Walking at the Channel Islands National Park

 Happy weekend everyone. I know some people here in the US have a long weekend because of the Thanksgiving holiday, but I hope, no matter where you are, you are enjoying your weekend.

I thought today for Art Every Day Month over at Leah's blog I would share some photos from the walk my husband and I took while visiting Santa Cruz Island in the Channel Islands National Park.

I'll start off with these morning glories which were blooming all over the island. At least I think they are morning glories.

We walked with a small group of people and with the park's volunteer naturalist. He was, like me, a somewhat recently retired science teacher with 36 years of teaching. As he taught  environmental science for many years, he had a lot of information about the islands to share with us. Since he taught high school, he also had a great style explaining. Of course I am partial to that way of explaining things since I'd taught high school science for a long time too. (smile)

We started off at "base camp" which was one of the original ranch stations when the island was not a national park. At that time it was privately owned, and the whole island was one giant ranch with lots of sheep and pigs. When the Park Service took over the islands they worked on restoring them back to their natural, pre-ranch state. That took many years to accomplish, but they are more or less restored there now, except for all the eucalyptus trees that the ranch family planted.

The base where we started off was near where the boat docked and was fairly flat. There was no place to go but up however, as most of the island is flat, but flat on top of some steep sided hills.

This was the start of the climbing. Not terrible, but it surprised me how steep it was as we walked. 

Our group arrived at this first plateau where we could have a view of the ocean. We had one small hill left to climb up on our trail after that. You can see that hill going to the right.

You can see our guide on the top of the hill behind  him my husband. The hubby and I were the first of the visitors to reach him up at the top, which made me feel good. Everyone in our group did make it up the climb; some of them just took a while.

It was worth it because the view at the top was spectacular.

There was a nice set of rock benches on top where, once our official tour wrapped up, we could sit and each our lunch, enjoy the sun and the view.

Then we walked back.  Here I am, with a view of Anacapa Island (one of the other islands in the park)  in the distance.

Here (below) you can see the beach area. We are still up on the hill top and it was quite a ways down.

Another thing you could do on the island was take a day kayaking trip. That would have been fun, but 1) we didn't come dressed for that and 2) it was $150 a person, so with 2 of us that would have been  expensive.

Here is the satellite ranch house we reached at the end of the hike (back where we started).

It was a beautiful day. Not too hot nor not too cold with a nice breeze. 

That's all for me. I hope you enjoyed the views today. 

Thanks for visiting! And enjoy the weekend!