October 18, 2012
by David Ryan
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Waterfall Wandering in Middle Tennessee

A basic premise of The Gentle Art of Wandering is that once you adopt the mindset of wandering you will discover that you can wander anywhere. While visiting my mother-in-law in Tennessee, the dogs and I spent the day wandering looking for waterfalls.

Every place has something special to offer and Middle Tennessee happens to have waterfalls. The falls are there because of water flowing off the Highland Rim, a limestone escarpment coming off the Cumberland Plateau, into the Central Tennessee Basin. You have a good chance of finding a waterfall wherever a water course reaches the edge of the escarpment.

One of those edges is just up the street from my mother-in-law’s house at Old Stone Fort State Park. Old Stone Fort is a Native American ceremonial enclosure built almost two thousand years. It is a network of walls built along the edge of a bluff where the Big Duck and Little Duck Rivers reach the edge of the Highland Rim and come together. The area between the rivers is enclosed by the ceremonial walls. The circumference of the enclosure is more than a mile.

Both the Little Duck and Big Duck River have falls as they drop off the Highland Rim.

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October 3, 2012
by David Ryan
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A Backcountry Wandering

I hope that the book The Gentle Art of Wandering and the posts in this blog have shown you that you can wander anywhere and that almost every area has something special to offer when it comes to wandering. For example Los Angeles has its public stairways while New Mexico has its wide open and almost empty backcountry. Both are great walking experiences.

To provide an example of what you can expect on a backcountry wandering, the dogs and I went wandering in a tract of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land northwest of Albuquerque a few days ago. We went there to record the locations of several archaeology sites that we had seen before.

Because I am a BLM volunteer, I cannot give you exact locations. But if you are interested in finding archaeological sites in New Mexico, you can start by checking out a sandy ridgeline or a finger of land coming off of a sandstone mesa. If you let yourself see, you just might stumble on to a few sites.

There are some earlier posts in this blog that can give you some background on dealing with roads and other items in the backcountry.

We did have to drive on a dirt road to reach our destination. In this case the road was fine. 

Had the road been wet we probably would have chosen a different destination. The addition of rain would make this road a nightmare. Continue Reading →

September 21, 2012
by David Ryan
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A Walk on the Sidewalk Streets of Venice, California

The previous post concluded with Bob Inman and me finishing our walk in Rustic Canyon and heading for the beachfront community of Venice a few miles to the south. Rather than heading for the beach and boardwalk, we headed a bit inland to the sidewalk streets of Venice.

The sidewalk streets are just what they sound like; the streets are a single sidewalk. Vehicle access to a house is through the alley. These streets, like the rest of Venice, were developed by Abbot Kinney in the early part of the last century as part of an oceanfront resort community. What may have been a quaint concept 100 years ago may now be visionary. According to a recent New York Times article, walkability is now an extremely important factor in a home’s value, and it’s hard to get more walkable than living on a sidewalk. (Click here to read the article.)

As mentioned in the previous post, Bob Inman will be including the sidewalk streets and other pedestrian friendly passages in the next edition of his stairway guide.

Here’s what we saw on the sidewalk streets:

We approached the sidewalk street from a cross street. You can see the street sign and the sidewalk going off to the right.

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