(no subject)
I think the "shorter" trend here is going to last... oh, about a day. This part of the world is getting pretty riled up at the moment over Hurricane Sandy - variously referred to as the "snowicane" or "Frankenstorm" - and I do want to write a bit related to that, but first I have to take care of a more immediate problem still involving rain but mostly bridges.
This is the Königs-Pittsburgh Bridge Problem hike, which a group of us completed on Saturday. The original idea of crossing all the pedestrian-navigable trans-Three-River bridges with at least one endpoint in the city of Pittsburgh is due to Chrisamaphone, who was keeping track years ago of the bridges she had crossed on her various walking adventures. My add-on to do them exactly once, on the same continuous hike, came from the famous Königsberg Bridge Problem in mathematics. Pittsburgh normally has only an Eulerian walk and not a full Eulerian circuit, meaning that you can't start and end from the same place without double-crossing or leaving out a bridge. But this analysis was before PennDOT put some dynamite on the 31st Street Bridge and blew up the northern end of it, so at the moment the complete circuit can be done by taking 31st Street off the map. On Saturday it looked like this.
We intended a 39-mile hike starting and ending at the Baum Grove in Friendship - the same length as West Virginia, so Ben, Keith, Dan, Alan, and I met up at the West Virginia time of 5:15 a.m. The weather started out cloudy and 11°C, with a predicted high of just 13°, so the gear packing was a little different from our usual summer hikes. I was better this time and tried to only take things in my ACL bag that I would actually use; the paring down was pretty successful, as the only dead weight came from my bike lights (which I'm totally OK with) and a banana that I accidentally squished and had to throw out at lunch.
Alan has a nice write-up, complete with a picture of every bridge and the timing information I noted down on paper as we progressed, and he also posted a complete set of pictures on his photo site. Alan's pictures came out way better than mine did: I only brought along my super-crappy Samsung point-and-shoot. You get what you pay for ($70) with this thing. Not only has the lens got two unremovable grey spots on it, but there doesn't seem to be a single lighting condition that it wants to focus properly in. I spent almost 17 hours with the thing making its grating descending-tone bee-boop "no focus" sound more or less continuously - about five times on average before I could actually take a picture - to the point that I dearly wanted to finish the hike by flinging the camera into the Mon from the highest point of the Homestead Grays Bridge. Except Alan told me I couldn't, and it would have been too dark to see the satisfying splash at the bottom anyway.
From a social aspect, Königs-Pittsburgh is nicer than West Virginia because it's easy for people to drop out and join in the trip at pretty much any time. Conversation, even from the beginning, was pretty animated. We spent the time between Aspinwall and Sharpsburg talking about politics, which went predictably given our age and demographic. There are also, I think, more things to see than on the West Virginia route. In Lawrenceville we saw a bunch of amusing For Sale signs advertising an "ENTIRE CITY BLOCK," contrasted a little later with a "development opportunity" just north of the Mexican War Streets featuring three existing structures and three vacant lots. A more artistic builder may be interested in a row-house lot, on the same street, that currently consists of a rectangle of grass and one full-sized indoor fireplace, suspended a few feet off the ground and solidly attached to the outer wall of the neighboring house. Visiting McKees Rocks by foot, instead of by bike as I've done recently, gives you more time to ponder the strange and desolate wasteland between what I think is called McKees Rocks Bottoms and the rest of the town: it looks like it was formerly laid out for streets or industry or something, but now the area is given over to broken-up pavement and waist-high weeds.
Even though we crossed a total of 18 bridges, only one or two of them were new to me as a pedestrian. The "one" is the Liberty Bridge, which I'd been over a few times before by car but never under my own power. It's not a particularly noteworthy bridge by virtue of its own design or anything, but it's got for sure the best views of downtown, the Mon, other bridges, and so forth. On a day with better weather (and my good camera!) I could easily spend an hour up there trying out different views and angles. The bridge also leads to the McArdle Roadway to get down to 10th Street, a curving, sloping route that features some nice sights of its own and feels somehow out of place within stumbling distance of Carson Street. After the Liberty, the other possibly new bridge for me was the Glenwood Bridge, south from the end of Hazelwood Avenue. Even after we crossed it, I was still pretty convinced that this one walk cmartens, some others, and I did a few years ago ended up at the Waterfront by way of the Rankin Bridge, which is entirely out of the city. But then we went up some stairs that looked exactly like the place where I took a good photo of Chris on that walk, and I shouldn't have known immediately what to do at the split of Seventh and Eighth Avenue in Homestead last night unless I'd been there before. So perhaps I'm confusing two different old hikes.
We did eventually provide a 35-mile constructive solution to the Königs-Pittsburgh Bridge Problem by getting back to the "continental node" on Browns Hill Road, but I wasn't mentally calling the walk a success because we hadn't yet gotten back to our exact geographic starting point. Ben and Alan - the only other two hikers left at that point - were both strongly in favor of catching a bus back, while the tenacious, stubborn part of me was pushing for walking the four miles back to Friendship. The bus prevailed by showing up before I'd gotten sick of waiting for it, and I think in retrospect that was the right solution. My right knee was already hurting enough again, both Saturday and yesterday, to make me feel that tasking it further would have done no good for re-establishing any kind of serious distance-running routine. Already I'm a bit nervous about trying to do my usual Thursday 5K, but if there's one take-away message from this or any of our other extreme adventures, it's that we don't stop or give up easily!
