Running Away in the Middle of the Day

I needed the trail today. Thank goodness we have raised the kids on these trails and they are always up for a random mid day, mid week outing.

They are out of school at 12:30 on Wednesdays, so I brought them a change of shoes and told them we were hitting the trail.

This is Shell Ridge in Walnut Creek.

We head up to the top of that ridge and follow it back down.

There were a few dogs cooling off in the water.

If you make it bigger you'll see a squirrel on the trail under those green leaves.

There's a lizard below the shadow in the middle of the log.

My "special" boy

I was a bit sad to find a nice new bench where my old, wooden, falling apart bench that I loved used to be.

But the new one was there for a good reason, and John Muir's words felt very true today.

The upper pond was full of baby frogs, and looks like there will soon be many more.

While at the pond we heard a pop and looked up to see a weather balloon dropping a camera back to the ground.

There was a team from Lawrence Livermore Lab doing some air quality studies that somehow involved sending up a Go Pro camera attached to a weather balloon.  They said after a few different experiments they would let it go and track it w/3 different GPS units to recover it.

On the back side of those tan hills is where we live, those are the same hills B and I climbed over to get home on last weeks "date night" that I mentioned in a previous post.

We made it to the top o the ridge, we always stop on this rock to have snacks.

Down off the ridge we saw this guy. For a Gopher snake, it's not that big, but still a decent size snake.

It was just what I needed!