Britt Donharl: Randall Davey Adubon Center and Sanctuary

We hiked at a new area on Saturday that was surprisingly delightful. Even though it's January, and dry DRY dry, it was a beautiful day for hiking at the Randall Davey Audubon Center. I need to keep an eye out for programs that we might do this summer, and I'd love to go back and tour the Randall Davey house someday. Since this is an Audubon Society property, it contained a meeting center and a short (1/2 mile) set of trails with bird feeders and some nature information. The trail linked up to the Bear Canyon trail, which went up a tiny drainage, and which we would definitely love to come back to. We all had a great time!

Since it was a cloudy day in January, and I forgot the camera and was using an iPhone, the photos were pretty washed out. I'm reading a book on photography and trying out some different techniques; thus, I washed the photos of the kids on the trail out further as a way to emphasize their little bright spot of color in the rather monochromatic scenes.

Lower on the trail there wasn't any ice or snow.

As we went higher, the ice covered stretches of the trail.


Alanna enjoyed the ice most of all, pretending she was ice skating and falling down a lot.

The end of the center's trails and the beginning of the Bear Canyon trail.


That black blob in the distance is Aaron.

As we were hiking we had a lot of fun making up a story about ice spiders. We first saw a frozen puddle in which the water underneath had soaked into the ground, leaving a thin layer of spindly ice sheets in the grass– an ice spider web. We then kept an eye out for ice spiders, and decided the pinon pine branch tips that fall to the ground were spider-like, and even found some caught in their own webs. Rhys then proposed that the Old Man's Beard draping the trees were the baby ice spiders, although Alanna maintained that Old Man's Beard was keeping the trees warm and dry. This sort of storytelling made this trail even more unique for our family, and encouraged us to be more observant in order to pick out the details of our surroundings and connect them in a creative way.