California National Parks here we come! - Park #10
My belly full of pea soup, it was time to hit the road. We still had a 2 hour drive ahead of us to get to our first park of the weekend - Pinnacles National Park. This was park #10 for all of you who are counting on my goal to get to 61!
And, I don't know about you, but personally I had never heard of this park before my quest began. Turns out Theodore Roosevelt declared this area a National Monument back in 1908, but it didn't reach Park status until 2013. Formed by volcanoes about 23 million years ago, people come to Pinnacles for the hiking, caves, and to check out the condors.
We didn't get to see any condors, but we saw some people with some pretty serious cameras set up in a field. After a quick stop to the very busy visitor center, we decided to hike the Bear Gulch Cave Trail as the temps outside were pretty high and cooling off in a cave sounded like a good plan.
The trail was a little busy through the cave, but when we came out we stopped at a beautiful little reservoir. Here we saw more dragonflies than I have ever seen in one place, all different colors too - blue, green, purple and even red! We took a less busy trail back and saw some amazing trees that looked like someone had dripped red candle wax all over them called - manzanita trees. So cool!
Finally, we got back in our practically brand new rental car stinky and sweaty and we were off yet again heading east excited to get to park #2 - Sequoia.
The trip there however was crazy! I have never seen such windy roads in my life. Here some of the more exciting photos from the drive:
Just a little detour we had to make here...
The goal, make it to Sequoia National Park by sunset, the GPS was not our friend however. And, you will have to check out the next post to see if we made it...