Street Hiking in The City

Earlier this week I was in San Francisco for an Opeth concert...great!  The next day I had the opportunity to do some street hiking in The City.  In the early 1990s, when I lived in the Bay Area, I hiked the hills often, but since moving to Monterey, I haven't done it nearly as frequently.  It's always a treat...though hard on the Achilles tendons.  I need to come up here more.  This pic was taken from one of my favorite spots, Ina Coolbrith Park on Russian Hill.  I've been coming up here for forty years.  It's one of many little oases of calm in the midst of urbanity.  Folks come here to sightsee, do Tai Chi, or just relax with the morning paper.

Russian Hill is precipitous.  Here's a typical sidewalk, stepped to ease the strain on the ol' Achilles and to improve traction on rainy days.

Some of the streets on Russian Hill are simply pedestrian walkways and staircases, but with official street addresses.  This is an example.  There are pretty gardens in these forested nooks, along with resident cats and even parrots, though I didn't see any on this trip.  In some places there are old mid 19th century houses that survived the 1906 fire, which spared some areas on Russian Hill.

This pic was taken on Montgomery Street near Union, on Telegraph Hill.  There are a couple of pre-1906 houses in the foreground. 

Near the site of the previous pic is this fabulous 1939 Art Deco apartment building.  the exterior design on this side of the structure depicts the Bay Bridge, brand new at the time, along with the latest airplanes and ocean liners.

On the other side of the building, the past is depicted...a conquistador, sailing ship, and birds instead of airplanes. 

From the summit of Telegraph Hill, Sts Peter and Paul cathedral in North Beach lies in a pocket of sunshine, with the highrises of shady Russian Hill in the background.

A good workout is to climb up and down Telegraph Hill on foot!  These are the Greenwich steps...there are about 400 of them between Coit Tower and Sansome Street near the bayfront.

You can also take the Filbert Steps, a block to the north.  There are fine old bungalows on the steps, a century and a half old, that escaped the 1906 earthquake and fire.

The quake...and mainly the fire...wiped out most of San Francisco from downtown north, and west to Van Ness Avenue.  However, west of Van Ness many 19th century Victorian homes survived.  More escaped the fire in the Mission district to the south.  Most of the Victorians still in existence have been finely restored, and are worth over a million dollars.  Pacific Heights has many fine old homes.  This is a stick style residence, popular in the 1880s. 

While the Stick homes have squared bay windows, Italianate houses have angled windows.  This beauty is also in Pacific Heights.  I love the fancy trim on the perimeters of these homes. 

Queen Anne homes commonly feature round towers and fancy shakes on the exterior.  Many of these houses were built in the 1890s.  This one is on Gough Street across from Lafayette Square.  The windows in the towers are curved...I can only imagine how much  the glass costs.

Stick, Italianate, Queen Anne, Art Deco...San Francisco has a myriad of architectural styles.  For me, this is one of the fascinating elements of The City.  And, in keeping with the climate, there is a lot of Mediterranean architecture, such as this home in Pacific Heights. 

Southwestern Spirit

Rambling around the southwest, I saw a couple historic sites where Native Americans lived in the past.  This is Spruce Tree House at Mesa Verde, in SW Colorado between Durango and Cortez.  The ancestors of todays pueblo Indians occupied this spot in the 14th century.  They left not too long after building these structures, probably because of a prolonged drought at the end of that century.

Spruce Tree House, like many other dwellings of the period, was set under a rock overhang, which gave some protection from rain and snow.  The residents built fires out in fromt of the complex, which is evident from the soot marks on the rock above.  In places the homes go at least a hundred feet into the alcove.  The irregularly shaped holes on the second floor are actually doorways...originally these houses had balconies on the upper floors.

This is Square Tower House at Mesa Verde.  The Anasazi...now known more widely as Ancient Pueblo Peoples...were building high rises of a sort...this one is four stories high...at a time when Europeans were constructing their big cathedrals.  Advanced architecture was in vogue in both hemispheres.

Here's the Four Corners Monument, where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet.  This plaque is fairly small...you can literally put one foot in all four states with no problem. 

Canyon de Chelly, in NE Arizona, has been settled by Native Americans for many centuries.  Navajo still live on the canyon floor and farm the bottomlands.

White House, in Canyon de Chelly, is one of the better preserved ruins dating from the 14th century.  Cool rock alcove too!

The Lizards enjoyed hangin' at Canyon de Chelly.  It's an interesting place for geology, scenery, history, and culture. 

The Painted Desert near Winslow. 

Jackson Browne, with his guitar, standin' on the corner in Winslow Arizona.  He wrote "Take it Easy" with these lyrics, and the Eagles had a monster hit with the song.  Still one of the best road songs ever.  Only trouble was, when I was taking pictures, no girls in flatbed Fords slowed down to take a look at me. 

The rambling reptiles are displaying their mountaineering skills here, climbing a barrel cactus in White Tank Mountain Park near Phoenix.  This is their favorite area...the Sonoran desert is their natural habitat!  We're going home tomorrow but I promised my saurian friends I'd bring them back to the desert next spring.

Cincy Critters

A few weeks ago I was in Cincinnati, and as I often do when I have some time to kill in a city, I went to the zoo.  It's always interesting to check out the critters, and each zoo seems to have a different specialty.  In Cincinnati they have a lot of rare species, and a lot of animals from Madagascar in particular.  This is an old lion that used to work with Sigfried and Roy in Las Vegas.  He's now retired, taking his leisure in a spacious compound, fed daily by zoo staff, as was being done here. 

A Mexican coastal rattlesnake, looking ready for action.

Lemurs from Madagascar, especially well groomed and carrying on with a certain aplomb!

The polar bear was dealing with fairly warm, humid weather, thus he was staying close to the water.

A rainbow lorikeet from Australia,  In the mountains and forests on the east coast of Oz, these guys are common.  You get a blaze of brilliant color when a group of them takes wing.

A Sumatran rhino.  There are only a few hundred of these critters left.  The Cincy zoo successfully bred a female...probably this rhino here...and she had a calf a few years ago.

This is a memorial to Martha, the last passenger pigeon in existence, who lived out her days at the zoo here, dying in 1914.  The remarkable thing is that in the mid 1800s, there were literally billions of these birds in the eastern and midwestern US.  They flew in flocks that darkened the skies.  Then, in the last half of the 19th century, they were killed en masse, with nets and guns, as food for slaves (before 1865) and the poor.  Between 1870 and 1890 their numbers crashed, and finally Martha was the only one left.