Small Adventures: Kenneth Hahn

Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area is... well, the name pretty much sums it up.  It contains the regular aspects of your normal California city park (playgrounds, covered picnic tables, basic charcoal grills, man-made pond and water falls, etc.), combined with a little, barely curated wilderness dedicated to hiking trails and natural flora/fauna, plus a big green space up away from everything else.

The trail itself has some pretty steep portions that kicked our butt a little, as well as many mini trails leading you off in strange directions that you hope will eventually lead back to the main trail.  There's a little map that you can get from the Visitor's Center that does a pretty poor job of representing the available trails--most of the smaller ones don't show up on the map, and the larger ones don't reflect the actual twist and turns of their reality.  But overall it's a nice little bit of wilderness within 5 minutes of home.

There are wildflowers everywhere.  My husband is a gamer, and his Skyrim senses have him pointing out every other occurrence of thistles we encounter.  They are a rather lovely purple color, though.

Once you've conquered the afore mentioned inclines, you're afforded nice view of the surrounding area.  In one direction, pretty much all you get is a wide expanse of oil derricks.  Other directions get you a little more wilderness, suburban sprawls, and (way off in the distance) downtown LA.

Possibly my favorite flora find of the day were the herds of cactus, clearly deep into a blooming phase.  We took a LOT more pictures of cactus blossoms, but I won't inflict all of them on the blog.

We found this strange contraption in the big green space in the loop at the top of the park.  The oddities of my father's college days meant I actually knew what the thing was: a frisbee golf basket.  We found three more on our way out of the loop.

This duck was kinda brutal.  When we first encountered him, he was swimming in the water and darted his beak for something in the water.  Clearly he'd caught something.  We wanted him to swim closer so we could see what he caught.  A fish?  A really big bug?  We were somewhat horrified and fascinated to find that he'd actually caught a small mouse.  You can just barely make it out in the picture, that the back legs and tail are hanging out of his mouth...  Nature is weird and fascinating.

TURTLES!  That's all.

The afore-mentioned man made pond/lake is pictured below.  There were geese and ducks and people fishing, which was apparently totally kosher according to signs.  I can't imagine wanting to eat anything that came out of that pond, though.

A random wild turkey-thing in the parking lot wrapped up the fauna tour for us.

This was an easy one compared to last week--just 2.51 miles and we stopped a lot for the views.