Oh, man, if you have never been to the La Brea Tar Pits and you're even a remotely scientific geek, you're missing out. This has been something I've wanted to do since I was a kid, and I found it was worth the wait. After I found it anyway. Lynn and I ditched Saturday morning traffic blocking up (the) 101 and went alternate routes overland- which isn't a problem because I am great at navigating. That is, I am great at navigating when I have the right destination. I looked at the map, found La Brea, said something to Lynn, looked back at the map and proceeded to direct us to the Natural History Museum because it was another set of three dots in the general vicinity. So much for me that whole navigating thing.
Anyway, when we pulled in the lot the first thing I noticed was the smell of Brewer Coat. They don't have that stuff out in California, so it was odd to smell it again. After seeing what happens to it in the California heat, I understand why they don't have that stuff out here. In the middle of the handicapped parking was a fenced off area. The Page Museum and the Tar Pits sit on about a block or so of downtown LA. There's not really much they can do about the tar, so wherever it bubbles up, it does. At some point they cordon it off with cones and when it reaches enough of an issue to warrant the trouble they fence it off. Eventually, as the tar settles it forms a tarry, oily lake worthy of a Stephen King novel or at least a short story- if you've ever read 'The Raft' then you get this sort of ominous feeling watching the water bubble up in them.
I pointed out how the tar had managed to single out the handicapped parking and that Lynn had better move quicker on her crutches- it was obviously culling the herd. Pit 91 was open and operational- that's where paleontologists are currently working- and it was fabulous to watch them do their thing. We strolled the park and I played in a couple of the tar puddles. It was awesome. The tar operates a lot like sticky quicksand, so when you put your foot in a very active puddle, it subsides enough to fill the imprint with water when (if) you pull your foot out again. On the less active ones, it's like walking in heavy mud or on one of those mega foam mats they sometimes pulled out for gym class. You sink, but not much. However, because there is little vertical resistance, it's hard to push off for the next step. When I was playing with a particularly active section, I mentioned to Lynn how on the website they mentioned entrapment still happened and that "and occasionally large mammals (dogs and humans)" were involved. She just laughed at me from the safety of the trail and replied "Oh, yeah? And how do you think that happens?" However, I really liked the pair of shoes I was wearing, so I didn't do anything too crazy. When we made it around to the BIG lake, which I didn't see at first because it was so big, I was reminded it wasn't all fun and games when I noticed pigeon wings in the tar. That's got to be an awful way to go, made that much more morbid by the mammoth statues on either end of the lake, one entrapped while his little mammoth family looks on in horror and the other about to innocently step to his agonizingly slow death. Cheery!
We wandered the park past the puddles, pits, and panhandlers (although technically, they were probably street performers) and headed in to the museum itself, which was cool although couldn't really stand up to the pits themselves for a rock-geek like me. Dire wolves seemed to be the usual suspect, which I can imagine since their lil doggie brains would smell food and override any caution they might have had. That's still SOP for pooches, which is probably why dogs are the only large mammals besides people trapped often enough to get a mention on the website. Anyway, it's a small, privately owned museum and probably in need of some funding. The animatronic sabretooth vs sloth was looking a bit dated but still fun in a nostalgic sort of way. The wall of dire wolf skulls was pretty impressive. They have pulled SO MANY bones out of these pits it's abstract. I know it was over a million. The final exhibit was a chunk of matrix removed from one of the pits and stored (ironically enough) at the Natural History Museum for many years. It was more bone than tar. I was duly awestruck. Even I could have found fossils in that and I stink at field work. I think I would have spent all day running around the place if we didn't need to hit the road home. Ah well, it's just an excuse to come back.
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