Parks and Paseos in Santa Clarita with College of the Canyons

On Saturday, October 11, Heidi and I hosted our first National Park Trust outing in Santa Clarita’s paseos. Our goal with this outing was to educate 24 students and families on the history and different opportunities for activity that the local paseo offers. Since we are a community college, we had some students who had brought along their kids to enjoy the beautiful day full of activities with us. With the paseo system being over 100 miles long, we decided to stick with three neighboring parks.

We started the morning at Valencia Glen Park. Here is where Heidi and I introduced not only ourselves, but what and who exactly the paseos were made for. We gave a rundown to participants on how the day was going to run and promised there would be hot dogs for everyone at the end of the event. We then began our walk to Meadows Park, which was about 0.5 miles.

At Meadows Park, we set up multiple games for participants to enjoy, such as volleyball, croquet, horseshoe, frisbees, and badminton. After that, we continued to walk a mile to Almendra Park.

At Almendra Park, we had a yoga instructor guide the group in a 30-minute session. We avoided going on the floor as we had some participants who needed accommodations due to disabilities. We walked back to Valencia Glen Park, where we cooked hot dogs and shared stories about the day.

We believe the participants enjoyed the experience, and it went well. People enjoy the yoga activity the most, as most haven’t tried it before. Many expressed their desire for more events like this and how they didn’t know the paseo system was so accessible to them. One standout moment was when our yoga instructor asked if we’d like to do more poses, and the whole group agreed enthusiastically. Overall, we got the opportunity to educate others and engage our community college while having no issues occur.