Curbside Appeal

The title of this blog is Webfoot Wanderings, but it seems like I haven't been wandering very much outside of my own town. So, I guess I'll take what I can get. 

On my Instagram account (@webfoot55), I posted a photo of an imprint that I used to see all the time growing up in Santa Ana, CA. This photo was actually taken in Claremont, CA, but it reminded me of the neighborhood where I grew up, so I took a photo of it. I also liked the fact that this particular imprint, designating when the cement for the sidewalk or curb in this case, was poured. Contractors would get some free advertising and the city would get some nice curbs and sidewalks, plus an additional bonus of some historical perspective. Kind of nice to realize this particular curb has been around since before my parents were born.

Most of these imprints seem to come in two different varieties, either stamped into the face of the curb, or stamped at the junction between two pieces of the sidewalk. I seem to remember that most of these in Santa Ana tended to be in the sidewalks as opposed to the curbs. Claremont seems to have both. It's probably more of the contractor's preference more than anything else. The one posted above is the oldest I've seen, but there's one on a sidewalk north of my house that is dated 2002, so they've been used at least in the last two decades.

As I wandered around town today, I did notice that the sidewalk version of these imprints tended to be more worn than the curbside imprints. That's pretty obvious since there's a lot more foot traffic and so erosion is going to take its toll over the course of the years. I found one in a sidewalk today dated 1947 that was very difficult to read, almost looking like 1997. That was highly improbable however, due to the age of the houses and the look of the rest of the sidewalk on either side of that particular imprint. But hopefully you can see the difference between the first two images, the first being on the side of the curb, while the second is in the sidewalk. The curb imprint appears to be in much better shape than the sidewalk imprint, which is 27 years younger. Between these two imprints were other imprints dated 1943, 1946, and 1947, showing the progress of the streets, curbs and sidewalks northward leading to Route 66 which is Foothill Blvd., in Claremont. That's a nice historical record there.

However, the historical record is slowly being wiped away by progress and government laws. Not that this is a bad thing, it's just happening. Tree roots uplift the sidewalk and sidewalks need to be replaced, or shave down. If the tree happens to uplift a section of sidewalk that the imprint is on, the imprint will either be shaved away as the city attempts to even out the pavement, or be replaced entirely by another section of pavement.

The American with Disabilities Act (ADA) has also taken a toll on these historical artifacts. This law, passed in 1990, is a civil rights law which prevents discrimination against individuals with disabilities. It's the reason we have ramps now at street corners so people in wheel chairs can traverse throughout the city in which they live without having to bump off a curb, or go down the street to the nearest driveway so they can cross the street. As you can see in the third shot, what is likely a 1926 vintage imprint was wiped out because the curbing at this point had to be lowered to accommodate wheelchair access. 

Please don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining about the ADA, I'm just noting that the law has some unintended consequences. Stuff happens. Some of these will hang around for a longer time frame, while others will disappear due to where they were placed.

Which brings me to my final thought. I seem to remember that most of the imprints in my Santa Ana neighborhood tended to be in sidewalks, but I also seem to remember them being on corners. I wonder if most of them have been wiped out because newer wheelchair accessible sidewalks have had to be built? I guess I need to head back to the old neighborhood sometime to see if those are still there.

Badlands

Back in the 60s, my dad's best friend took a sabbatical from teaching to pursue an advanced degree. He ended up getting his degree from a university in Wisconsin and they ended up taking the entire family back for the year. When they returned his son, my friend had new decal stickers, one of which was from Badlands National Monument. Being the map nerd that I am, I was intrigued and looked it up and thought at some time in the future, it would be interesting to visit the park. Since that time, Congress has upped the status of the monument and now it's a national park located east of Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota.

As we approached Badlands National Park, we kept seeing advertisements for Wall Drug, which is a major tourist trap just north of the park. Yeah, we stopped there, only to look around, find a tee-shirt of the place, mainly because I like advertising weirdly different stuff I've visited and then headed south out of town into the park. The park is a geologic wonderland of erosion and there were pullouts along the road with many interpretive signs. We ended up stopping at several, including one where there was a herd of young bighorn sheep. The sheep are very hard to see mainly because they blend in so well with the browns of the badlands, which is why there are no photos of them here.

At another turnout, we stopped and took a walking tour of an interpretive loop trail while we gathered answers for an earth cache based upon fossils. The area is rich in fossil life and we weren't disappointed, getting to see several different varieties of fossils in the rock layers. What was also outstanding about the day was the weather. As you can see from the photos, we ended up driving through the beginnings of a large series of thunderstorms as we made our way across southern South Dakota that day. The first storm started while we were on our way out of the visitors center at the east end of the park heading back to the Interstate (third photo). The clouds made for some gorgeous photo opportunities. And, as always, I could have spent more time there, but we had an itinerary to keep to and were actually attending a geocaching event in South Dakota later that evening (who goes to a geocaching event several thousand miles from home?).

I'm sure I'll get back to the area in the future and the plan will be to camp a couple of nights there to fully enjoy the park. We got an appetizer of the park that day, be enough that made us both want to come back.

On our way back out to the Interstate, we got pelted with rain, as we had earlier the day before coming from Wind Cave National Park. This time, the storm got a little bit more severe as we drove across the South Dakota prairie. We had the radio on and we kept getting the weather alerts, those alerts that we rarely get in Southern California because we don't get any kind of severe weather, but scares the bejesus out you when they come on. These were coming every fifteen minutes detailing thunderstorms and worse, hail storms, with hail the size of ping pong balls.  Later, the size of the hail stones were "upgraded" to golfball size hail. Fortunately, they also listed counties where this was likely to happen and my youngest was tracking it using the atlas and checking out where the counties were and all of the major alerts were south of the Interstate, so we missed the hail, but did get an entertaining thunder and lightning storm accompanied by very heavy rain. Fortunately, the geocaching event was under a covered shelter in a park, so we stayed high and dry for the entire event except when we were walking to and from our car. 

I've attended five geocaching events out of state and every one has been very enjoyable. We share a common hobby and it's always fun to swap stories with the local geocachers. We'd had problems with a cache near our motel and I mentioned it to one of the cachers there and he pointed me to another cacher who was the owner. The owner of the cache met up with us back at his cache after the event and we discovered that the cache was indeed missing, so he replaced it with another one he'd had in his car. He had been intending on giving it to us, but instead, gave us a couple others that he had made using his 3D printer. And so I have a cache container that looks like an oak acorn and another one that looks like a pine cone. They are my souvenirs from South Dakota geocaching.

The next day we left South Dakota behind and headed into Minnesota and Iowa, spending the next night in northern Iowa in Mason City.