Ideally, this would be where I would write up Mud Creek Park, but when Alex and I visited Mud Creek Park, it was closed because, as one would actually expect, given the name, Mud Creek Park floods pretty badly when it rains, and it had rained recently when we went up there. So instead on that day we returned to McAllister Park.
So let’s go on to Panther Springs Park. Panther Springs Park is kind of an odd one to try to reach. It looks, on the map, like you should be able to access it from Blanco, possibly from the parking lot to the Mays Family YMCA. I actually swear that Google Maps said that there was a way in there at one point. But you can’t get there that way. You actually have to go up through a residential area (fortunately not through the actual neighborhood, but the street passes one housing development after the other) to get there.
Jon Isherwood, “Sotol Duet,” 2015
Once Alex and I were in the parking lot, we had to find the way into the park. Alex and I were walking through the parking lot when a man came up and asked where the entrance to the park was. We confessed that it was our first time there, too. So we continued towards the end of the parking lot. I needed to take a picture of Isherwood’s “Sotol Duet” on the way in, so I headed that direction and the man found the entrance before we did.
Basically, Panther Springs Park is a three-mile walking trail and a dog park. There isn’t much in the way of a playground or anything of that nature. We didn’t end up walking that much of the trail because it was still pretty warm out and the humidity was something to be believed. So we walked (and met a man and is son and their dog who were herding a baby snake from the path), returned to our car, and went home.
I like to leave for our destination as early as possible when I travel. When driving, that generally means leaving the night before the trip, particularly if the trip will take us up the Interstate 35 corridor. Interstate 35 is kind of a nightmare at the best of times, and morning rush hour is not the best of times. It’s nice to leave San Antonio at around 10:30 p.m., though. By the time you’re through Dallas, it’s just about sunrise and you’re on your way to Texarkana.
For flying, this generally means a flight sometime between 5:00 a.m. and 7:00 a.m. For this trip, we ended up with a 6:30 a.m. flight, which, with picking up our luggage and riding on the Blue Line subway, had us in the Loop by 11:00. We emerged from the tunnel beneath Daley Plaza and walked to our hotel to check in. As luck would have it, our room was ready by then, so we dropped off our bags and headed out for the day.
Our first stop was the department store formerly known as Marshall Field’s. We admired the Tiffany ceiling and then went down to the food court in the basement. They seem to have remodeled since my last visit, but the food was excellent. I got roasted chicken with green beans and rice. Alex got just the chicken and a smoothie. He helped me finish the rice.
I then dragged Alex up to the 7th floor, where we peeked in at the Walnut Room and then looked down one of the atria to the first floor. We left the department store and then walked to the Chicago Cultural Center.
The Chicago Cultural Center is the original building for the Chicago Public Library. After the Great Chicago Fire, the citizens of London donated thousands of books to the city. The city government, understanding that this gift deserved a suitable building, built a five-story building, with mosaics and what is one of the largest Tiffany domes in the world, to house the collection.
The dome of the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, Illinois
We actually entered through the “wrong” side of the building (on Randolph Street), which is the side that the Grand Army of the Republic rotunda is on. The Grand Army of the Republic was an organization for veterans of the Union Army during the Civil War. The entrance isn’t quite as grand as the Washington Street side and the dome (by Healy and Millet) is lovely, but less impressive than the dome on the library side.
We explored some of the art exhibits in the center, including Paul Catanese’s Visible from Space.
After we left the Cultural Center, we went to Millennium Park and stood in the mist from the Crown Fountain (which seems to be showing its age a bit) and admired the Bean (more formally known as the Cloud Gate). We then walked from there to the Art Institute of Chicago, where we wandered around for a while. I made sure we caught most of the really notable works including A Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Nighthawks, At the Moulin Rouge, and America Windows. American Gothic was in a for-pay exhibit but was put near a glass window so that we could see it from the outside of the exhibit. We also went into the recreation of the trading room from the Chicago Stock Exchange building and then after we left the museum went around to the back to admire the arch that once stood over the door of the exchange.
