Inside the nature center, the ranger introduced us to a collection of live honey ants,
showed us a live scorpion glowing under blacklight...
...and let them hold fossilized dinosaur scat! Asher was in awe!
We chose to hike the Loop Trail, veering off a bit to find some of the arches before coming back to finish the trail.
The deep canyon was created by large amounts of water from the San Gabriel mountains cutting thru the rocks as well as the movement of three different fault lines in and around the area.
Here we heard a beautiful birdsong, it turned out to be my first California Thrasher sighting!
This is a manzanita tree. The seeds have a very hard shell and can only grow after an animal eats and "processes" it or after a fire. A fire will burn thru the outer shell, but not harm the actual seed, so the spring after a forest fire will see lots of new manzanita sprouting. During a drought, it has the ability to seal off sections to save itself. The gray section is dead, the red is the live plant. Once a water supply is more plentiful, it will grow again, twisting around the dead parts.
This large rock has a stripe of small different kinds of rocks imbedded. Very interesting!
It's fun to include reading, number recognition and math
wherever we are, especially along the trail. The beauty of unschooling.
Once we made it to the bottom of the canyon, we were met with a small stream.
Daddy pulled out the Lifestraw and let the kids take a sip of the cold, mountain water.
It was a fairly steep climb out using switchbacks, but we immensly enjoyed the entire hike.
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