I kicked off the third week in LA with the one and only thing I had my heart set on doing while in Southern California: a visit to the La Brea Tar Pits. Ever since the childhood fascination with dinosaurs and fossils that I think afflicts every middle schooler, I've been interested in the tar pits. I'm happy to report that they are as cool as I had hoped!
Surprisingly, to me anyway, the tar pits are right in the middle of urban Los Angeles! (I suppose this surprised me because it's difficult to imagine mammoths and sabre-toothed cats wandering along Wilshire Boulevard...) All over Hancock Park asphalt, tar and methane bubble up out of the ground. The gunk is forced up through the fissures and cracks that all the seismic activity in the area has created. Sometimes, the tar comes up in big pools, but other times it just comes up through the grass or parking lot! The smell of the place is quite something - it has the powerful oder of a road construction project.
A methane bubble rising through the tar
Roy, Jason and I turned into little kids when we found a stick laying near one of the tar seeps - we couldn't help poking the stick into the tar. Sadly, some of the tar ended up on Jason; that stuff doesn't come off!
The tar has been seeping up in this area for tens of thousands of years. In prehistoric times, animals were attracted to water that floated on top of the tar or stumbled into the gooey mess that was camouflaged under a layer of dust and leaves. It took only a few inches of tar to entrap even the largest animals who either died of dehydration or were set up by predators (who often also became and entrapped and died alongside their prey). The bones of entrapped animals sank down into the tar and were preserved by the petrochemicals that seeped into them.
Nearly 400,000 fossils have been recovered from the pits to date. The most well known, of course, are the sabre-toothed cats, mammoths, and mastadons, but all kinds of animals, plants and micro-organisms have also been found. The oldest fossils are 38,000 years old (meaning that there are no dinosaurs but plenty of long-extinct creatures.) The area is still very active with paleontologists who estimate that there are at least that are hundreds of thousands more fossils yet to be unearthed.
Volunteers and professional paleontologists clean and catalog the fossils in a lab inside the Page Museum at the Tar Pits.
Roy and one of the sabre-toothed cats
As the weekend approached, Karl and I hatched a plan whereby we declared Saturday the 25th "Sausage Saturday". Unbeknownst to us, July is National Hot Dog Month, so our declaration was oddly appropriate! We kicked off "Sausage Saturday" at Pink's, the mother of all LA Hotdog Joints (and it turns out there are quite a few). Pink's is familiar to viewers of all the "Diner's, Drive-Ins and Dives"-type programs and is a local institution. It's not far from my apartment in Hollywood so I'd been eyeing it from the moment we arrived. From 9:30AM, when Pink's opens for business, until closing time (2AM on weeknights and 3AM on the weekend), there's a line. When Karl and I arrived at 11AM, the line was relatively short: only 1/2 an hour. Their chili dog is what put Pink's on the map when Paul and Betty Pink opened their hotdog stand in 1939. Since then, the menu has grown to include dogs named for celebrities and topped with all sorts of outrageous items.
Karl and I each ordered a "Martha Stewart Dog": 10" stretch dog with mustard, relish, onions, bacon, chopped tomatoes, sauerkraut and sour cream - AMAZING
Of course, the Martha Stewart is kinda hard to eat; but even the signature chili dog is a delightful mess
We continued "Sausage Saturday" between shows at Wurstkuche in downtown LA. Wurstkuche is a neuvo-German sausage joint. They feature classic bratwurst, bockwurts and Italian sausages alongside exotic fare like alligator and pork smoked andouille, rattlesnake and jackrabbit or Filipino Marharlika. They also have delicious hand-cut fries with fun dipping sauces. While sausage Saturday may not have been so good for my waistline, it was quite good for my soul!
Once I discovered that it was, in fact National Hot Dog Month, it seemed only natural to keep celebrating. I'd already sampled a Dodger Dog and Pink's infamous fare - so I sought out a couple more local hot dog legends. Skooby's on Hollywood Boulevard was delicious. The "world famous" Oki-Dog was a bit much: two hot dogs wrapped in a tortilla with pastrami, chili and cheese - too much to appreciate. Mike Berg surprised me with a couple of dogs from Wienershcnitzel ("The world's most wanted wiener"). The Wienerschnitzel chili cheese dog has a unique feature: the cheese is applied to the bun first, then the dog and the chili - this is GENIUS! It holds the cheese in and makes the whole affair easier to eat. I think I did a pretty good job of celebrating...
