Peters Canyon is a Nice Place to Walk

I walk a lot for exercise and it's also a good way to get places you need to go as long as they aren't too far away and you have the time. It's good to combine the exercise and the getting places and save gas and the earth all at the same time; and you also see stuff you would never know was there if you drove. And so, much as I yearn to walk the trails in a place like Peters Canyon Regional Park, it seems oxymoronic to drive there and take a walk. Yet that is what I finally convinced Mr. Cardui to do on a recent weekday morning because I just wanted to see some new flowers and birds and buggies. Warning: Do Not Attempt This Walk on a Weekend.

Peters Canyon is very close to suburbia, where lots and lots of people need exercise. Reviews on Yelp reveal that most of these folks think of the park as a open air gym, with up hills and down hills etc to provide a nice workout; not much mention of the other things that live there. I also thought the several comments about getting harassed by the rangers or cops were odd/funny. It costs $3 to park in the lot. You buy a ticket at the kiosk. It's not that hard or expensive; if you don't want to pay to park, you can walk in for free.

We took the grand circuit walk, about 3 miles or so, and saw some flowers that I couldn't stop to photograph because I was busy keeping my heart rate up. I did stop, however, when I saw a fuzzy spider crossing the trail. On closer inspection, that wasn't fuzz, it was her babies riding on top of her back. I hope the mountain biker behind us missed them.


A few parts of this trail are kind of steep so it's best to keep up one's cadence if you hope to finish in a respectable time. Even so, I stopped a moment for this scruffy looking beetle that was traversing instead of going straight up.




Down in the willows near the end of our walk, the trees are in bloom and attract lots of honey bees but we didn't want to linger too long for fear of getting in the way of the hordes of high school distance runners making their break on this level section of trail. Still I managed to get a few photos of the bees working the abbondanza of the willow blossoms.

Happy Trails.