Peters Canyon Regional Park

Peter's Canyon Regional Park is a quick getaway. Step onto the trail as the tall, tawny grasses dance. Fields of clover beckon. The arms of the California bush sunflowers stretch and reach, commanding the attention of all that pass. It's almost a portal--a doorway out of Orange County and into a pocket of paradise. Break a sweat pushing up the terra-cotta hills and let gravity fold you back onto the even path, passing Coastal prickly pear cactus or Bladderpod as you wind around the reservoir. It’s a rhythm of feet pounding the soil and wind whispering through the brush, all wrapped up in color and texture. That's Peter's Canyon.

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How do you find wily coyotes? Just drive by in a firetruck with its sirens screaming, and soon you'll hear their pack wailing and crying out loud. That happens a lot in this 360-acre native habitant, inside busy and crowded Orange County. They're joined by other wildlife, including sneaky raccoons, nervous rabbits, lumbering opossums, croaking frogs, migratory birds, soaring hawks, stinky skunks, slithering snakes, and occasionally a ghostly mountain lion. They all survive nicely in Peters Canyon's thick groves of black willow, eucalyptus, and cottonwood trees, drinking from the 55-acre reservoir lake. All this shared with dirt bikers, day hikers, and horseback riders, who meander through a network of eight different trail systems that traverse a diverse set of ecosystems—riparian, coastal sage, grasslands, woodland and sometimes yucky freshwater marshes. Too bad for humans who also live nearby—many pets have mysteriously disappeared.

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