We returned to our hotel room and ordered a pizza. Alex fell asleep literally while eating, so I ate most of the pizza myself. Then, while he was still asleep, I went out onto the street in front of our hotel and checked out some of the places I remembered visiting from my days working in the Loop. One of the restaurants I used to visit is now a falafel place. I also caught a Magmar and a Jynx while I was out there.
After that, it was too dark outside for me to feel perfectly comfortable walking around by myself, so I went back to the room myself to get some rest for our next, even more exhausting, day.
When we left Chicago, I was wondering if I got any decent pictures of Lincoln Park. As it turned out, the only pictures of the park that weren’t of the zoo that I got, as it turned out, were one picture of the Couch mausoleum that I took from a moving bus (so it’s not the best picture ever), a few pictures of the Albert Caldwell Lily Pool, and a couple of pictures of the beach just a little south of where Lake Shore Drive would intersect with Belden Avenue if Belden Avenue went through. Which it doesn’t.
Anyway, I haven’t found anything that I liked well enough to showcase in my post on Lincoln Park, so on to the zoo. I have 47 pictures from the zoo, so I’m sure that I can find something that I can work with there.
Lincoln Park Zoo began, for all intents and purposes, with two swans in 1868. In 1874, a bear cub joined the swans, and the zoo was underway. I’m not sure when exactly the “there are two swans and a bear cub in Lincoln Park” gave way to a formal “Lincoln Park Zoo,” but the first zoo director, Cyrus DeVry, was hired in 1888, so it’s likely to have been somewhere in that period.
Over time, the zoo grew, with the addition of new buildings and species. Today, there are over 1,000 specimens of over 200 species in the zoo.
The animals above the entrance to Lincoln Park Zoo
At the moment (and for the foreseeable future), Lincoln Park Zoo is free to the public. I don’t normally talk about admissions fees because that’s not “evergreen.” Someday the admissions cost will go up which means that one of two things would have to happen. One, I would have to track the cost of admission to absolutely everything that I’ll ever write about that has an admission fee (the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Antonio Zoo, the Empire State Building, the Ruins of Pompeii) and then keep those pages updated. Two, I would have to resign myself to having out-of-date information on my page. And, honestly, this is what would be more likely to happen.
I’m making an exception to the above rule in this case because not having an admission charge is highly unusual. There are 142 accredited zoos in the United States and of those, from what I can tell, fewer than ten have no admission fee. In the case of Lincoln Park Zoo, the money to run the zoo is largely covered by the fee for parking in the lots near the zoo and the sale of food and souvenirs. They take donations as well, and I threw a few dollars in that bucket while I was there. Any shortfall beyond that is covered by the city. The parking lot, by the way, is not a “throw a quarter in the meter” type parking. It costs roughly the same as any private parking lot in a big city. Therefore it’s more cost-effective to drive if you have several people in the car with you. On this visit, we didn’t drive; we didn’t have a car available to us. We took the bus.
As one would imagine from the location, Lincoln Park Zoo is a lovely, parklike zoo, with lots of greenery. It’s a nice place to do some walking and watch the people and the animals. There is food available at the zoo, the most prominent of which (at least it’s the only one that stood out to me) is the food court at the Park Place Café. This food court has been there since Alex was maybe three, so it’s likely to turn out to be a long-term fixture at the zoo.
As to the animals, well, there are animals at the zoo. I think that the western lowland gorillas made the biggest impression on me. This is at least in part to the fact that a silverback was leaning up against the join between two windows when we were there, allowing me to get several really lovely pictures of him. Of course, gorillas and Lincoln Park Zoo have had a long association. In 1930, the zoo acquired a gorilla named Bushman. Bushman lived for another 21 years at the zoo, and during my childhood, most of the adults in my life had fond memories of him. He was taxidermied and is on display at the Field Museum of Natural History.
The drive back to Salt Lake City from Jensen took a bit longer than Google Maps said it would. This was at least partly due to the fact that I was so over the seats in that car.