This is the Königs-Pittsburgh Bridge Problem hike, which a group of us completed on Saturday. The original idea of crossing all the pedestrian-navigable trans-Three-River bridges with at least one endpoint in the city of Pittsburgh is due to Chrisamaphone, who was keeping track years ago of the bridges she had crossed on her various walking adventures. My add-on to do them exactly once, on the same continuous hike, came from the famous Königsberg Bridge Problem in mathematics. Pittsburgh normally has only an Eulerian walk and not a full Eulerian circuit, meaning that you can't start and end from the same place without double-crossing or leaving out a bridge. But this analysis was before PennDOT put some dynamite on the 31st Street Bridge and blew up the northern end of it, so at the moment the complete circuit can be done by taking 31st Street off the map. On Saturday it looked like this.
We intended a 39-mile hike starting and ending at the Baum Grove in Friendship - the same length as West Virginia, so Ben, Keith, Dan, Alan, and I met up at the West Virginia time of 5:15 a.m. The weather started out cloudy and 11°C, with a predicted high of just 13°, so the gear packing was a little different from our usual summer hikes. I was better this time and tried to only take things in my ACL bag that I would actually use; the paring down was pretty successful, as the only dead weight came from my bike lights (which I'm totally OK with) and a banana that I accidentally squished and had to throw out at lunch.
Alan has a nice write-up, complete with a picture of every bridge and the timing information I noted down on paper as we progressed, and he also posted a complete set of pictures on his photo site. Alan's pictures came out way better than mine did: I only brought along my super-crappy Samsung point-and-shoot. You get what you pay for ($70) with this thing. Not only has the lens got two unremovable grey spots on it, but there doesn't seem to be a single lighting condition that it wants to focus properly in. I spent almost 17 hours with the thing making its grating descending-tone bee-boop "no focus" sound more or less continuously - about five times on average before I could actually take a picture - to the point that I dearly wanted to finish the hike by flinging the camera into the Mon from the highest point of the Homestead Grays Bridge. Except Alan told me I couldn't, and it would have been too dark to see the satisfying splash at the bottom anyway.
From a social aspect, Königs-Pittsburgh is nicer than West Virginia because it's easy for people to drop out and join in the trip at pretty much any time. Conversation, even from the beginning, was pretty animated. We spent the time between Aspinwall and Sharpsburg talking about politics, which went predictably given our age and demographic. There are also, I think, more things to see than on the West Virginia route. In Lawrenceville we saw a bunch of amusing For Sale signs advertising an "ENTIRE CITY BLOCK," contrasted a little later with a "development opportunity" just north of the Mexican War Streets featuring three existing structures and three vacant lots. A more artistic builder may be interested in a row-house lot, on the same street, that currently consists of a rectangle of grass and one full-sized indoor fireplace, suspended a few feet off the ground and solidly attached to the outer wall of the neighboring house. Visiting McKees Rocks by foot, instead of by bike as I've done recently, gives you more time to ponder the strange and desolate wasteland between what I think is called McKees Rocks Bottoms and the rest of the town: it looks like it was formerly laid out for streets or industry or something, but now the area is given over to broken-up pavement and waist-high weeds.
Even though we crossed a total of 18 bridges, only one or two of them were new to me as a pedestrian. The "one" is the Liberty Bridge, which I'd been over a few times before by car but never under my own power. It's not a particularly noteworthy bridge by virtue of its own design or anything, but it's got for sure the best views of downtown, the Mon, other bridges, and so forth. On a day with better weather (and my good camera!) I could easily spend an hour up there trying out different views and angles. The bridge also leads to the McArdle Roadway to get down to 10th Street, a curving, sloping route that features some nice sights of its own and feels somehow out of place within stumbling distance of Carson Street. After the Liberty, the other possibly new bridge for me was the Glenwood Bridge, south from the end of Hazelwood Avenue. Even after we crossed it, I was still pretty convinced that this one walk cmartens, some others, and I did a few years ago ended up at the Waterfront by way of the Rankin Bridge, which is entirely out of the city. But then we went up some stairs that looked exactly like the place where I took a good photo of Chris on that walk, and I shouldn't have known immediately what to do at the split of Seventh and Eighth Avenue in Homestead last night unless I'd been there before. So perhaps I'm confusing two different old hikes.
We did eventually provide a 35-mile constructive solution to the Königs-Pittsburgh Bridge Problem by getting back to the "continental node" on Browns Hill Road, but I wasn't mentally calling the walk a success because we hadn't yet gotten back to our exact geographic starting point. Ben and Alan - the only other two hikers left at that point - were both strongly in favor of catching a bus back, while the tenacious, stubborn part of me was pushing for walking the four miles back to Friendship. The bus prevailed by showing up before I'd gotten sick of waiting for it, and I think in retrospect that was the right solution. My right knee was already hurting enough again, both Saturday and yesterday, to make me feel that tasking it further would have done no good for re-establishing any kind of serious distance-running routine. Already I'm a bit nervous about trying to do my usual Thursday 5K, but if there's one take-away message from this or any of our other extreme adventures, it's that we don't stop or give up easily!