September 17, 2012
by David Ryan
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Stair Wandering in Rustic Canyon (Los Angeles) with Bob Inman

A few days ago I had the opportunity to go on a walk with Bob Inman. Bob is the author of A Guide to the Public Stairways of Los Angeles. The book describes over 260 public stairways within the city limits of Los Angeles.

If you’ve read any of the other posts in this blog about public stairways, you know that they are great places to wander and for exploring a neighborhood. I was especially excited to walk with Bob as he has an incredible knack for finding stairways and pedestrian friendly passages. I knew that there was much I could learn from him.

Bob and I met in downtown Santa Monica and immediately went down a stairway and overpass combination that took us off the bluff and down to the beach. We took a right and headed north to the Los Angeles – Santa Monica border. There we headed inland along Ocean Avenue. If you are interested in doing a similar walk, you can look at the section in Bob’s book about Rustic Canyon. Charles Fleming also has a Rustic Canyon walk in his book Secret Stairs: A Walking Guide to the Historic Staircases of Los Angeles.

As we walked up Ocean, we spotted a staircase on the other side of the street. It turned out that that particular staircase is not in the current edition of Bob’s guidebook. We decided to go up the stairs to see if they connected to anything else. When we turned right we ran into a dead end. When we turned left, we found a long walk that ended at another staircase that took us back Ocean.

This staircase on Ocean Avenue is not in the current version of the guidebook. It will be in the next edition.

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September 2, 2012
by David Ryan
1 Comment

The Goblin Colony

In an earlier post about visiting an old Indian mound in St. Louis, I mentioned that I got the idea to wander there from a National Geographic article. Last week I found an idea for another wandering adventure on page 231 of 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: Albuquerque by Steven Ausherman. If you are looking for an idea, hiking books are great sources for ideas.

The book described a hike to an area with unusual rock formations in the Jemez Mountains in New Mexico called the “Goblin Colony.” After reading about the strange shapes of the rocks, I was ready to take the dogs for a visit, and it turned out to be a perfect place for wandering.

The adventure serendipitously started with finding a dime laying on the ground when we stepped out of the car.

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August 22, 2012
by David Ryan
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A Visit to the Last Cahokian Mound in the City of St. Louis

One of the principles of The Gentle Art of Wandering is that most wandering adventures start with an idea. The idea is what gets most of us out to wander. Ideas can come from anywhere, and once you spot an idea, it makes sense to write it down somewhere so you remember it.

I found an idea in the January 2011 issue of National Geographic. It was an article about Cahokia Mounds across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. The article even had a picture of the last remaining Cahokian Mound in the City of St. Louis called Sugar Loaf Mound.

As background, a little less than one thousand years ago the St. Louis area was home to an important Native-American mound building culture (Mississippian or Cahokian). The center of Cahokian culture was just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis near Collinsville, Illinois.

You can still visit many of the mounds at Cahokia State Park in Illinois. The largest mound, Monks Mound, is over 90 feet high and covers over 13 acres of land. It’s huge.

That hill in front of you is Monks Mound. It is as tall as a ten-story building. It was built almost 1000 years ago – one basketful of dirt at a time.

As for Sugar Loaf Mound in St. Louis, I had visited Cahokia several times and knew that St. Louis was once called the Mound City because of the many Indian mounds that used to be in the city. But I had never visited a mound in St. Louis and had thought that they had all been destroyed.

Needless to say, I made a point of finding Sugar Loaf Mound when I drove through St. Louis on my way to conference a little over a year ago.

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