelt High School senior outfielder said. So now, as he watched with his teammates on the edge of the baseball infield at Evergreen Recreation Center in Boyle Heights, Serna was pleased to hear the news.

Past some of the greenest hills, poorest villages and roughest roads in Africa, a machete-wielding ranger hacks his way deep into the jungle until a canopy of giant ferns and bamboo eclipses the sun. Antelopes, elephants and hippos once thrived here in Africa's oldest national park. Decades of poaching have left little more than a few families of mountain gorillas. And civil war rages just miles away, the latest twist in a conflict that has ensnared eastern Congo for 12 years.

The 9-acre waterfront plot at the northwest edge of downtown Seattle was an oil depot for much of the last century; for years it was considered a fuel-soaked toxic waste site. After a decade-long cleanup, it caught the eye of developers, who floated proposals for apartment buildings there in the 1990s.

The history of preserving open space in the Los Angeles Basin, critics long have said, has been characterized by a lack of vision, as asphalt and concrete were given free run of the landscape. Vision has won out, however, at what may be the single best vantage point in the metropolitan area, where earthmovers and workmen are laboring to create Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook State Park.

Ending a five-year legal skirmish that pitted Huntington Beach against its police union, city officials announced Tuesday that the union and other agencies would help pay to decontaminate a portion of Huntington Beach Central Park used for a quarter-century as a firing range. The Huntington Beach Police Officers Assn.'