I was somewhere around King City when I first saw the sign for Pinnacles National Park. It struck me as odd that there was a national park in California that I’d not only never been to, but also never heard of. I’ve spent the bulk of my life in California, and much of it since the Golden State granted me a driver’s license at the age of 16 in seeing its many parts. The particular stretch of Highway 101, El Camino Real, that was now inviting me to Pinnacles National Park is one I’ve been on scores of times.
A couple days later, my visit to the Salinas Valley completed, I was overcome by the curiosity of just what these pinnacles were that had been made into a national park.
They were rock spires, vastly different than the Gabilan Mountains just east of them that separate the Salinas Valley from the San Joaquin Valley. I learned at the Visitor Center that the Pinnacles had been created by seismic activity along the San Andreas Fault. The creation site was actually about 200 miles southeast of where the Pinnacles now stand, near the Antelope Valley in northeastern Los Angeles County. The Pinnacles had been pushed north in the jostling of the Pacific and North American tectonic plates.
It turns out, I also discovered at the Visitor’s Center, that I never knew about this national park because it was just over a year earlier that it had become a national park. The Pinnacles had protected status for over a century before that as a National Monument, having been designated by Theodore Roosevelt in 1908.
That morning my curiosity compelled me up a one-lane road east of Soledad was a warm one—over 90 degrees before noon—and I let reason take over. I didn’t have the right shoes for hiking and I also didn’t have any drinking water with me. (The rangers recommended a liter an hour for the two-hour walk through the caves.) I figured I’d have to leave for another day more detailed explorations of Pinnacles. Besides, there was a whole area of the park that wasn’t accessible without leaving the park and driving miles around to get to it.
As I was getting ready to leave, I looked up and saw the circling birds. My first impulse was to think they were some of the California condors that had been released into Pinnacles. The birds were circling at too high an altitude for a rank amateur like me to try to identify the species. Maybe they were hawks, maybe some other birds of prey.
Or maybe my curiosity had paid really big dividends by giving me a glimpse of ancient beasts in glorious surroundings.
UPDATE (April 15, 2014 1:27pm PT): Due to my editing error, one of the photos in this post was duplicated, and two of the photos weren’t originally included. The photos have been rearranged.