Pinnacles National Park

If I asked you to name the National Parks in California (there are 9), I bet you wouldn't get Pinnacles. I had never heard of it before this trip. But "all" means "all," and I'm always open to finding hidden gems!

At 26.6k acres, Pinnacles is small as far as National Parks go. There are two entrances, which are not connected. We went in through the east entrance first, and it only took a few minutes to get to the center of the park. That's a far cry from places like Death Valley, where it can take hours to reach your destination!

The way something becomes a National Park is by having something unique to protect. The vast majority of the time, that thing is something geological. At Pinnacles, the namesake pinnacles are leftovers from an ancient volcano, severed from the land around it by a fault line.

To be honest, this one felt like a bit of a stretch to me. I have a hunch that a geologist would be able to talk for hours about what was going on here, but to a layperson, it looked like a few rocks jutting out of the otherwise rolling hills. Let's just say that we've seen more impressive rocks on this trip.

But no matter, much of the joy of visiting these parks is simply being outside in nature. And Pinnacles was great for that (the beautiful weather helped).

The first attraction was a series of caves, but these were very different from our previous caves. These were talus caves, which are formed when huge boulders fall into narrow gorges, creating a roof. In other words, they are not underground. There were signs warning that flashlights were required. Given how the caves formed, I was skeptical. I was also wrong. Sure enough, it felt like being in an underground cave at spots!

After the caves, we reached a reservoir that was constructed in the 30s by the Civilian Conservation Corps (we've discovered on this trip that the CCC did a ton of work on lands that are now National Parks).

After a relaxing time at the reservoir (and some lizard hunting), we headed back a slightly different way. Instead of heading down to the caves, we headed up onto the Rim Trail.

On the way back, we kept encountering trees that appeared to be partially painted. They had bark that appeared armor-like. It was thick and smooth, unlike anything I had ever seen.

A bit of research after getting home revealed them to be manzanita trees. They were really neat.

We capped our visit off with a California condor sighting! We spotted a group of birds hovering as we were preparing to pull out of the parking lot. We stopped and grabbed the binoculars to investigate.

After some heated debate about whether they were condors or turkey vultures, we used a picture in the park's guide to settle on condor (actually, there were a few of each, but the big ones were definitely condors). The color patterns from below are fairly distinct, and we were able to get a clear view through the binoculars.

Julie read on a sign that there were 33 condors in the park in 2015. They were extinct in the wild in the 80s, and there are only about 350 alive in the wild today (after a successful breeding and reintroduction program), so we feel very lucky to have seen some!

We returned though the west entrance a few weeks later. Being a small park, there are only a handful of hikes. We wanted to reach the pinnacles themselves, so we chose the "High Peaks" trail. It wasn't why we chose it, but this would also give us our best odds at a better condor sighting than the one we had from the east parking lot.

Before embarking on the hike, we stopped for a sack lunch at a table right next to the parking lot. It was there that we spotted a creature that we've been hoping — and failing — to see for about 8 months: a rattlesnake!

He was about 4' long and didn't care one bit about us

You have to understand: For the past 8 months or so, every park we've gone to has warned us of rattlesnakes. Every one. Multiple times. On every hike. We weren't looking to play with one, but we were hoping to spot one, at a distance, of course. None. Zero. Zilch. (No scorpions either, but that's a story for another day.)

So how do we finally spot our first rattlesnake? We spot him moseying across the gravel picnic area in which we're eating, right next to a parking lot. Go figure. Let the record show that the kids all declined my urging to go make him mad so we could see him rattle. The disobedience was blatant.

Back to our hike...

There are some steep and narrow sections at the top, so Julie and Jordan opted to stop about halfway up. They hunted lizards while the boys and I continued up. This was quite a strenuous hike, possibly the most strenuous one we've done on this trip. Of course, being out of shape didn't help.

But the payoff was there. Upon reaching the top, we found the condor hangout. Between those perched on rocks and those soaring above and below us, we probably saw 20-30 distinct birds. I'd love to drop a picture of one in here, but my phone camera was woefully insufficient!

We all decided that it was neat seeing them but only because they are so rare and have such a successful comeback story. If we're being honest, they are truly ugly birds, and if they were plentiful, we may have been more annoyed than overjoyed, similar to how we'd react if we came across a group of 30 turkey vultures just hanging out.

With any luck, their comeback will continue, and maybe someday my grandkids will think it's a non-event to spot one!