Fun Friday: Q is for Quest

A Hiker in Quest for Adventure

It was Fun Friday yesterday once again in our group Blogging For Fun. We are doing an A-Z meme, and this week, we are working on the letter Q! As you can tell I am late ( it is a Saturday now), all because we were on a Quest for Adventure yesterday. :) Friday was the start of my 4 day President's Day weekend, and we love always to spend our time out of the doors, spending some time with nature. Exploring our outside world is our form of bonding. Together, we share the fun of exploring our natural world every weekend or whenever we are on vacation :) Let me share with you our Quest for Adventure yesterday :)

Since San Diego County is riddled with numerous ecotones- which are areas between two adjacent but different geographic regions or ecological habitats, such as forest and desert, our quest for adventure yesterday involved exploring two different words in but one place.

We started our day driving to Mt. Laguna, which is in Eastern part of San Diego County. This was the scenery from the trail head.

 Snow Covered Slopes, Mt. Laguna, San Diego County

Our hike started meandering through pine forest, then, slowly, the pine and oak forest changed to low lying chaparrals, and finally to a more exposed slopes of manzanita and mahogany brush. After that, we did not proceed any further, since it would be a very tough and challenging vertical drop to the desert floor.

end of our hike @ Monument Peak with the Anza Borrego Desert State Park in front of us

At the top, we just enjoyed the expanse view of earth and sky. 

Hiker Taking in the Desert Scenery to His Front

The desert view above is totally different from this mountain view below, both taken at my vantage point yesterday.

Looking Back to Our Trail Head at Mt Laguna

This drastic change in environment creates a very sharp boundary between the geography of forest and desert. This type of scenery however, is not unique to San Diego only. There are a lot of this type of ecotones in the Eastern part of California. 

Anza Borrego Desert State Park

 After this mountain hike, we moved down and took another trail at one of the wild hidden canyons of San Diego County, the San Diego River Canyon.

San Diego River Canyon

The hike started with the view of a waterfall to the North.

Mildred Falls

There were a lot of trails to choose from at the trail head, and we chose the one that will lead us to Cedar Creek Falls. I was excited to see hints of a good wildflower season in this trail, there were already some early bloomers, such us poppies, phacelias and indian paint brush. 

Early Bloomers in the Trail

Strange it may be for some to see snow, waterfalls, wildflowers and the ocean in a short distance, but these are some of the special sights  we treat ourselves for living in California. After a long descent along this trail, we took the left trail that descended abruptly and in some parts through slippery rocks towards the top of the waterfall.  

Cedar Creek Falls from the top

I was too scared to scramble further down the rocks to get a good view of this 90 ft tall, 50 ft wide waterfall from the bottom. Some people brave enough and probably with more experience rock scrambling and bouldering would go down from the top through these slippery rocks and boulders. However, that type of adventure was not for us, since we don't feel like we are really skilled to doing that. We could opt to continue from where it branched earlier, that is go down all the way to the bottom of mountain and turn left to follow the creek, but it was already 3:30 pm, less than 2 hours before sunset. Considering we would have a long way to climb back up, we decided to just go back up to the trail head before the sun sets. As we were heading up back to the trailhead, I entertained myself with the amazing contrast of the blue sky and rock strewn mountain in front of me.

Before reaching the trail head, I saw some reflection on this small puddle of water.  

Mildred Falls (looking very small from afar) and Reflection

It was a great decision to go back instead of continuing down, since when we got back to the car, I could feel my legs were aching and really tired, must be from the snowy slopes in the first hike, and the slippery rocks trying to find our way down of Cedar Creek Falls but did not succeed. Had we gone down, I do not think I would have the energy to go back up.
On our drive home ( going West ), nature continued to treat us with the sun setting in front of us and the colors of the sky were changing. The pictures below were taken from a moving car, thus may not be that very high quality, but just would like to share how nature continued to treat us with wonderful sights after leaving the desert and mountains to go back to the coast.

Sunset

Peaceful Countryside of San Diego County

Today, as you can tell, I am just resting my legs :) but the day is still long, and we may end up still doing something outdoors before the sun sets.

♥♥