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A long, lonely stretch of sand that begins just south of the Marina del Rey entrance channel, Dockweiler State Beach collects the beachfronts of Playa del Rey and El Segundo all the way down to 45th Street in El Porto, the northern line of Manhattan Beach. If you're on the beach bike path, shift to high gear. If you're in a car on Vista del Mar, roll up the windows. The sights and smells you experience are from the Hyperion sewage treatment plant of bunker-like concrete structures, the Scattergood steam plant of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, some tanks representing a tip of the Chevron refinery and yet another electrical generating station, this one owned by Southern California Edison Co. And that explains why this rather pretty beach has few visitors.

If the steamy smokestacks and oily refinery smells don't get you, the jet noise will. Vista del Mar Park sits inland from the road, a little palm-studded oasis amid some abandoned streets and vacant home pads beyond the end of the main runways at Los Angeles International Airport. Lie on the grass, cover your ears and look straight up -- at the underbellies of aircraft taking off at the rate of one nearly every minute.

Access to Dockweiler is not convenient. One of the few places is at the foot of Imperial Highway, where there is a pay parking lot and camping beach with hookups for recreational vehicles. Nearby is an area with about 40 fire rings for bonfires on the sand, an activity that is part of Southern California culture as accessories to romance, for parties or just for toasting marshmallows. Dockweiler and Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro are the only places in Los Angeles County that allow fires on the beach.

Nobody swims at Dockweiler, probably because it is the offshore dumping area for treated sewage from more than four million people in 10 communities. But the Hyperion outfall pipes are five and seven miles out at the edge of a deeper ocean shelf and dispersal by waves is such that Dockweiler gets back only a small portion of what it gives.

Lepidopterists must believe that the airport noise is not a deterrent to the El Segundo blue, a nearly extinct butterfly that lives and hopefully reproduces in the sand dunes at the end of the runways. The fenced-off area north of Imperial at Pershing Drive is a habitat restoration area for the tiny butterfly and also the Jerusalem cricket, the crab spider, the coastal pack rat and more than 900 other plant and animal species.