Plan the Perfect Day at Pinnacles: California’s Most Slept-On National Park

From Yosemite to Lassen, some of the country’s most iconic — and most visited — national parks are virtually on our doorstep here in the Bay Area.

But our “home” national park, Pinnacles, is even closer than you may realize.

If you’ve driven Highway 101 south from San Francisco, you’ve probably seen the signs directing drivers to the park, which is only a few hours away from the Bay Area. But despite its proximity, this park is often overlooked.

When Richard Neidhardt first started volunteering at Pinnacles in 2010, he said the most common response from anyone he told was: “Where’s that?”

“It’s remarkable how many people who live within two hours of here haven’t heard of it, don’t know what it is, and have never been here,” said Neidhardt, who is now the Condor Chair of the Pinnacles National Park Foundation, the nonprofit that helps fill funding gaps for the park.

This under-the-radar element is partly because Pinnacles only became a national park in 2013, when it was upgraded from a national monument. It’s also a relatively small park — at just around 27,000 acres, it’s one of the smallest in the whole country.

But this little park still packs a punch, and makes for a fantastically fulfilling — and surprisingly easy — trip from the Bay Area, even just for the day.

So to help you plan your own Pinnacles visit, I traveled there one hot spring day to check out the best trails, find the most beautiful views, and learn about some truly hidden wonders from Neidhardt and his colleagues.

Read on for 10 tips to make the day trip worth your while.

Jump straight to: 

• Can I camp at Pinnacles?
• What are the most scenic trails at Pinnacles?
• Where can I see condors in the park?
• How can I visit Pinnacles’ caves?

Getting to Pinnacles (and which entrance to use)

Depending on where you’re coming from in the Bay Area, and traffic conditions, the drive to Pinnacles’ eastern entrance — considered its main entrance — is only around 2-3 hours.

Once you pass through the South Bay, you’ll continue on Hwy 101 until Gilroy, where you’ll take Highway 25 to Hollister and through Tres Pinos before turning off the highway and into the park.

On your way to the park, you can stop in Hollister for any major needs, like extra gear or groceries. The small town of Tres Pinos has its own quaint feel and is an ideal post-hike dinner stop at one of the handful of restaurants on its main street.

What about using the western entrance instead? This location will take you a little longer to reach from the Bay, but it certainly has its own appeal — namely, the sweeping views of the namesake Pinnacles rock formations themselves that are readily available from the parking lot. You can stop in Salinas or Soledad on your way in or out from that end, although be aware: Highway 146 from the western side is scenic but somewhat narrow.

Make Pinnacles a surprisingly achievable day trip

Unlike other sprawling national parks, which demand a multi-day trip to see all of their sights, it is worth it to visit Pinnacles for a day trip.

Or as Neidhardt puts it, “You can see a lot of the park in one day.”

But this advice comes with a caveat: Pinnacles is split into two sides, east and west, and you shouldn’t expect to be able to visit both sides of the park in one day. In fact, you can’t actually drive from one end to the other — so pick an entrance and stick with it.

For first-timers, especially those coming from the Bay Area, heading to the east side typically makes the most sense, given its increased infrastructure, like a full campground and park store, and it is a jumping-off spot for a wider variety of hikes.

Return visitors may want to check out the west side for a new perspective — including iconic valley views of the namesake pinnacle rock formations.

“You can drive down to the Chaparral Parking Area, and there they are,” Neidhardt said. “It’s just the most spectacular views of the rock formations.”

Get to Pinnacles early (to avoid a wait)

Visitorship to Pinnacles has hugely increased in the last five years, and was historically also boosted by its new status as a national park. “The impact on the park was huge,” Neidhardt said.

And visitorship is still sizable, said Tim Regan, president of the Pinnacles Foundation — meaning you should plan to avoid the worst of the traffic into the park.

While Pinnacles may be no Yosemite in terms of visitorship, lines of cars to get into the park during peak spring weekends can still be miles long, even requiring up to a two-hour wait to get in. These days, people come from all over the world to visit the park, often on their way to and from other areas like Yosemite or Big Sur.

