I have a friend who is doing the whole cancer and radiation thing and is not a well puppy. So I do what I can and one of the things is walk his dog. He lives on the bluff of the stretch of the river that runs through Pueblo between Fourth Street and Union Avenue. That is also where the Kayak Course is located. They have done a lot of work down there to include a very nice wide side walk, benches, trash cans, bags to pick up doggie do and also landscaped and planted the steep edges with wild grass and such. To hold that in place they covered it with net. Now comes the tricky part.
That net is doing what it is supposed to do, it is rotting and going back to mother nature. Well, kind of doing that, but not quite. The plot thickens. Click on my little slide show and be sure to read the captions.
The first shot is Pearl and Chapa. That is right off of Fourth Street. The fishing sign is 2 blocks away and is right behind my friends house. So I go out the door, turn left and pass two houses, another left and across a vacant lot and there I am at the big wide side walk. As you can see it is very nice. Well, yeah, until it ends! There I am left with the choice to either slip and slide down down the dirt incline which is rutted and full of rocks and no place a 70 year old woman out to be skittering down! Or I can angle off across where you see those 3 young'uns walking down. See that is steep, too. So if I go at an angle I come to a gentle slope and then I reach the wide, safe sidewalk. Unless, of course, I catch my shoe in the netting and then I face plant. Last time I went that way I was so careful and I reached the sidewalk and had one foot in the air on the way down to the sidewalk and the other in the netting and face down on the cool concrete, my fall broken only by my poor old, mistreated knees. There were two girls there with there dogs who were kind enough to offer to help me up, but the dog I walk is very protective of me, so that did not happen.
So, I have a message for the city of Pueblo. I notice you have chained the steps that lead up the embankment beside the Chinese Resturant there on Fourth and the bridge heading into the city. I have no idea what that is about. How about taking some of those chains down there and draping them across the "Pedestrian Access" behind that big gravel pile in case another little old lady wanders down there and thinks that 3 foot wide sidewalk actually goes some where. Or here! Even better would be if you finished that other 30 feet so we could actually get down there safely. How about that?
When my son saw my bruises he was in hog heaven imagining the lawsuit we could have against the city. This is a clear cut case of negligence on your part. However, I am not a suing person, but you should know there are people out there who are. I love to walk on that part of the river and that access is wonderful right up to the point that it becomes treacherous. I am surely not the only one who would like to see that little stretch finished. It just seems counter productive to do so much work and spend so much money and then not finish the project.
So, I ask you to either finish it or take down the Pedestrian Access sign and chain that sidewalk, before some one else gets hurt. I could loan you a padlock if you don't have one.
