Get On Your Bikes and Ride: Stairway to Heaven

Did you guess it yet?


Don't worry, I wouldn't have picked it either.


While I was in Santa Cruz, Marc had kindly loaned me a book called, "Stairway Walks in San Francisco". On the front cover was this photograph of the most amazing stairway.


I had to see it.


So we looked it up and found that it was located on Moraga Street between 15th and 16th Streets. That's south of Golden Gate Park. When we rented the bikes, we decided to see if we could nut out how to get there.


There was a lot of hill work involved, but, assisted by our map and the Awesome Navigational Skills of yours truly, we made it quite easily.


The neighbourhood colour schemes as we got closer became somewhat interesting.....

And then.......we found it!!!

Ta-da!!!

We had to wait a few minutes for the stairway to clear, but we were too busy reeling in our jaws to mind:

According to http://www.tiledsteps.org/, the 16th Avenue Tiled Steps project was a neighborhood effort to create a beautiful mosaic running up the risers of the 163 steps located at 16th and Moraga in San Francisco. It was completed in 2005.


Artists Aileen Barr and Colette Crutcher led the creation of 163 mosaic panels that were applied to the step risers. Over 300 neighbors assisted in making them, and over 220 neighbors sponsored handmade animal, bird and fish name tiles embedded within the mosaic.


This has to be one of the best pieces of functional art work I have ever seen. It's just incredible.


I climbed up ever so slowly, admiring the detail in each and every step. I took, um, over a hundred photos (digital rules!), but here are the edited highlights.


We start at the bottom with the ocean...........

 .... which gives way to land and all these cute woodland creatures:

I loved the colours in this section.

Gradually, the shades start to get a bit darker:

The individual tiles are so beautiful:

About half way up. You can see the Golden Gate Bridge off to the right.

Moving on up, and it's back into some fish, but this time in a river:

Spot the froggie:

Gradually, the landscape gives way to the sky:

Birds and stars begin to predominate:

And bats!

The final two sections of the stairway: the moon, and the sun: 

And here's the view west to the Pacific Ocean from the top of the stairway!

 Two happy art-loving, bike-riding stair climbers:

Loving it!

So where did we go next?!

Stay tuned!