La Brea Tarpit Adventure

This past Sunday, Nikki and I decided to brave the sweltering heat and go to the La Brea Tarpits. It was all a part of my plan to see the things I haven't seen in LA before I leave. The list actually isn't very long, it's pretty much the tarpits and the Natural History Museum so I can see some dinosaur bones, which I'll go to in a few weeks. As I said it was extremely hot and even a little drizzly that day, but only for a moment, so we decided to press on, even though Nikki occasionally exclaimed, "This is the worst day ever!" It really didn't turn out to be.

What I really wanted to do was reinact the scene from My Girl 2 when Nick pretends to drop the ring given to Veda by Thomas Jay into the pit, but I forgot to bring a ring that day, and I wasn't really sure where the spot was that this scene took place. Maybe I can do it next time.

It was kinda crazy that there was an actual Ice Age excavation site right on Wilshire Boulevard surrounded by tall buildings and horrible traffic and other things you wouldn't expect to find near a natural wonder. We were able to walk right onto the grounds and right up to the tarpits, which of course were fenced off. There went our plan of pushing each other in. Our first impression was that it was just a dirty lake that smelled really, really terrible. I'm sure the heat did not help any either. While Nikki and I walked around the watery tarpit we had to inhale the hot, sticky smell of asphalt. It was neat to see the gases that made the water bubble, but I was hoping to see brontosaurus ribs sticking out of black tar. After we had walked around the entire pit we went inside the museum to escape the heat and look at some prehistoric bones.

Once inside we learned that the George C. Page museum does not have any dinosaur bones and no dinosaur bones were found in the tarpits because dinosaurs had been long extinct before the tarpits formed. They made that very clear with signs stating this everywhere we looked. You can imgine my disappointment. The museum contained Ice Age bones and fossils. We debated going in and before we did, we asked if there were more tarpits on the grounds. The very friendly and very cute guy at the information booth instructed us to walk further down and we'd be able to see an actual excavation site with real bones. Well, we must have misunderstood his directions because we wandered around for a bit before we found the excavation site. We were able to go into a little room that was above the excavators, who were probably non-paid interns. I don't know how they were surviving down there, because that room was boiling hot and was pungent with the smell of tar. I could only imagine what it was like down there where they were. We watched for as long as we could but then we had to get out of that hot room. But it was cool (no pun intended) to watch them chip away the tar around the bones.

When we couldn't take the heat any longer we retreated back to the museum in hopes of finding Ice Age temperatures in the Ice Age museum. As we walked across the grass towards the promise of cool air waiting for us inside, we considered pretending to faint to see what reaction we would get from other tourists. Nikki came pretty close to actually doing it and if the grass wasn't so moist, I probably would have gone through with it. We just wanted the guy driving the golf cart to drive us the remaining 10 yards to the museum. But we made it regardless.

Inside the nice, cool museum we saw the skeletons of a giant sloth, which I had no idea were actually that huge. They looked like overgrown gophers. We also learned that the jaw of a saber toothed cat, not tiger, could extend more than 90 degrees. Fascinating stuff. There was also a gigantic mammoth that I was sure to get a picture next to so I could feel small. Nikki and I wandered around the museum and stopped to watch video clips about the history of the tarpits, and even raced coins in this circular thing while 5-year-olds waited for their turn. One of their grandmothers kept repeating "Patience. Patience." which kind of made me feel guilty for hogging the game. Well, not that guilty.

What was really interesting about the tarpits and the museum is that they are active research sites. Inside the museum, there was a room with glass windows where we could watch people sort and label the bones. Bones were scattered all over the room. There was one that was labeled "mouse toe bone." The bone was as small as a splinter. Nikki made a good point when she asked who would actually know that that tiny speck of nothing was a mouse toe bones. How do you even find something that small? The very idea provided us with something to joke about for the rest of the day. Not that we ever run out of things to joke about. After playing in the gift shop for a while we decided to call it a day. I'm really happy we braved the disgusting weather to visit the La Brea Tarpits and I can't wait to visit the Natural History Museum in the upcoming weeks.

After my visit, everyone I told about my going to the tarpits had the same response, "I used to go there all the time on field trips when I was a kid." Hmm. Are the La Brea Tarpits only for children? No of course not. Nikki and I proved that as we ran around taking pictures, climbing on overgrown sloths, wondered what would happen if we started fighting right in the middle of the museum, pretended to be attacked by saber toothed cats, and pushed children out of the way so we could race pennies, all the while arguing over who's coin actually won. (Mine did.)