Today we went to the California Botanic Gardens in Claremont, Ca. Much like many of the other walks/hikes we have done in the past few months, this botanical garden is just a 12 minute drive from home. With the temperatures hitting the mid 80s to low 90s in the afternoons here, morning hikes work much better. Morning hikes or afternoons at the beach, which is at minimum, an hour's drive from here.
Our original plan for today's hike was to drive down to Eastvale and climb up Pumpkin Rock Trail. Still just a 30 minute drive, an hour both ways, eats up too much of our available hours. With daughter's work schedule changing from early am to noon through early evening, our hiking plans line up with the hottest afternoon hours.
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Back at the beginning of May, I discovered there was a botanical garden 6 miles from us. https://www.calbg.org/ At the time, they were offering free entrance on Mother's Day. Unfortunately, we could not work that free admission offer into our schedule. Still, the lure of going to see the gardens stayed with me. With a couple hours available, we headed over to Claremont.
Imagine discovering that this unheard of botanical garden was 1/4 mile from where my daughter and her husband lived up until 2022. A place I babysat my youngest grandchild a couple days a week for several months.
With Natalie starting work at 11:30, we thought 1 1/2 hours would be plenty of time to tour the gardens. Unfortunately, first we discovered we were a minute and a half too young for the senior discount...sigh. And daughter wanted to wait in the car, rather than walk through the gardens before an eight hour shift on her feet. By the time we arrived at the California Botanic Garden we were down to just an hour. Still, it should be plenty of time for what is listed as a 1.8-mile loop trail near Claremont, California. Generally considered an easy route, it takes an average of 37 min to complete. link
But alas, the person who was in line right before us was trying to purchase a season pass as a gift. She could not decide exactly what type she wanted or anything else, apparently. This place has about 6 people total in the entire park and it took almost 30 minutes to get tickets. For what ever reason, the person working the ticket kiosk made us wait behind the only other person there forever. AAAHHH!
The wait did give us time to think about time, first, because it was ticking away. And second, if we should get the season pass for ourselves, as one day tickets were almost twice as much as we were expecting. We now have a season pass to the botanical gardens just down the road!!!
Time was not on our side, but we still managed to get in a 1.8 mile hike before having to leave to get daughter to work on time.
The Tongva Village was very reminiscent of the Minnesota Historical site near Hinckley, MN. We had just enough time to snap a couple photo before moving on. I can't wait to have time to really learn about the Tongva people.
With easy to walk, well maintained pathways, we quickly moved on to the California Habitat gardens. Again, it was mostly photos taken to use as reference when we return.
The giant Wisdom Tree is listed as being over 250 year old. Wow! We hurried on, seeing flowers, trees a few lizards and many, many, many squirrels. We could hear many birds singing, but we did not see many on our walk.
One of my favorite spots was the Joshua Tree garden. We have not been out to Joshua Tree National Park in years. I truly hope we can go back, but it will definitely be in the late fall or early winter. Once the desert heat is cooling.
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I have added a few more photos of our first day at California Botanic Gardens. With a forty minutes walk, it was a lot of 'We'll look at that in the future," moments. I have had a few months of no doctor appointments, but that changes again soon. Still, with gardens to walk through and mountains to hike, I plan to get as much nature time in as absolutely possible.
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We went back to the California Botanic Garden again that same evening (after I wrote this blog post). Missing the heat of the day, the gardens were pretty empty. There was a lot of insect activity. A hat would have been beneficial to keep the gnats out of my face. We again saw lots of squirrels. There were lizards every couple of feet, so beware where you step.
In these evening hours, the birds were also plentiful. We watched a small bird chasing a hawk away from its nest. Black birds, hummingbirds, purple finches and plenty of others I didn't get close enough to recognize.
We also saw a few white tail rabbits. They skittered away too fast to get any photos. They were a surprise, because we did not see any in the morning. There were giant black bees and more red ants than you count.
The garden in located in the middle of Claremont. So, in additions to the bees buzzing and the birds singing, you can hear the constant humming of the 210 intermixed with the occasional emergency siren. While wandering the trails, it is easy to forget how close to civilization you really are walking.
Our walk was leisurely slow taking the outer loop. Unlike the morning brisk hike where we zipped in and out of pathways through the center of the gardens. In the end, we walked 1.87 miles early and 1.9 miles later. So close in distance considering how different both our trails chosen and pace walked.
