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Thursday, April 18, 2002

By Bob Batz Jr., Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Donald L. Gibbon sure can talk the walk.

	Donald Gibbon, right, gives some insight into the city to Walter Mastropaolo, a recent transplant from Louisville, Ky., along the Three Rivers Heritage Trail, North Shore, during one of Gibbon's Pittsburgh Walking tours. (John Beale, Post-Gazette) For more information: www.pittsburghwalking.com or call 412-362-8451. For a grand walking tour of Pittsburgh, see Sunday's print travel section.

On a recent weekday morning, with a blue PGH WALKING cap perched on his head, a big blue fanny pack with loaded water-bottle holster wrapped around his skinny waist and well-broken-in brown hiking boots laced to his feet, the lanky 65-year-old strides from beneath the north end of the 16th Street Bridge and into the sunshine with a small band of walkers in tow.

Pausing at a historical marker on the trail by the Allegheny River as the group gathers around, he begins the guided part of the walk by saying, "Let me go back a bit."

His "a bit" is, true to form, further than most people's. By a few hundred million years.

"The face of Pittsburgh is really determined by its Paleolithic past," he says, and he's off, talking and walking at a clip.

The Point Breeze geologist, naturalist, photographer, writer, traveler and all-around "green" gadabout has been leading such outings for the Sierra Club for years. But now he's taken the first steps in establishing his own walking tour outfit called Pittsburgh Walking.

More catchy than the title of the first walk he led in the early 1980s:

Engineering, Environmental and Geologic History of Downtown Pittsburgh.

"It was for people interested in the facts," Gibbon tells the friend who teases him about that during this day's two-hour stroll, which will go down the Three Rivers Heritage Trail to PNC Park, over the Sixth Street Bridge through Downtown and back up river and across the 16th Street Bridge.

With Pittsburgh Walking, Gibbon is offering to lead treks like this for groups of people who would "like to stretch your legs and learn about this exciting city."

He sure is excited about it, as you can tell by all the times he uses "interesting," "very interesting," "favorite," "fascinating," even "nifty."

"The astonishing story is this," he says during a pause in the history of the canal that used to cross above this river. Gibbon shows how in the mid-1840s the Pennsylvania Canal used to run along that railroad right of way there -- hence, "Canal Street." Then it turned and crossed the river on a suspension aqueduct designed by John Roebling, the Saxonburg native who created the "wire rope" -- cable -- used to hold up the aqueduct and later, to more lasting fame, the Brooklyn Bridge.

The really astonishing thing, Gibbon points out as he points to the roof of the new Lawrence Convention Center, is, "Its roof is half of a suspension bridge. It's built the very same way!"

He prides himself on making these connections -- from one side of the river to the other, from the present to the past.

"I have traveled virtually every inch of the city by bicycle, and I know it extremely well," says Gibbon, whose writings and photographs have appeared in various publications. "I thought, I'd love to share this with people."

So far, he's shared his knowledge and insights with visiting members of the Kiwanis and the national associations of both geology teachers and corrosion engineers.

On this day, he's leading a freebie for friends including Mt. Lebanon's Walter Mastropaolo, a walking and history buff who moved here from Louisville in July to work as a clinical chemist at Allegheny General Hospital. "I'm really enjoying myself discovering the city," he says, as Gibbon walks and talks them past various sculptures, bits of stone and other points of interest, from tall to tiny.

Pittsburgh Walking's official rates vary depending on the number of walkers and the length of the walks but start at $15 per person, with a minimum of $50 per hour.

Gibbon, who still works part time as a senior materials consultant, is involved in too many other things -- from heritage parks to relationship training -- to lead walks full time. But he says he has others who could help him as he starts to do more marketing. And he expects business can boom, especially as more visitors are drawn in by the new convention center.

As he passes that construction site on his way to the Strip District (which started, he notes, because that's where the Pennsylvania Canal ended), a flat-bed tractor-trailer rolls past loaded with coils of cable for the convention center roof. It'd be too perfect if the cable were made by the New Jersey company that Roebling started.

"It isn't," says Gibbon, who -- of course -- has already checked.