I really can’t complain about the weather on this trip.  Except for a few days of rain at the beginning, and some fog in San Francisco and Morro Bay, it’s been clear and sunny the whole way, and usually a quite livable temperature.  It’s made it possible to get some great pictures too, like this one in Santa Barbara, looking back on the town from Stearns Wharf, where I stopped to have coffee and do some writing.  Unfortunately, the cold that I had been fighting ever since Big Sur decided to come on in full force here, and I was feeling a bit miserable in spite of the blue scenery.

But!  I laced up my brave soldier boots, loaded up on cold medication, cough drops, and caffeine, and motored on to Encino, where I was meeting a couple of acquaintances for lunch.  It was nice to sit and chat for a while over seafood and some awesome garlic bread!

There are a lot of options for things to see and do in LA, but I’ve done a lot of the famous things on past trips, and wasn’t feeling up to anything too energetic, so decided to have a quiet day exploring the La Brea Tar Pits.  Having never been there, I wasn’t sure what to expect, whether it was a museum, an archeological dig, or something else.  It turns out that it’s a bit of everything.  The museum building that houses the labs and some of the major findings is small, but very modern and of interesting construction.

Outside, you can wander around the park-like grounds to visit the tar pits where the fossils were, and continue to be, excavated.  The air smells like hot asphalt, and there are blurping bubbles disturbing the surface of the famous Lake Pit.

The Lake Pit is the only one that seems to combine water and tar, however, as most of the pits look more like semi-solid black mud, and it’s hard to imagine who first felt inspired to see what was under the surface of this mess.

Some pits are still active, such as Project 23 and Pit 91, and are still yielding large numbers of finds.

I was quite interested to learn about how tar pits are excavated, since semi-solid tar isn’t exactly the easiest terrain to work with.  It seems that once a likely area for fossils is identified, excavators are used to trench around it, and custom crates are used to enclose and transport the block to a holding area.  They’re later individually examined for finds.

The crates themselves vary in size, and loose debris is transported in buckets.

Inside the museum the real fun began, and I was able to see some of the best of the fossils found at La Brea.  Just as I entered the door I was confronted with this large Harlan’s Ground Sloth, that probably weighed about 1,500 pounds.  That would explain those impressively robust leg bones!

I learned that there were also bison in this area, and they seem to have been wider spread on the continent that I ever realised.  This was an Antique Bison, and I was surprised to see that the shoulder hump was part of the skeleton, as I had always assumed that it was software, like a camel’s hump, instead of firmware.

One of the most common fossils found at La Brea is the skeletons of Dire Wolves.  This is apparently because packs of wolves came to feed on other animals trapped in the pits, and then got trapped themselves.

The remains of over 1,600 wolves have been found here, and this display on the wall holds the skulls of 404 of them, showing a variation in size and shape that’s being studied in order to better understand wolf evolution and population structure.

There have also been a number of big cats discovered in the asphalt, including more than 80 of these Giant Jaguars.  To give you an idea of the size of this monster cat, if I was standing right in front of it, I’d be looking it directly in the eyes.  I’d be lunch.  It’s bigger than a modern lion or the Sabre Toothed Cat.

Here’s the Sabre Tooth itself, which I believe is the second most common big predator found at the site, after the Dire Wolves.  The latin name for this kitty is Smilodon Fatalis, killer smile, and it seems pretty well justified.  Unlike the Giant Jaguar, it has just a stumpy tail, so it’s all sharp and pointy on one end, but fun and frolic at the other.

There were a number of other displays, including a variety of the birds found in the pit, and I learned that there’s only been one human skeleton found in the pits, a woman about 25 – 30 years old that seemed to be related to Channel Islands Indians.  But I’ve saved the best, or at least the biggest for last!  This Colombian Mammoth is the largest complete skeleton found in the pits.  This specimen was of average size, weighing about 15,000 pounds, and standing 12 feet high.  At least 27 of these mammoths were found in a single pit on the site.  Once again it’s difficult to convey the size of this creature, but using myself for scale, I could have just walked under it’s belly without stooping.

And those massive tusks!  It’s hard to believe that this animal didn’t just tip over onto its face!

As much as I was enjoying the Tar Pits, my cold was really getting the better of me by this point, and I needed to move on to where I was going to stay in Capistrano.  Unfortunately that lead to another typical LA experience, hours stuck in bumper to bumper slow moving traffic.  This seems to have gotten much worse since the last time I was here, and left me pretty convinced that big city life will never be for me.  I get the impression that a lot of the locals avoid the highways and live mostly in more local communities, though.

What will tomorrow bring?  I think I’ll let my cold run it’s course and my head clear before I decide…. ugh.