Once we arrived back in Salt Lake City, I had three goals: 1. to see the state capitol building (and, at one point, I could have crossed a moon tree off my list, but it is dead now); 2. to see City Creek, which was the water source for the early city (and still supplies water to the city today); and 3. to make it back to the airport in a timely manner.
And I achieved all three.
The trip to the capitol building took us up State Street (which makes sense), which eventually becomes one very lane going uphill. It was near the end of the work day (around 4:30 or so), so I figured that most traffic would be headed away from the capitol. I’m not sure why so many cars were headed towards the building at this time of day, but the road was very congested. This was not my favorite part of our trip, and made me wish we had had a little more time and energy on our first day in Salt Lake City to hike up the hill to the capitol. The view of the capitol building once you emerge from this narrow street is very impressive, I’ll give it that.
Once you reach the capitol, you find a street, with the understandable name of “Capitol Street” that makes a circuit around the building. Due to the congestion we didn’t even attempt to make a left and instead just took a right turn. Along the eastern side of the capitol is a very small parking area, so we parked and I got out to take pictures. There was no time to go inside the building.
It was so late at this point, that I despaired of being able to see City Creek until I looked at my phone and noticed that the creek went right past the spot where we were parked. The parking area is at the very edge of City Creek Canyon. So Alex stayed by the car and I took the winding path down into what turned out to be Memory Grove Gardens.
At first, I have to admit that I thought that Memory Grove Gardens looked like a cemetery. I was unaware of the name of this plot of land at this point, but even the name sounds kind of cemetery-like. The path ended at a replica of the Liberty Bell. As I looked around a saw several marble monuments that looked more than vaguely like graves to my eyes.
City Creek, Memory Grove Gardens Park, Salt Lake City, 2017
I spent quite a bit of my childhood visiting a great-aunt and great-uncle who lived down the street from a cemetery, so I’m no stranger to spending time in cemeteries. I thought it might be disrespectful to take pictures, though. Then I noticed some people walking dogs and decided that if it’s okay to walk dogs, it’s probably okay to take pictures there.
I think I saw some kind of sign indicating that this was a park at this point. I’m trying to remember (it was two and a half months ago and the Google Maps car has apparently not been along Canyon Road down there yet). I think the sign indicated where the off-leash area for dogs stops. So I got some pictures of the park, the creek, and the walls of the canyon and went back up to the car. I had been down there for a while, and Alex was about to come down after me.
We got back in the car and filled our gas tank at a very small gas station down the street from the Temple and then headed back to the airport. And even with the late start and everything we still got there in time to recharge our phones before we got on the plane (I also caught a Ponyta at the gate).
Like Fox Park, Leon Vista Park is another park that more or less is just a trail head for the Leon Creek Greenway. It is a very nice trail head for the Leon Creek Greenway (and leads to an area that is probably my favorite section of the greenway so far), but that’s basically all it is.
McAllister Park on the other hand, is a very different animal.
At what I estimate to be over a thousand acres, McAllister Park gives the impression of being larger on the inside than it is on the outside. The park is bounded by five pretty busy streets, and while driving on most of them, you would never guess that a park of that size lurks back there. The first time we went to McAllister Park, I parked my car by one of the playgrounds and Alex and I walked. And walked. And walked.We had no idea how much park was there until we explored. And after two more visits, we still haven’t seen all of it. There is one part of the park that heads off to the northwest and I have never been able to find that path at all.
Usually my pictures are all, “look at this vista,” “look at this architecture,” “look at this historic site.” So here’s “look at these raccoon footprints.” Because raccoon footprints. McAllister Park, 2014
My most recent visit was an attempt to continue the Salado Creek Greenway. I had followed the greenway from Walker Ranch Historic Landmark Park to U.S. 281, but no farther. There is a nice parking lot for the trailhead in McAllister Park. This parking lot also serves the dog park which is in that corner of the park. Then you walk for nearly 3/4 of a mile (1.2 km) before you even get to the greenway. Now that we’re aware of that, we need to set aside more time than we had that day to try it again. We will make it someday, though. Or maybe I’ll attempt it myself on a day off now that Alex is back in school and the weather is cooling off.
