La Brea Bike Adventure, Part 3: Tar Pits

Hancock was a rancher who purchased land from the Rancho la Brea land grant, and today the park with the tar pits is called Hancock Park, and is in downtown Los Angeles. La Brea is Spanish for "the tar". It had been known as dangerous for a while, and the big pit with the elephant is man made.

For thousands of years petroleum would seep up through the crust to the surface, and is still occasionally pumped from under nearby 6th St. At this site, over the millenia, the elements that made the petroleum mostly liquid evaporates, and the remaining substance is called either "tar", which is coating and sticky, or called "asphalt", which we know as had blacktop but here is mostly mounds. Whether it's tar or asphalt depends on how much evaporation has occurred.

The sticky tar would get covered by dust or water, and animals would get stuck in it, and eventually die. Predators would happen by, see animals trapped, and jump and get a meal, only to get themselves stuck, and then they eventually die. Their bones would end up preserved in the tar/asphalt, only to be excavated today and shown off at the Page Museum:

The petrol products do smell pretty serious, but it's not as bad as you may think: it's not choking or an overpowering stench. But the tar pokes up all over the place, having little regard for the man made fencing around the larger spots. Here's a spot where you can get a stick all gooey, like I did:

This is an excavation shack, and if you look close, you can see some flags in the pit. Each flag represents a spot of a fossil that is corresponding to a larger drawing in the room from which we're looking.

Here's a gas bubble coming up through some tar, an iconic picture from this attraction:

We didn't go inside the museum, but we did notice that the LACMA (LA County Museum of Art) is also on the Hancock Park grounds, which gave us a little more stuff to check out. For us, on this adventure, the journey was part of the show...