Café Discovery: Tar Pit Environs

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My (almost) last batch of photos were taken in Debbie’s brother’s neighborhood.  I had an hour or so on our last day in Los Angeles before we returned to the desert.  So I took a walk through the neighborhood.  And I took a camera with me.

Jim’s house is two blocks from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which I wrote about before.  And it’s also two blocks from the La Brea Tar Pits.  Photos were not allowed inside LACMA…or I would be displaying one of a painting of The Death of Buddha.

But I did walk down to the grounds of the tar pits and got some shots.  And I took more photos on the way back.

Warning:  23 photos inside

On the left of the photo to the right you can see the one of the LACMA buildings and towards the bottom you can see another…and just barely the top of another which is behind it.  That third building is one of the two buildings the Japanese art exhibit was in, either the Hammer Building or the Pavilion for Japanese Art.  My guess is that it is part of the Hammer Building.

Of course, the main point of the photo was to capture the palm trees.

This shaggy fellow below is probably also be a palm.  If so, the difference may be that it is a different kind of palm or it may be that it is just not manicured like the ones in front of LACMA are.  This guy was near what may have been an apartment building across the street.  This particular neighborhood also has a Native/Central/South American art store/museum across the street from the park.  I found myself hoping I had the time to visit it as well.

I took the shot of this presumed palm because it was in bloom.  I don’t recall ever seeing a palm in bloom before.  But I may have done.  

If one continues walking down Wilshire Boulevard, one eventually arrives at the grounds of Hancock Park and the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits.  I did not have time to go into the Page Museum on this trip, but it is worth the effort if you ever get there.  I mean it’s got bones.  What’s not to like about bones.  Especially bones of mammoths and sabertooths, giant ground sloths and dire wolves.

Twenty-five thousand years ago those animals may have thought this was a lake…and water.  They were wrong.  Dead wrong, mostly.

One should remember that there wasn’t much water in the Los Angeles Basin once upon a time.  There still isn’t.

Below are shots of the entrance monument with its stylized sabertooth and the tar pits themselves, from varying degrees of closeness.  One can see why an animal might think it was water.  But up close is ugliness.  Up close was death.  Probably slow and agonizing death.

On the right-hand side of the photo on the top right in the group above one can see a statue of a mammoth, stuck in the tar.  It was part of a family grouping which can be seen below from a couple of other angles.  The statue of the guy charging into trouble was at the other end of the pit.  

The statue of the sabertoothed cats was closer to the Page Museum, which is partially visible on the right of that photo.  Unfortunately, dumb ass me did not walk up the little hill visible behind, where I believe I could have snapped a photo of the Hollywood Sign.  Alas.

At the entrance/exit to the park, across the street from what is referred to as “the Rolls Royce of Marie Callender’s” restaurants, is this gnarly tree.  It’s root system could be used for the very definition of gnarly.  I was fascinated.

But it was time to get back to the house.  I decided, however, not to waste the opportunity to get some shots of the fauna.  Now I suck at naming most flowers, so I’m just going to show them and let the readers decide what they are. Any identifications you wish to make in the comments would broaden my knowledge base.

About all I could do with the flowers is identify the colors, so I won’t.  Presented without words:

Wow.  I am in awe of Mother Nature.  I started that sequence with some gnarly roots.  So I’m ending them with some roots as well.  They are not so gnarly now, but maybe they will be, given enough time.  It probably wouldn’t even take another 25,000 years.

We near the end of this part of our journey.  Below are a house in this neighborhood, a house we have visited periodically.  It’s a two-family dwelling has a lot more value than one might have thought, being so close to the intersection of Wilshire and Fairfax.  One might not have even noticed that this quiet little neighborhood exists.

On the landing at the top of the front stairs is the desert in microcosm.  There are cacti of about five different kinds which you might spot if you look closely…  

…and there is a tortoise named Tiny, who is not so tiny anymore.  Sharing the porch habitat are two other tortoises who were camera shy.