My other big food adventure of the week was my introduction to Philippe's. Phillipe's is one of two restaurants in Los Angeles that lays claim to having invented the French Dip Sandwich (the other is Cole's Pacific Electric Buffet). Philippe Mathieu immigrated from France to the US in 1901 and moved to LA in 1908, opening the first incarnation of Philippe's. There are several explanations for the invention of the French Dip - but they all result in half of a roll being dipped in a au jus and placed atop a sandwich of sliced roast meat. The restaurant doesn't appear to have changed much in 100 years, sawdust covers the floor, orders are taken at a long deli counter and customers eat a large communal tables. In addition to their famous sandwiches, Philippe's serves all manner of salads, pickled eggs, pies and homemade lemonade and ice tea. It's wonderful and a local institution. The night Jeff Brewer took me there, the lines were long, but fast moving, with crowds in Dodger Blue on their way to Chavez Ravine.
$15 gets you quite a tray of food at Philippe's...
On Sunday, Spamalot celebrated a milestone with one of our original cast members: Darryl turned thirty! We had our usual cake at intermission celebration, but then Darryl also threw a do at a bar in West Hollywood after the show. Lots of his "real-life" friends also turned up and made for a fun evening.
Darryl blows out the candles on his ice cream cakes
After all that great food, I needed to do something with my day off to work some of it off. Shey and I headed to the San Gabriel Mountains to do a bit of hiking in the Angeles National Forest. We set off early in the morning (7:30 is pretty early for me) to avoid the worst heat of the day, though it was more than 10 degrees cooler up in the mountains. The San Gabriel Mountains make up the western portion of the bowl that surrounds Los Angeles and separate LA from the Mojave Desert. Bordered on the north by the San Andreas Fault, the San Gabriels are the fastest growing mountains on earth: rising at 1/10th of an inch a year as the colliding plates heave them upwards.
Our initial destination was the Cooper Canyon Falls. We hit the trail at the Buckhorn Campground some 30 miles along the Angeles Crest Highway from the nearest town and at 6,300'. The day was brilliantly clear and sunny - perfect for hiking. As we hiked along Cooper Canyon, the scenery was constantly changing: sometimes high, rocky desert, sometimes lush with ferns and grasses and sometimes dotted with pines and redwoods. Like so much of life around Los Angeles, the terrain changes as water comes and goes. As we descended to the bottom of the canyon, things grew more and more green until we found the creek. In late July, there wasn't much water flowing, but we still managed to find the falls and the big pool at their base. We clambered down a steep trail with the aid of a rope and soaked our feet in the pool with the small trout swimming by and snacked for a while.
w/ Shey at the base of Cooper Canyon Falls
The falls had slowed to a cool, mossy trickle
The hike to the falls and back was quicker than I had expected, just a couple of hours, so Shey and I looked for another mountain adventure. The trail we had hiked part of continued on to an area known as the Devil's Punch Bowl some 10 miles farther on. The Punch Bowl sounded really interesting, so we set out to see it. To reach the Punchbowl by road, however, we had to drive almost 40 miles! The trip was really interesting as it took us down the backside of the San Gabriels into the edges of the Mojave. Again, it was amazing how quickly the landscape changed: pine trees were replaced with surreal-looking Joshua Trees.
The road to the Devil's Punchbowl took us right across the San Andreas Fault. While the fault line was pretty easy to see, it wasn't as dramatic as I had hoped. I expected a line of broken rocks and upheaval but found something more settled looking. From an ariel perspective, the fault line does appear broken as it wends through the mountains, but on the ground it's just slightly bumpy earth. (I'm told there are more dramatic-looking stretches in other areas.)
Being a Midwesterner, I'm afraid of earthquakes and was half expecting the ground to open up and swallow me as I stood on the fault line.
As we approached the Devil's Punchbowl, my need for dramatic landscapes was sated. Three fault lines come together in the area (the San Andreas, Pinyon and Punchbowl Faults) and make the area quite unstable. As the faults push together, the surrounding land is heaved up into a 'V' shape. At points in the Punchbowl formation, this 'V' is 300' deep with the sandstone on either side rising up dramatically.
Layers of sandstone pushed up to form the Devil's Punchbowl
The landscape quite dramatic with these layers of sandstone rising up hundreds of feet over the surrounding landscape
A great ranger at the Punchbowl's visitors center explained the basics of the geological forces that created the formations as well as introduced us to many of the animals that live in the area. The Punchbowl lies at the boundary where the mountains meet the desert making it a very diverse place. It receives snow in the winter but is quite arid in the summer months. All kinds of creepy snakes make their home in the area (I avoided those displays) as do mountain cats, coyotes, lots of birds and some crazy insects. It's quite an interesting place.
Shey and I were back in LA by dinner time. I whipped up a big batch of gazpacho from the many astonishingly fresh vegetables available in Souther California. (The sun just doesn't stop around here! If there's water available, one can grow almost anything in the area. While this abundance is shipped all over the country, it's at its freshest in local markets making for an amazing array of delicious choices.) I was pretty beat after a day in the mountains and sunshine, but enjoyed a bowl full of summer-tasting goodness to wrap up the first third of the LA engagement.
JV
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