With four picnic pavilions, a dog park, two playgrounds, sports fields, and more than 17 miles of hiking and/or biking trails, McAllister Park is not what you’d call a quiet place to contemplate nature in solitude. If you are the kind of person who likes to people-watch, or who just feels safer with potential witnesses around, McAllister may be your kind of park.
McAllister is a park, so some of the paths are paved and level, and thus wheelchair accessible. Some paths are less so and accessible by wheelchair users with great upper-body strength. And some are just dirt paths and only accessible to people traveling on foot (and not even them, sometimes, when it’s been raining).
These are both fairly small parks, so I figured I’d put them together.
Fox Park is not particularly exciting, I’m disappointed to admit. The parks website says that there are walking paths and such, but Fox Park mostly functions as a trailhead for the Leon Creek Greenway. If you blink, you’ll miss the park entirely.
Gorrell Park is still small, but has more going for it. The full name of the park is Officer Edwynn J. Gorrell Park, and the park is named for a police officer who was killed in the line of duty in 1988.
Gilbert Barrerra, The Letter, 2012. At least it looks like Barrera finished it in 2012, judging by his Facebook. I took the photo in 2016.
Gorrell Park has a playground, picnic tables, and a quarter-mile walking trail, which is an out-and-back trail, rather than a loop. There is also a statue which for a long time was wrapped up, apparently to deter vandals. I have never been able to find a name or attribution for the statue, but it is titled The Letter and the sculptor is Gilbert E. Barrera. It is a widow holding a dove, which represents not just the widows of fallen police officers but also anyone who has suffered the loss of a loved one.
I mentioned vandalism. I’m not sure if it’s specifically anti-police vandalism, since the park is named for a fallen officer as such, but there has been some vandalism in the park. I would blame the vandalism more on the park’s proximity to Tom C. Clark High School, which is right across the railroad tracks. Clark is one of the best high schools in the area, and not at all bad in the national rankings, but kids are kids, and I seem to recall a study saying that homes that are near schools face more vandalism, so I suspect the same may be true of parks near schools. If the vandalism makes you want to be cautious, make sure that other people are in the park when you visit, and don’t go alone.
It’s a lovely park, despite the vandalism and perhaps worth a visit.
Alex and I took a trip to Chicago on August 8 through 11, 2016. Partly the trip was because I was homesick; I hadn’t been home in six years. But part of the trip was because my now-ex has most of our photographs from our previous trips to Chicago. I started writing about Chicago destinations in past posts, but since my ex has the pictures, I couldn’t post any pictures with them.
So here are a few pictures that I will, ideally, be moving to those posts, and probably a few more that I’m particularly fond of.
First, is the Field Museum of Natural History. Arguably my favorite museum in Chicago (if it’s not my favorite, it’s a very, very close second to the Art Institute of Chicago). I’m not sure which image(s) I’m going to use, so I’ll post three of my favorites here. I reserve the right to come back and say, “Ooh! Here’s another nice one!” at some later date.
The Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois, 2016. Alex and I were in the Museum Campus until after the museums closed so I was able to get this nice photograph of the north entrance without any people in it.The Lions of Tsavo, two of the most famous “residents” of the museum. These lions (well, the lions that used to wear these skins) killed and ate around 35 people in Tsavo, Kenya, in the 19th century. The lions’ skulls are also on display in the same case. You can see one of the skulls there in the lower left-hand corner.Sue the tyrannosaurus rex. Sue is yet another popular “resident,” visible in Stanley Field Hall
Millennium Park was my next post, so here are a few of my favorites from there. I will definitely include the first image because I attempted to describe it in the post and failed miserably, so why not include a photo?
The back of the plot of land that eventually became the westernmost part of Millennium Park had a wall similar to this along the back of it.
