Hiking in Rabbit Valley

One of the advantages of living in a remote suburb is that there isn't much at the end of our road apart from hills and valleys. So we often go on hikes in the canyon we have discovered there. We can even go after Stephen has finished work. We were warned about bobcats, big wild cats that come out at dawn or dusk, generally angry that their territory is gradually invaded by the sprawl of suburbia and ready to attack humans! Everyone who has lived here for a long time says how much the valley has changed, that in the 70's Thousand Oaks used to be a big village, and has grown exponentially with the develpment of Amgen. The valley used to be farm land, mainly strawberry fields and horse farms.
There are signs along the paths that say: " Caution Rattlesnakes", which are not exactly reassuring! But it reminds me of the vipers in Lozère when we were little, watch where you walk, avoid rocky, exposed areas, since they love basking in the sun and if you get bitten, run to the nearest hospital!

On a hike with Flavia and her two dogs Ziggy and Zaza, she showed me some small skull left on the side of the path and told me that coyotes, small skinny dogs, run to catch pets, in people's gardens or farms but also on trails, and then kill them! Walking in Britian along the North Down way and the South Down Way, through the green rolling hills of Sussex or Kent over the past few years was quite different, much more peaceful! But we like hiking here too, the scenery is very dramatic: rocky cliffs, volcanic canyons, sandy earth. The vegetation is very dry. Some eucaliptuses, " garrigue" type of vegetation, aromatic plants, dry bushy trees and, that's different from the Languedoc or the Provencal hills, cactuses abound. In this region there are three geographical zones: the coast, the valleys and the desert. The weather forecast on the radio gives you the three which are usually quite different: in the spring, the coast is much cooler, usuallly overcast, the valleys are overcast until mid-morning, the desert is very hot and very dry. Here in the valley, it is quite nice. The wild life is quite different from England too, lots of rabbits, hence Conejo Valley (rabbit in Spanish), cute lizards, dragon flies with hues of luminescent blue, lots of crickets that chirp all year around, roadrunners, little birds that run fast on the ground (like in the cartoon, except they don't say "bip, bip"!). I am fascinated by hummingbirds, very small birds, that can only be found on the American continent, almost like big bumble bees, who don't really fly but hover or dive suddenly. Lots of seagulls fly here from the Pacific. We have also seen racoons, mainly around rubbish bins, small black and white mammals with big black eyes and a strippy tail, generally not as scary as foxes.

On one of our walks we saw a film crew once, reminding us that Tinseltown is less than 50 miles away. Yesterday we went hiking in Wildwood Park, more canyons and gently rolling grassland plateaux. From what the hiking book, Day hike around Ventura County says, this particular park was used to shoot "a number of Westerns and televisions series like Bonanza in the 50's, 60's and 70's, the Rifleman (1958) by Sam Peckinpah, Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, and the original town of Dodge City. One of the trails in this park is called the Stagecoach Bluff Trail, named for its numerous stagecoach racing scenes"! Other trails are appropriately named Lizard Rock trail, Teepee overlook trail, Paradise waterfall.
A real escape from consumerism and the car obsessed society or trying to know of Paris Hilton is in or out of prison!