Outdoor Hour Challenge #1: Nature Walk Notes

We successfully completed our Green Hour Challenge yesterday. We decided to take advantage of the beautiful weather and go for a nature hike. I had seen a sign a couple miles from our house that looked like it was the beginning of a trailhead. How could I have never put the effort into stopping and finding out before? It seems strange that such a gorgeous trail could be that close to my house and we had never walked it before. The Green Hour Challenge put it into my head to go ahead and give it a try. Here are a few photos of things we saw.

Delicate lavender flowers among miner's lettuce.

Ferns lined the trail on the way down the canyon. I love this photo so much that it is now the background image on my nature blog.

I have no idea what this bloom is but it was so unusual that I decided to try to identify it when we got home. Did you see the insect on it?
After we hiked this trail a bit we made our way back to the car and went down to the river to explore.

So here are some rocks along the river's edge. We decided that this week we are going to try to identify the pink and the green rocks in this photo. I have an idea of what they are but we are going to do some research and find out for sure.

Here is another shot of the green rock.

Here is a photo of the American River where we spent some time on our Green Hour Challenge. Can you believe this river flows about 4 miles away from our front door?

Who can go to the river without throwing a few rocks in?

It was getting late but we were enjoying ourselves so much that we lost track of time. The dog in this photo just appeared at the river's edge and convinced the boys to throw some sticks into the water so he could jump in and fetch them. My boys loved this added feature of our nature walk. :)

So that ends our first Green Hour Challenge. I got my reading done (I've read it before but I took the time to reread it.) We spent our time walking outdoors together. We found two things to investigate further. We had a wonderful time.

Success.