Pinnacles National Park

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Pinnacles National Park is an amazing park and weirdly one of the least visited. It’s also a newer park - so maybe that’s why. But I found its diversity to be very vast and beautful.

Before I really dive into this park you should know this is one of those parks with a West and East entrance and they DO NOT MEET IN THE MIDDLE. With over a two-hour drive to get around to the other side, you really need to pick one side to do or one half per day. There is also NO cell service. Like any desert park, you need to bring a crap ton of water. And lastly, this park is pretty wild and has lizards, spiders, mountain lions, foxes, and rattlesnakes which you should be aware of. We saw a lot of turkeys, bugs, and one fox while driving and did hear a snake, but never saw it.

This park is known for its’ California Condor population and these MASSIVE birds can be seen throughout the park but more easily on the East side of the park and that is the side we saw on our trip. Once parked we started our day with a hike of Old Pinnacles, and then went to see the Peaks View.

After this, we went back to the Bear Gulch area and started walking. Now we definitely got a little lost here, but then we came upon the cave. This is actually the first cave we’ve ever been in and we quickly found out we are claustrophobic and had a huge fear of the large rock above us falling so we literally ran through and after a while found our way out on the other side. We then went up a set of stairs cut into rocks and found a beautiful body of water. It was like a small little paradise. After checking our map we realized we were at The Monolith at Moses Spring. We loved that we happened upon this because t was so diverse for the area!

The majority of our day was spent hiking here and soaking in all the different rocks, plants, and little animals we saw- including the infamous Condors. There was a welcome center that we stopped in to get ice cream after - but this was actually during a California rolling blackout and their freezers were all melted. This landscape here was really remarkable and I’m very happy that we added a day at Pinnacles into our road trip!