Evan Days

Every Thursday is Evan Day. It grew from our original homeschooling group. Evan is Evan Albright, who owns and runs SLO Wanders.

Each week we go to a new place and work on outdoors skills: fire building, shelter building, tracking animals, learning about plants, playing games, and enjoying nature.
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This is quite old, from one of our first outings. This is a shelter the kids built:

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Here we are at El Chorro Park in San Luis Obispo, rock climbing, exploring the creek and learning how to do a spore print with mushrooms:

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This is Reservoir Canyon, where we go at least once a month. This is Evan playing a game with the kids. He is the deer, they are all predators hunting him. They have to sneak up on him, if he looks up, he has heard them and they must freeze. Fletch is a mountain lion and viciously attacks the deer:

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A few weeks ago we went to Jennifer, Marina, and Shasha's house, their family owns 420 acres near Park Hill Road where we used to live.Before we came out they had spread out flour around a stick with some type of fish on the top, we were checking for tracks of animals coming for the fish.
Here the kids found some berries on the ground. Evan is talking with them about how to figure out where they came from and what kind they are:lunching with the cat, and Maggy awake and enjoying the sun and breeze.

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Sometimes we go out to Evan's house in SLO, recently we made mug wort soap, which is good for washing off poison oak oils. Here they are collecting wood for the fire to melt the glycerin:

Fletcher, blowing on the tinder with the fire coal to get the fire started:

Two weeks later, the soap is set and they split it up:

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This week we went to the Salinas River bed where the kids are working on building a more permanent shelter, one we can visit through all the seasons:
Maggy and I had a nice visit while all the work was being done.
We start and end each meeting with a circle. During the opening circle we say hi, talk about our plans for the morning a share something we are grateful for. Fletcher is usually grateful for some type of animal, this week the Indian Cobra. At our closing circle we say good-bye and share something we remembered or enjoyed about the day. This week Fletch remembered finding a bobcat track

Some mornings it's hard to get out of the house before 10 am, which is when our meeting starts. Some days I feel too tired to hike. Some days I just want to stay home. Usually we leave the house right at 10, we're late, and Evan is always nice about that. Then I am so glad we're there. I am glad every week we found this group, and that Evan does this work.