I spent several minutes trying to find the best reflection of the skyline on the Cloud Gate (also known as the “Bean”), but didn’t find any that really spoke to me. Maybe later, after further examination, I’ll find one, or maybe I’ll just have to make the sacrifice and go back to Chicago at some point other than the height of the tourist season (imagine a fake sigh here). So, instead, here’s one I really liked of the Crown Fountain.
Crown Fountain, Millennium Park Chicago, 2016
I think I’ll stop here for now and return to this topic in two weeks or so with photos from the Art Institute of Chicago and Grant Park, also perhaps of Lincoln Park, though most of those pictures I took were of the zoo, which I haven’t posted on yet. And then, two weeks or so after that, we’ll go forward with (in two-week increments) Lincoln Park Zoo, the Adler Planetarium, the Shedd Aquarium, the Chicago Botanic Garden, and some of the highlights of Chicago architecture. We should be in November by then.
I’ve run some numbers and it looks like I’ll be able to return to Chicago to take photos of the Museum of Science and Industry, the Oriental Institute and perhaps some suburban destinations, in 2018 or 2019.
I’m trying to remember how my ex-husband and I discovered Friedrich Wilderness Park. I do remember that we accidentally wandered into Raymond Russell Park the first time we looked for it (but didn’t get very far into Russell Park at all — I finally explored that one fully just this year). Friedrich Park ended up becoming one of our favorite parks, though, and we introduced both friends and family to it over the years.
Friedrich Wilderness Park, San Antonio, Texas 2015
The original land that made up the park was a bequest of Norma Friedrich Ward, who wanted it to be preserved as a natural area and named for her parents, Emilie and Albert Friedrich. Later, two men, Wilbur Mathews and Glen Martin, donated another 52 acres. Interestingly, though, despite its status as a natural area, Friedrich Wilderness Park is not untouched by human hands. I’m not talking about paved paths and the addition of bathrooms and a classroom. A stream passes through the park and where the stream intersects with the Main Loop Trail (and for a while out into the wilderness from there), the stream bed is concrete or cement or something like that. I’ve never been able to figure out how that stream bed got paved or why someone would pave the stream bed.
Friedrich Wilderness Park has eight miles of walking trails, most of which are not accessible to those in wheelchairs. Friedrich is where I first saw the path levels that are used in San Antonio. There is a loop path near the entrance that is level 1, but most of the other paths are level 3 or 4.
Friedrich Wilderness Park is also a nice place to go if you are a birdwatcher. It is one of the nesting sites for the Golden-Cheeked Warbler and the Black-Capped Vireo. Of course, other birds are seen there as well. Unfortunately for me, the Golden-Cheeked Warbler nests in “mountain cedar” (actually a type of juniper) trees, so the park is rife with them. Mountain cedar is a really bad asthma trigger for me, so I need to make sure I bring my rescue inhaler, particularly during the winter, which is when the trees release their pollen. Many people in San Antonio face a different, but related problem, which is more traditional “hay fever”-type allergies from mountain cedar pollen, so take any allergy medication before going.
Every Last One, by Rachel Hartigan Shea, photographs by Joel Sartore
In my last National Geographic post, I said that this article will also be tangentially about death. And extinction, cancer, John James Audubon painting the portraits of dead birds, there’s a lot of death, and potential death, going on here.
Joel Sartore is a photographer who used to travel all over the world, until his wife, Kathy, developed cancer. Sartore needed to be there for her and to take care of his kids, so he stopped traveling for his work. Using John James Audubon as his inspiration, he decided that he wanted to start taking portraits of animals. As you may or may not know, Audubon was drawing, which takes longer than photography, and he needed his subjects to sit still longer than they would in life, so every bird that Audubon drew was dead and wired into a natural pose.
Sartore contacted a friend who worked at a local zoo and got his friend to lend him a white box and a naked mole rat. And thus Sartore’s new career was born. Some of the animals that Sartore is photographing are endangered, some even critically endangered. Sartore photographed one of the last five northern white rhinoceros in the world just before she died. Sartore’s photographs are amazing. In this article, we see 77 of his photographs. Sartore estimates that it will take 25 years to finish photographing just the species that are in zoos. He may not live to see that part of his career finished.
