Adventure Quest

11/19/2023

Out Questing in the rain today!

10/25/2023

“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”

~Muhammad Ali

10/08/2023

For those of you who have been on my night hikes, scorpions aren’t the only thing with an eerie black light glow!

Because being a duck-billed, egg-laying, venomous weirdo wasn't strange enough.

10/02/2023

It was coming down pretty hard Saturday evening but Sunday brought the sun, though it was still cold.

10/02/2023

Adventures in the rain and woodlands this weekend!

09/28/2023

After we tackled the Wall, Adventure Training Class devolved into a slide pile-up today! 😂This is a super fun class. We have a blast every day!

08/15/2023

08/15/2023

Chico is too ruddy beastly bloody hot in the summer! Come on, Autumn! Get here already!!

07/30/2023

Out running this morning and finding Geocaches along the way! Shaved a minute off my average mile time today… gotta get in shape so I can keep up with my middle school students at Nord School! I’m teaching Adventure Training this year!

07/30/2023

This peak amid the Pacific ocean is taller than it is wide (562 m in elevation vs 300 m across): it looks like a fantasy novel place and it really exists

Read more: https://bit.ly/41CcMaO

07/17/2023

A little camping, a little exploring, a little outdoor cooking, a little obstacle overcoming, a little swimming, a little Geocaching… what are you up to this summer?

07/13/2023

Crazy swarms of dragonflies! Up in Paradise off Neal Road. No water nearby but a trickle of a creek. I thought there must have been a hatch of some kind and the dragonflies were there to feed, but if anyone else has some insight, please share! The landowner had never seen anything like it there before.

07/11/2023

What’s everyone been doing for adventures this summer? Our youngest got his very first horse ride this summer and learned how fun archery can be!

06/30/2023

https://youtu.be/VAX7Qz8uO7A

Harrison Ford | Empowering Climate Change Speech This is a powerful speech legendary actor and conservationist Harrison Ford gave at the Global Climate Actio...

06/27/2023

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/indiana-jones-harrison-ford-movie-impact-archeology?cmpid=org%3Dngp::mc%3Dsocial::src%3Dfacebook::cmp%3Deditorial::add%3Dfb20230625hist-indianajonesarcheology&linkId=221470262&fbclid=IwAR0OjG5Am0vFfBM5Y8YolV3CMcwbUSU3QahZJ0sG9H1hVOeYTxcNY72rwIg_aem_Ae-khexmeCyvdoISrSCum2x0k3hZu4yuywjcyjsMAM3ekC2P0CGUE7clSssMPkh-DwE&mibextid=Zxz2cZ

Harrison Ford and archaeologists weigh in on the impact Dr. Jones has had on the discipline for more than 40 years.

06/23/2023

Looking for some summertime ADVENTURE?? Round up a group of friends and let us send you on an epic journey!

05/15/2023

Happy Mother’s Day to all the Adventure Moms out there (and the less adventurous ones too)!

04/28/2023

Just another day at the office. Being Robin Hood and waiting in a tree in the Greenwood for some Adventurers to come Questing 🏹😁🏹

04/26/2023

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to!”
~Bilbo Baggins, The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien

03/17/2023

Adventures in Geocaching Wednesday with this little ham! We found two Geocaches out at the Seed Orchard. Lovely day!

01/29/2023

Support Chico’s first professional contemporary dance company! Debut performance February 18th! Get tickets now!

Prohibition Dance Ticket Sales

01/26/2023

Scouting for a Quest in Upper Bidwell a week ago Saturday. That riffle in the creek is the Diversion Dam and you can just see the top of the old flume in the other pic! The water was, uh, high. 😳

01/17/2023

11/29/2022

A pair of Adventurers working on deciphering a clue on the trail Sunday! Remember that Adventure Quest is for adults too! Make your next date a memorable one! 😉

10/18/2022

My Battle Class completed their shields last week!

10/09/2022

I’ve been leading a monthly field trip for a second grade class. We’ll continue with a Nature Immersion field trip once a month for the rest of the year, observing how different habitats change through the seasons! We’ve seen riparian and chaparral so far; next month we’ll be looking at wetlands. 🦆

08/18/2022

Did you know we have tarantula-hawk wasps in Chico? This one has caught a spider, paralysed it, and is dragging it to a prepared hole where it will lay its eggs in the spider. The wasp larvae will have fresh, living spider to eat when they hatch! Nature is brutal and beautiful!

08/12/2022

Some people may still not know, we do Quests for adults too! Team building Quests for staff, couples Quests, bachelor/ette parties… all kinds! Here is some feedback from our latest Monkeyface Adventure:

“Hey Druin! Thanks for the adventure Tuesday. It set the tone I was hoping for high functioning team work the rest of the week. Thank you!!”
~Wendy Fairon, Chico Country Day School

06/30/2022

Sign up for a Quest Subscription!

In this offer, you receive a ciphered clue. When you decipher it, it will lead you to an out of the way location in the Wilds and another ciphered clue, and so on, for as long as you want your subscription to last!

