DryStoneGarden

The Bell

Along with the plants of Baja, we checked out the missions down there. Pretty interesting, with more varied stonework than I expected.

My knowledge of California missions is mostly based on some half-remembered grade school field trips, but the basic outline is this: the Jesuits established most of the Baja missions, starting in 1697 at Loreto. They were expelled by the king of Spain in 1768, and the Franciscans briefly took over, but then the Franciscans were sent up into Alta California to found the missions up here, and the Dominicans took over the Baja missions. The indigenous people of Baja took a massive hit during the missionary age, with 90% of the population or more dying from European diseases, so there weren’t enough people to keep many of them going, and most were abandoned in the early to mid 1800’s, with the rest taken over by the main Catholic church. A lot of them are in ruins; a few are in use.

The La Paz mission is one of the ones still in use, though it’s not the original building. It was established in 1720 and closed in 1749, and the current building was built much more recently. Surfing the Spanish google, I found a video with photos of the towers (with Edelweiss as the soundtrack) under construction in the 1920’s, so that might be an approximate construction date. There was an outdoor mass underway when I visited and I got a chance to climb up to the top of one of the towers. Nice views of the town. I resisted the temptation to ring the bell, which was good, because one of the church officials eventually noticed the gringo up in the bell tower and was somewhat horrified I had been let up there.

Misión de Nuestra Señora del Pilar de La Paz Airapi

We also checked out the missions at Mulege, Loreto, and San Ignacio. I started to upload photos from them, but decided to put them in separate posts which I should have up shortly. Photos of another historic building in La Paz and the mission in San Jose del Cabo (built in 1940) are below.

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Manzanar Cemetery Monument

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, but I wanted to first reread Farewell to Manzanar, Jeane Wakatsuki Houston’s memoir of her childhood in the internment camp. I hadn’t really thought about that book since reading it back in eighth grade, but while I was out on the east side I visited Manzanar, an interesting place to visit despite the fact that there’s not a lot there any more. Whether for practical or more guilt-oriented reasons, the site was almost completely erased after it closed in 1945. All of the buildings were dismantled and hauled away, leaving only some concrete foundations, the large auditorium, two stone sentry posts built by a stonemason internee Ryozo Kado, the cemetery with its concrete monument (also built by Kado), and the remains of a few gardens built by the internees. Now, the place feels barren and desolate, which is, I guess, appropriate.

The park service has done a lot of work to put together a visitor center that gives a sense of what life might have been like in the camp. Their website says they will have a virtual tour online in the future, but for now the wikipedia page or this article in Lost Magazine have the most info and links that I could find on the web. Farewell to Manzanar, though, is the best source. I don’t remember the book making much of an impression when I was young, but this time I found it quite compelling, perhaps because the story is relevant to our country’s recent history.

Entry Pillar

Kado’s work is all very meticulous for someone who was essentially a prisoner. He created almost everything that remains at the site, which may I guess have been a motivation. There’s a saying: If you want it to last, build it with stone. His stonework makes this memorial possible.

Military Police Sentry Post at Manzanar

The lintels are made of concrete finished to look like wood, apparently a signature of Kado’s work.

Concrete with Faux-Wood Finish

The posts at the sentry station resemble a tree trunk, while the ones in the cemetery have a smooth finish as if they were scoured by sand or water.

Manzanar Cemetery Monument with Posts

Manzanar Block 34 Garden

There are the remnants of several traditional Japanese gardens built by the internees. I don’t know of any photos that show the gardens in their prime, but they look like they were quite complex, involving water features, landscape boulders, and masonry. Kado was one of the main creators, and some of the concrete ponds were lined with more of his faux-wood masonry. This article talks about the park service’s archeological efforts with the gardens, including more details about Kado and a number of photos of the garden ruins. In person, the effect is quite powerful, especially for someone like myself who creates gardens for a living.

Garden at Manzanar

Houston talks about the gardens in her chapter about revisiting the ruins of Manzanar.

‘It is so characteristically Japanese, the way lives were made more tolerable by gathering loose desert stones and forming with them something enduringly human. These rock gardens had outlived the barracks and the towers and would surely outlive the asphalt road and rusted pipes and shattered slabs of concrete. Each stone was a mouth, speaking for a family, for some man who had beautified his doorstep.’

Photos #5 and #6 from Wiki user Mav.

Update — 99% Invisible has a podcast telling the story of the establishment of Manzanar National Historic Site, as well as some great photos by Ansel Adams and Dorthea Lange and creator of the podcast. It looks like the park service has done a lot of work developing the historic site in the eight or so years since I was there.

