600 lbs of Sin

This past weekend, I headed down to LA to catch a Yonder Mountain String Band show with my old friends, Lindsey and Chris. It was a real hootenanny, but since the show was on the Sunset Strip they weren't quite as hootenannied out as this.


Nevertheless, they played two seriously rocking sets. I mean, when was the last time you heard a bluegrass cover of Talking Heads' Girlfriend is Better? It was also by far the best crowd of any concert I've been to in California. You gotta hand it to hippies, they love them some music.

After the gracious hosting of the Byer's family (so much yummy food), Chris and I went out to explore LA's desert origins, no wait, that was on the radio, we explored LA's prehistoric origins. Thats right, in the middle of LA there are bubbling tar pits filled with skeletons from crazy beasts such as the Mammuthus columbi, Smilodon fatalis and the Canis dirus or dreaded Dire Wolf.


While I'm on the subject of bubbling black substances, my friend Paul gave us a generous gift of Coke Blak for our drive home.


For those readers not familiar with Coke Blak, let me tell you a little bit about it:

At the Coke Blak Factory, the crude oil has been seeping out of the ground through conduits and fissures in the coastal plain sediments for the past 40,000 years, the seeps forming pools in low-lying areas.

Fresh sediments from the surrounding hills continued to form new layers of sediments on top of the older ones and asphalt continued to seep to the surface. Over tens of thousands of years, this produced the cone-shaped asphalt deposits found in Coke Blak.