Give yourself a great excuse to get out in Nature, get excercise for yourself, your family, your dog; and exercise your mind, too! Find items along the way, if you want, and feel like you’ve truly earned them, or find items that will help with your next clue! There are many ways to customize!

Subscriptions start at $540 for 9 stages, then add as you go!

06/23/2022

It’s a good time of year for JUNGLE ADVENTURES!!

06/12/2022

Sibling Adventures at the Sacramento River! The area around the river is lots of fun right now; very jungly with vines and pokeweed. A good time to book a jungle Adventure! 😉

06/06/2022

It has been a CRAZY past month! AQ was kept busy prepping and then carrying out our part in Chico Country Day’s 6th and 7th grade environmental camps. We taught the Survival Basics/Flint & Steel Firemaking field study; we had some fun with the Night Hike, AND we created an Adventure to close with! Whew! On top of THAT, we helped out Nord School with their PE Day, with physical and mental challenges for Nord’s middle schoolers! Busy busy!

Now summer is here and it’s nice to take a breath and enjoy the much appreciated rain, but I’m looking forward to the next Adventure! Anyone interested in an intro to backpacking? How about a community Adventure Quest challenge with a buy-in to get the first clue?

For now, I’m having fun Adventures accompanying this little guy to the Library! Happy Summer, all!

05/17/2022

A friend recently relayed a story about rescuing a turtle from the road. I commend him for his compassion! But looking at the pictures, I could see the turtle was one of these guys pictured (photo from Wikipedia). A red-eared slider. So I felt it might be a good idea to make a post about these turtles because here in California they are a highly invasive species. My friend didn't know, and I bet many of you don't know either, so I'm including an article here about red-eared sliders. The short version is, if you happen to catch one in the wild, please don't let it go! You don't have to kill it either. Take it to a local reptile rescue facility. The red "ear" markings make them easy to distinguish from our native western pond turtle. The red-eared slider is pushing our pond turtles out of their native habitat. Please don't release them into the wild! In fact, please don't release ANY pets into the wild!
Here is the article on red-eared sliders:
https://wildlife.ca.gov/Conservation/Invasives/Species/Redeared-Slider #:~:text=Red%2Deared%20sliders%20have%20been%20introduced%20to%20many%20areas%20of,world's%20worst%20100%20invasive%20species.

05/08/2022

Happy Mother’s Day to all those Adventure Moms out there!!

05/04/2022

I recently ran across something on Facebook that made me feel like some clarification might be in order, and since I can provide that clarification, why not?

If you live in California and you see a bear, you're almost certainly seeing a black bear, no matter what color it is. That is because the California Grizzly (a subspecies of brown bear) is extinct and it is not very likely a grizzly from another state where grizzlies still live would wander across a couple of states to get here. Stranger things have been known, but it's not likely. That leaves the black bear as the only resident bear species in California. "But wait!" I hear you cry, "I saw a bear in California once, and it was brown!"

Here's the thing: the name "black" bear is misleading. It would really be more properly named "forest" bear because this species likes cover of trees, brush, and the like. It does not like open plains. This is because its larger relatives, the extant (and also not the most aptly named) brown bear (aka grizzly), the extinct cave bear (which was very closely related to the brown bear and might have interbred), and the extinct short-faced bear would attack the smaller black bear when they saw it. So hanging out in woods where the smaller black bear can climb a tree (brown bears generally can't climb trees beyond a certain age; likewise with cave bears; and short-faced bears were built for ranging the treeless plains) to escape a beat-down or death became a species-wide behavioral adaptation for the black bear, regardless whether they share their habitat with larger bear species anymore (evolutionarily speaking, the Pleistocene wasn't all that long ago and it's even more recently that brown bears/grizzlies have been eradicated from much of their natural range). "Black" bears can be black, brown (chocolate), red (cinnamon), blonde, white (kermode), or blue (glacier or gray). These different colorings are called "phases," and they're not the only critters that have a range of colors despite their name (I'll do another post on the "red" fox soon). I imagine they got the name black bear because the first white dudes to encounter them did so on the east coast, where the woods are thick and dark and the black phase pelage of the black bear is more common. So we're stuck with the unfortunately misleading and not-too-creative "black bear" for the common name of Ursus americanus.

Now I will direct you to the images below. Every one of these photos is of black bear(s). I will label the phases on each pic if Facebook will let me. Black phase is most common in dense woods. Blonde, brown, and cinnamon are also common. Kermode is super rare and only occurs in populations in particular pockets of the Pacific Northwest. Glacier is also rare but occurs more commonly in Alaska, I believe - though I have seen ONE cub that was the "blue" phase here in California.

Thanks for reading and I hope this helps clear things up for some folks 😄

**Images found on the interwebs. If you know who took the pics, please let me know and I'll credit them.

04/30/2022

Our Scorpion Hunt and Night Hike tonight was a great success! Thanks to all who came out walking with me 😁
Here’s a pic from tonight showing the contrast from normal flashlight to UV! We’ll see you next time!

04/29/2022

Don’t forget our night hike tonight! Starting at Cedar Grove parking area between the Nature Center and Parkview School! Come out, have fun, and maybe learn some cool things! 😁

04/25/2022

Remember our Night Hike coming up this Friday!!