Pinnacles National Park

Matt and I haven't been on a proper hike in ages, so we decided to skip our usual Saturday morning yoga routine and get on the road.  We drove south to Pinnacles National Park, which was just added to the National Park system earlier this year.  It's known for towering rock formations left over from an extinct volcano, which makes the park pretty popular with rock climbers.  Pinnacles is also known for talus caves, which are essentially caves formed by piles of huge boulders.  The caves house at least thirteen species of bats, although we looked but didn't see any of them on our hike.  Matt also read that Pinnacles has one of the highest diversity of bees on the planet -- over 400 species live in the park.  And if that weren't enough, Pinnacles is also a release site for the endangered California Condor.  We didn't see much beyond the occasional ground squirrel and a small flock of deer, but we were also in a cave half the time, so that might account for the lack of wildlife sightings.

We decided to skip the highest elevations this time around and headed for Bear Gulch Cave instead.  We started out hiking along a dry stream bed, stopping along the way to admire the large Ponderosa Pine and Chestnut trees.  The California Sycamore were also showing their fall colors, which made the first part of the hike quite colorful.  

Once we got to the caves, we climbed up through piles of huge boulders and stairs carved into the rock.  At times it was pitch dark without our flashlights, and all we could hear was the trickle of water through the cave.  Matt was on the lookout for bats, but we never found any.  We emerged at the top of the cave system and had lunch by a little water reservoir.

From the reservoir, we skirted a few large rock formations before heading back down to lower elevations.  There were glimpses of even more Pinnacles from the trail, but the sun was getting low, so we decided to come back another day to explore the highest peaks.