Some of those redwood trees are older than the oldest buildings in the entire nation.
>nature alone manages to build towering long-lasting structures in that environment. My last camping trip in Joshua Tree National Park concluded with my tent collapsing on me under a snow load. It's why you find Terracotta/slate/metal roofs so common in the desert the environment is too harsh for the cheaper asphalt shingle stuff you find across the country.Īnd it's not like deserts don't get freezing temps or snowfall. Asphalt shingles quickly become embrittled in the desert, and the frequent gale-force winds break them off. But asphalt-shingled roofs easily lasted over a decade, barring some exceptional tornado-style event ripping them apart. The main problem we had back in IL was ice-heaving of roads and patios/sidewalks. The "15-year" Behr brand exterior paint I put on a refinished shed ~2 years ago is already cracking and peeling off, simply because the substrate undergoes such extreme thermal expansion and contraction daily between the day-night cycle, with the UV quickly embrittling the skin. here in the Mojave where I have property. There was no comparison in terms of how quickly things deteriorated there vs. My parents are in the midwest which is where I lived into my 20s, and my dad did a lot of DIY maintenance on their house which I helped with.
I never said nowhere else is harsh, I just strongly object to arguing the desert is not a harsh environment.
It took me an hour and two screw drivers to go from "unusable paperweight" to "fully functional", the most advanced pieces of machinery in there are metal gears and springs. I just picked up a camera from 1950, opened it, cleaned its lens elements / shutter mechanism and it works just as good as when it came out of the factory. That's why you can pick up virtually any pre 1960 camera and repair it but cameras from the late 80s early 90s are incredibly finicky. I do believe stuff was made better in term of repairability and simplicity, simply because they didn't have any other ways. The transition from hand built to machine built and the general miniaturisation of most mechanical/electronic systems since the 80s also means it gets harder and harder to fix. When they started building consumer grade cameras in the 80s they almost exclusively used cheap plastic and cheap electronics which inevitably die (LCD screens instead of mechanical displays, undersized rewind motors instead of manual advance levers, autofocus vs manual focus, &c.). If you look at cameras from example, "cheap" old (pre 1960s) cameras were just as reliable as expensive ones, if not more, they were just simpler in design and built with less tolerance. The transition to "everything plastic" definitely was a big jump in term of quality in general.
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