Royal Palms State Beach

I wish I'd been able to do entries for some of the places we walked over the summer. Boston Harbor and the Lynn Woods. London, Broadstairs, Margate, Ramsgate, King's Cross, Petworth. San Diego, Carlsbad, Oceanside. There are photos from these trips, but there were no readily available words, and no time to find some.

Yesterday we visited San Pedro - home of Mike Watt, home of shipping containers. It's a long drive. We left the car at White Point Park and walked down a steep paved road to Royal Palms State Beach.



PC likes tidepools, so we went for the tidepools.



I've come to enjoy them too. We were minimally invasive. I did turn over a few rocks to inspire the hermit crabs to take walks. There were tiny hermits - easy to miss if you don't know to look.



I also poked a sea urchin, but only because I thought it was a pretty rock. It was covered in little shells and it felt like a ball.



It will be good if we remember to bring the real camera when we do these things. These are iPhone photos, and they don't tell you much. But you can probably see that there was a cat on that rock. There were lots of cats, but cats don't like water. I counted eight and then stopped counting.

Wildwood Park

This afternoon we drove to Thousand Oaks with JR and hiked to
Paradise Falls, a 70-foot waterfall inside Wildwood Park. We saw lizards, ducks, a big blue heron, some other birds, a rabbit, and a turtle that fell off of the waterfall cliff and into a pond. The loop was about 3 miles. On our way back to the car, we passed a vegetable garden growing lavender, tomatoes, oranges, lemons, grapefruits, and several varieties of squash. Then we went to In-N-Out.

Solstice Canyon

Today's hike: Solstice Canyon.

The Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area has a Flower Finder. It's fun to know what you're pointing at. The "faded" California poppies I identified today--mostly yellow, not orange--were actually Collarless California poppies. They weren't dying after all.

There's a long version with notes and a compact version.

We also saw snakes, or a snake. Not sure. I tried chanting "red then yellow, kill a fellow; red then black, venom lack," but I was too busy getting ready to die to do any competent color analysis. Patrick courageously snapped photos.



I am now certain we encountered a Mexican Milk snake (click picture for stripe inspection). Venom lack! According to the Park Service, there is only one type of poisonous snake in the SM Mountains area, and it's a rattler.