I recently netflixed Standing with Stones, a travelogue overview of the megaliths, henges, and stone circles of Great Britain. It’s good stuff, put together by just two guys, the filmmaker and the narrator. My favorite parts were probably the segment on Men-an-Tol and a short rant about some misguided preservationists who “restored” Newgrange using Portland cement. There is maybe a bit much of “…and we have no idea what it was for!” but I suppose that’s a reflection of how ancient these stone sites are and not really the fault of the filmmakers. Personally, I had no idea there were so many sites and that they were so old. Those early Brits really liked to move rocks.

A playlist with 15 segments can be found on Youtube. The filmmakers have an interview up on Youtube and an interesting blog.

Failed Moss Rock Wall

In light of all today’s talk about tearing down that (Berlin) wall, here’s some photos of the biggest wall to come down in my neighborhood this past winter, when a section of hillside pushed a moss rock retaining wall into the road. Must have been a shock to the homeowner and whoever built it (not me).

Though, without sounding like I’m piling on the unfortunate builder of the wall, it was predictable that this wall would fail. A three foot high wall is supposed to be two feet thick at the base, and this wall isn’t even one foot thick. It also doesn’t have a proper foundation or gravel backfill. I see a lot of failed retaining walls around town, and the common denominator is that they are always backfilled with dirt instead of the drain rock or rubble that virtually every book or manual recommends.

Failed Moss Rock Wall

Intact Section of Wall

The wall is still intact where the bottom course has bigger rocks and the rocks are toed in against the curb.

Failing Section of Wall

Failing Section of Wall

Moss Rock

Two more waller nightmares are below. (more…)

Pack Mules on Duck Pass Trail

The topic for this month’s design workshop at Gardening Gone Wild is dealing with slopes. The description mentions “tips for building steps and paths to make slopes easier to navigate,” so I thought I’d cite the source I learned from, the forest service Trail Construction and Maintenance Notebook, which is online and in the public domain (Who owns this government document? We do!). The text might have a few elements geared towards public trails rather than residential gardens, but the diagrams are good and the principles are solid.

Step Construction

‘Build stairways from the bottom up, at a break in the grade. The most common mistake is to start part way up a grade. If you do so, the trail will wash out below the stairs. The bottom stair should be constructed on a solid, excavated footing. If it is constructed on top of exposed rock, it should be well pinned to the footing. Each successive stair is placed atop [or against] the previous stair. Dry masonry rock stairs usually rely on the contact with the stair below and with the footing to provide stability.

‘Hikers, especially backpackers, generally don’t like steps and will walk alongside them if there is any opportunity. The steps need to be comfortable to climb or they won’t be used. This means keeping the rise a reasonable 6 to 8 in (150 to 200 mm) and the run long enough to hold a hiker’s entire foot rather than just their toe. It’s helpful to armor the sides of steps with rocks to encourage users to stay on the steps.’

Stepping Rock and Riser Stairways

‘The most important area of the step is usually in the run. This is where most traffic steps as it climbs. If the step is composed of something like a board on edge with fill behind it, then the traffic will step onto the landing. Almost all foot traffic descending the step will walk off the edge of the step. The top of the step (and landing) should be stable and provide secure footing. The edge of the step should be solid and durable. The face of each step should not contain a batter that creates a “face run” of over 2 in (50 mm) from top to bottom. This is particularly important as the rise of the step increases.

‘Steps with landings are a bit harder to secure in place because the stairs do not overlap. Each step can either be placed in an excavated footing and the material below the rise removed to form the landing of the next lower step. This is usually the most stable arrangement. Or the step can be secured on the surface and fill used to form a landing behind it. The material used to provide the rise does double duty as a retaining structure when the landing consists of tamped fill. These steps must be seated well to prevent them from being dislodged by traffic. For stock use, landings should be long enough to hold all four of the animal’s feet.’

Riprap Stairway

‘In more primitive settings, you don’t need a uniform flight of steps as long as the route is obvious and there is solid tread at each stepping point. In the Sierra, a cross between cobblestones and stairs, locally called riprap, is commonly used for this purpose.

‘If the stairway climbs straight up the hill, each step should be slightly crowned to drain water to the edges or slightly sloped to one side. When the trail traverses a slope, each step and landing should be slightly outsloped. Water should not be allowed to descend long lengths of a set of steps or to collect on or behind a step on the landing. A drain dip where the trail approaches the top of the steps is a good idea.

‘In all steps, the key is to use the largest material possible and to seat it as deeply as possible. Rocks should be massive and rectangular. On steps that traverse a slope, it helps to seat the upper end of the step material in footings excavated into the slope.’

