Early this month, my parents, brother, and I went to the Coachella Valley Preserve for a morning of hiking. It’s a wildlife refuge and botanical oasis out by the San Andreas Fault. The reason for the trip was that my mom has been enrolled in the local branch of the Master Gardener’s Program. Once or twice a week, she’s been logging onto Zoom classes and learning all about plants. At the beginning of the month, her teacher assigned a special lab to her students. Go out to the Coachella Valley Preserve and take pictures of the native species. We all jumped at the opportunity to go with her and get out of the house.
There were many people there enjoying the preserve, but we didn’t see a lot of people on the first trail. That was just as well, given that my mom had to keep stopping to identify plants on her list and take pictures of them. We even took a break in a small picnic area and found an active beehive on the outskirts. We didn’t bother the bees and they didn’t bother us.
The last trail we went on that day was on the opposite side of the preserve. While the first trail was arid, the second one made me feel as if we were in a jungle. It was more swampy and cooler in the shade. My mom found and recorded my plants on her list. It was a fun morning.