September 25, 2015
My maternal human calls them kwale. I call them toys and I want one!
This morning, we are going to take one of the hikes in the
park. We decide not to disconnect the
truck, and get the bikes off the rack. I
have to question why we did this. We
have never been here before, we have no idea what the roads are like, and we have
no idea where we are hiking. And Spouse,
the fidgetmeister, has to add another thing to his Zombie Apocalypse Backpack.
Oh, then another thing, and one
more thing. Finally, off we go. We had heard it was only a couple of miles to
the Pinnacles so how bad can this be?
The road is a nice black top road with easy hills. Oaks provide some shade, but it is only 8:30
and still quite cool. We see signs to
the trail heads and decided to go for the Old Pinnacles trailhead almost 2
miles away. Piece of cake. We lock up our bikes and start the hiking to
Balconies Cave. The trail is somewhat
easy. It weaves through dry arroyos and
oak trees. It is very thirsty here. What looks like walnut trees still have
fruit, but every leaf has dried up. The
trail narrows a bit and we pass through several more small arroyos. In the spring, this would mean we would get
wet most likely crossing. After about 2
miles we see an intersection of trail where the Cliffs trail meets the Cave
trail. We met some people on the trail
that said to do it, so after the cave, we figured we would.
Until now (about 2.7 miles), the
trail has been fairly easy. Now comes
the fun part. Out with the flashlights
and into the cave. Here, we have to
channel our inner monkey and do some climbing up rocks, under boulders, and
around slabs. It gets narrow is
spots. It isn't clear if there is
another way out but I see a few vague white arrows pointing the way, so I
correctly assume that we go out a different way then we came in. It was a whole lot of fun. We then got on the Cliff ridge trail. There is a lot of climbing, and the sun is
getting real hot. There is not a lot of
shade. Here we get some pretty impressive vistas of the canyons and the rocky
pinnacles. We should see a condor to top
it all off, but that didn't happen.
Beneath the shade of a huge boulder, we sat on a rockface and enjoyed
our lunch drinking in the view. It is
sometimes difficult getting Spouse to move once he stops to rest. I got out my handy crowbar, pried him up and
we continued... I am starting to hear
the grumbles... 'Are we there yet?".
There is more shade now then there was this morning (thankfully). It is very warm, in the 90s. Spouse is lagging a bit behind me but we make
it back to the bikes. Oh goody, we get
to ride back to Hannah after our 6 1/2 mile hike!
There is not as much shade as
there was this morning and the black top is hot! Good thing we only have a couple of miles to
go. Did I mention it was hot? We got back to Hannah and thought about
completing our triathlon by swimming in the pool here. But that would require walking... the water part of our triathlon was a good
shower!
Note to the Pinnacles campground
peeps: when you label your electric box
with 50 amps, how about actually supplying the 50 amps! Don't get pissed when we go to your main to
find out what is happening only to discover you are supplying only 30
amps. On 30 amps, we KNOW we cannot run
the air conditioner AND the microwave at the same time. At 50 amps, we can. Boneheads...
It is hot!
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