Rock Staircase

Best practice for building a stairway these days, if the rocks are big enough, is to butt them against each other instead of on top of each other. That way it is possible to repair one of the steps without redoing the whole staircase.

Rock Staircase

It doesn’t say in the notebook, but I was taught to kick test every step. If the stone moves when you kick it, it isn’t solid enough. A bit of a shock, sometimes, to see someone kick the structure you just labored on, but the step is definitely going to get kicked when people use it, so you might as well find out if it is going to last. You want to feel confident that your stairs are safe. It’s scary enough the first time you see a mule train crank through a set of steps that you’ve built even when you know the steps are solid. There aren’t mules in residential backyards, but the foot of a 150 lb. person can easily impact with 300 lbs. of force, so the basic principle is the same. Steps should be strong.

Steps also need to be regular. The test is to walk up and down the stairway without looking down at your feet. If the rise and run are even, you shouldn’t trip or stumble.

Old Town Wall Steps

In the front country I usually don’t get to work with stones that are “massive and rectangular,” but I still kick test every step and walk the staircase with my eyes closed. This set of steps, built with a local sandstone called Old Town Wall, was a lot of work, getting the risers to all match and the stones all interlocked enough to stay in place. I was working for a designer who is a serious dry stone purist, so mortar was out of the question. I think the steps and cheekwall took me longer than the entire rest of the wall.

Mortared Arizona Flagstone Steps

When it’s up to me — though I’m a dry stacker at heart — I usually build steps with mortar, usually by stacking flagstone with a recessed mortar joint. I don’t think that method holds up in areas with heavy freezes and probably not if the steps are going to be used by mules, but it does well in Bay Area gardens. A before photo of these steps and another mule photo are below. (more…)

Tenaya Peak

I have a feeling it might be self-indulgent to post about rock climbing for a largely non-climbing audience — it has a distinct ‘Look at me, I’m on top of the rock!’ quality — but there is clearly some connection between my interests in stonework and rock climbing, so I’ll go for it. In any case, what Anita and I do is often not so much rock climbing as it is vertical hiking, long climbs that are not particularly difficult but very scenic. We recently managed to sneak in a trip to Tuolumne Meadows and the Tenaya Lake area to do some absolutely beautiful vertical hikes before the fall planting season swallows us up for a while (55 lbs. of bulbs coming, among other things). It doesn’t get much more scenic than the area around Tenaya Lake.

Tenaya Summit

Tenaya Peak was probably the highlight. The view from the top includes Half Dome and all of the peaks of the Tuolumne area, and the climbing is low-angle and easy. The approach morphs into the climb and eventually you think, ‘Maybe I should put on my Spiderman rock shoes,’ and then a while later you think, ‘Maybe we should rope up,’ and then later you realize, ‘ Wow, I’m on the top, what a view.’ Rubberneckers in the parking lot and other non-climbers never believe me, but all that’s needed is a pair of sticky-rubber shoes with someone to manage the rope and anyone could do this climb. It’s truly beautiful.

Tenaya Lake

Foxtail Pine on Tenaya Peak

There’s always a surprising number of plants growing on the rock. We got to to hang out with one of the poster children for global warming, the pika. Pika’s can’t deal with heat and for the most part retreated up onto alpine peaks a long time ago. Now that the climate is warming even more, they are stranded on those peaks, unable to migrate north to cooler locations.

Pika!

Stately Pleasure Dome at Tenaya Lake

We climbed a few of the other domes in the area. The Stately Pleasure Dome is appropriately, if a bit grandiosely, named. Great White Book, up the white dihedral near the center of the main face, is one of the most enjoyable climbs I’ve ever done. Pywiack Dome is another dome we climbed, an almost unbroken slab. It’s all some of the most perfect granite I’ve ever seen.

Pywiack Dome

Can you spot the climbers?

Looking around on wikimedia, I found some photos that zoom in on climbers on the dome. You can click to enlarge.

Can you spot the climbers?

Climbers on Pywiack Dome

That’s not us, but we did rappel from those same anchors.

Glacial Erratics at Lake Tenaya, by Edward Muybridge c. 1870

I also found this copy of an old stereoscope from the 1870’s. That man clearly wishes he had my sticky-rubber shoes to climb that boulder with.

Look at me, I'm on top of the rock!

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Yosemite National Park, especially the Tuolumne Meadows and Tenaya area, is my favorite place in the Sierras. Pam at Digging is of the same mind, with a post calling Yosemite the most beautiful place on earth. She’s writing about national parks this week and compiling a list of posts from other bloggers. Check here to see the ongoing collection.