Embudito Canyon

I had all of my nephews and niece sleep over at my house one night when they were visiting. I bought their love with food - sopapillas for dinner and homemade donuts in the morning for breakfast. Those kids LOVE food, and they were so excited about eating it that cooking for them was super gratifying.

See? Donuts! YUM! The only way to get those kids up and at 'em before 9 was with the smell of bread frying...

As a side note, we had them help us with this little project in the backyard after our hike to Carlito Springs the day before. It starts with a pond on top that trickled down to a small pool before the turtle enclosure. There's another pool inside the turtle enclosure that empties out a pipe and down over our big rocks into a bigger pond. More pics of that to come...

After our *ahem* healthy and filling breakfast of donuts, I ordered the kids into the van so we could go to a nearby trailhead for a hike. Most of them were agreeable, but a couple of them needed a little tough love and coercion. We went to Embudito canyon and hiked about a half mile up the wash. There was a little bit of water trickling down the trail from recent rains and the kids spend the next two hours playing in the water and building a series of dams. We made videos of the water breaking through the top dam and rushing down to be slowed temporarily by lower dams.

It was intense work. Sometimes heated words were exchanged over the engineering specifications of a particular dam or the process in which it was destroyed. But all in all everyone had fun.

When we left there was a lot of talk about when we could come back and do it again. Unfortunately we didn't make it back, but I think it will forever be a memorable, happy place to these kids...even the ones who didn't want to go at first.