Oh, and Kathy had another bout of cancer in 2012, but has been cancer-free for four years now. His son, Cole, had Hodgkins lymphoma in 2012, but Hodgkins lymphoma is curable, so his prognosis is excellent.
Urban Parks, by Ken Otterbourg, photographs by Simon Roberts
If you’ve been reading here very long at all, you’ll see that I really love urban parks, so this article was right up my alley. Otterbourg traces the origins of some of our urban parks, mostly focusing on lands that have been reclaimed from other uses, including the rebirths of the Cuyahoga and Chonggyecheon rivers, the creation of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and other parks.
I’m disappointed that Millennium Park isn’t listed here. The creation of the park above a parking lot and old railroad lines seems right in keeping with the “reclaming land to make parks” theme of this article. Speaking of which, it’s August, so it’s only about two months before I return to walking San Antonio’s own reclaimed-land park, the Peak Greenway.
We’re home from Chicago, so I will probably resurrect my Northern Illinois Destinations topic soon. I’m not entirely sure how many of the places we went I haven’t covered yet, but I got a lot of pictures of places that I have written. And I mean a lot, a lot, like over 600 total pictures. So I will probably start with a post sharing the pictures that I will eventually go back and insert into those posts. Then we’ll start tackling places that I haven’t covered. I probably will also do a post on some of my favorite buildings that are not really places to go for an activity, but things to see.
Next up alphabetically is Denman Estate Park, but we’ve already covered that one. So onwards and upwards to Eisenhower Park.
Eisenhower is a lovely park built on one of the foothills of the Texas Hill Country. I went there once with the now-ex when Alex was little, but I had a terrible asthma attack at the top of the hill and was afraid to go back after that. I was sure that everyone around me could hear the wheezing, it was so bad.
Now that I’m taking asthma maintenance medication (whoever came up with the combination of inhaled steroids and long-acting beta agonists really needs to be canonized), I can visit Eisenhower Park whenever I want.
The land which is now Eisenhower Park was originally part of Camp Bullis Military Training Reservation. Camp Bullis is still there, yards/feet/inches away from the park, depending on where you are standing at the time. Former General and US President Dwight D. Eisenhower was, for a time, stationed at Fort Sam Houston (locally called “Fort Sam”) here. In fact, he met his wife, Mamie, in San Antonio.
Sometime around 1972, the United States Army decided that they needed to reduce the size of Camp Bullis by more than 1,000 acres. They transferred ownership of this land to Bexar County and to the city of San Antonio. In 1988, the city turned their 320-acre share into a public park.
The house in Eisenhower Park, San Antonio, Texas, 2016
Eisenhower Park has picnic facilities, a playground, a house that I think was moved here from somewhere else, and, of course, five miles of hiking trails. Interestingly, no one has put the origin of the house on their website, so when I next go to the park (more on that later), I’ll make a note of it. I thought I got a picture of the sign explaining it but I can’t find one now.
The trails are, for the most part, unaccessible by wheelchair users. There is one paved path that goes pretty much right straight up the hill, but it’s pretty steep. I guess if the wheelchair user in question has really good upper-body strength or a fairly powerful motorized wheelchair you might be able to make it but I really wouldn’t recommend it.
At the top of the hill is a (not at all handicap accessible) observation platform. You can see downtown San Antonio from the platform, but it’s pretty small. Alex and I had tentative plans to go up to Eisenhower Park the Sunday before we left for Chicago, but it never happened. Alex is going to his dad’s for a few days later this week, so I may make the trip myself. I’m going up there because of the view of the city. I’m trying to figure out how to get good pictures of the moon with my cell phone camera and I read something that said that you can use a telescope or binoculars to bring the moon into sharper relief so I’m going to experiment with taking pictures with a telescope (or binoculars) from the top of the platform. The moon is farther away than downtown San Antonio is, but if I can make downtown look bigger from there, it might be worth experimenting with it on the moon.
