hiking the northside – buena vistatrek – 3
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Along the periphery of the historic district – The Mexican War Streets – there is great development and we’re finally seeing modern design infiltrating the staid and traditional. The two images are new houses going up on Buena Vista just north of the historic district boundaries.

Seeing the new designs is seeing new life in an area that was rescued from the wrecking ball by the urban homesteaders of the 1960s and 1970s. And those same pioneers are now welcoming new homesteaders who have a different world-view, a different sensibility than those of us who preserved and rehabbed the old structures.

The construction and rehab rules are different outside the original historic district – the gray area – and what these new home-owners seem to be doing is using the lines and the symmetries of the old houses to develop a new architectural language that looks to the past, but isn’t confined by it.

This morning’s hike was up Buena Vista Street. The Department of Public Works classifies Buena Vista at 12.5% – 6^o grade/steepness from horizontal. (A 0% grade is perfectly flat and a 100% grade is 45 degrees from the horizontal. The percentage expresses the steepness of the hill as the rise over run expressed as a percentage.)

I walked up Buena Vista to Perrysville and then took steps down to Arch and then home; the hike was 1.5 miles. The uphill portion – Buena Vista – was .6 miles; Google Maps shows a rise from 761 feet at the bottom to 1063 feet at the top. (My Thursday hike up Itin Street was a rise from 761 feet at the bottom to 965 feet at the top. No wonder this morning’s hike was so much more strenuous.)

Also, found a set of stairs from Perrysville down the hillside to Arch Street. I’m not ready to do stairs yet, but I’ll keep using them as the way down to the Flats.

Am also using the hikes to better learn the d800e camera. Today, all the images were shot using the preprogrammed settings – P is Nikon’s auto setting for its high-end cameras. I’d like to take the d800e (36.3 effective megapixels) with me to Peru and I’m assuming that I will be handing it off to other people on the tour so that I can be in the Machu Picchu pictures, and so I need to get familiar with the auto setting.