I can testify from my own visit that you should plan ahead to avoid missing out. While I didn’t experience any lines to enter the park’s east entrance when I arrived at 10 a.m., by the time I was ready to embark on a hike, the Bear Gulch parking lot was full, meaning I had to park a mile down the road and walk to the trailhead. (During peak season times, the park runs a shuttle from the campground to the Bear Gulch Day Use Area to mitigate this issue.)

That’s why Neidhardt and his colleagues recommend you plan to arrive at the park early — or even come on a weekday or during a less busy time of year.

There’s a reason for this wait, Regan said: The park isn’t really designed to hold more people than its current parking lots can accommodate. “The land around here is very fragile,” he said.

Another good reason to get there early? The heat. The day I went, during the Bay Area’s historic March heat wave, it was pushing 90 in the afternoon.

Heat wave aside, springtime is still the best time to visit Pinnacles, Regan said. “Everything is green, the wildflowers are out, and it’s not too hot — except for this week,” he said. “It’s usually in the 70s here, and it’s wonderful.”

Consider sleeping within the park itself

If you want to avoid the headache of getting there early enough to avoid a wait, you can stay overnight at Pinnacles’ campground — an underrated but “wonderful” way to experience the park, said Mike Novo, the treasurer for the Pinnacles Foundation.

“The night skies here are wonderful,” he said, so much so that they’re striving to get international “Dark Sky” status by retrofitting light fixtures and working with nearby communities to reduce their light pollution.

And if you get lucky, you might be able to see condors leaving their roosts on the ridge above the campground in the morning.

Just remember: The campground is on the east side of the park only, so plan accordingly. You’ll have access to showers and even a swimming pool that’s open during the summer, weather permitting. There’s also a small campground store where you can purchase necessities.

The downside: Reservations for the campground can be tough to secure, so check early and stay flexible.

Find a trail that works for your ability levels

While Pinnacles is not a huge national park, it still has a wide range of trails for all types of hikers.

“It’s not a driving park, it’s a hiking park,” Neidhardt said.

The most iconic — and most difficult — trail is the High Peaks Loop, which takes hikers from the main parking area on the east side up and over the park’s craggy mountaintops, down to the Bear Gulch Reservoir and through the Bear Gulch Caves.

“The High Peaks Loop is rugged, but it’s just the most spectacular hike anywhere, not just in Pinnacles,” Neidhardt said.

But if you’re planning that hike, he said, you should:

• Start as early as you can in the morning
• Go counter-clockwise, starting on the Condor Gulch Trail, to get the hot, exposed section out of the way in the morning
• Keep in mind, “it can be 10 degrees hotter up in the high peaks than it is down below,” Neidhardt said.

If that sounds like too much, don’t worry: There are lots of less strenuous options that are still just as scenic. From the Bear Gulch Parking Lot, try heading up the Moses Spring Trail to the Bear Gulch Reservoir, stopping to check out the caves along your way for a 2-mile round-trip hike to experience some of the park’s highlights.

Or trek up to the Condor Gulch Overlook, where you might catch a glimpse of the park’s famed birds. Even the walk from the campground to the Bear Gulch parking area is a pleasant, shady one that’s great for families.

On the west side, the High Peaks are a quick but steep hike away. You can also stroll along the park’s new ADA-accessible “lollipop” route to see them from below.

See the incredible biodiversity on display

Because of the park’s varied ecosystems, it also boasts a wide variety of species. That includes wildflowers, which are especially widespread in the spring.“The sheer variety of wildflowers here — it’s just astonishing,” Neidhardt said.

That extends to its animals, too: The park has one of the highest diversities of native bee species anywhere in the world, Neidhardt said, with over 500 species of bees found within the park.

Despite many trail and area names with the word “bear” in them, there are no bears in the park. There are some pesky raccoons, however, who will boldly grab your food, Regan said. I also encountered a very persistent squirrel by the reservoir — a reminder not to feed any of the wildlife here.

Among the less desirable creatures near the park are wild pigs, which are so prevalent that there’s now a 3-foot fence around the entire core of the park — nearly 30 miles in total — to keep them out, Neidhardt told me.

“They were a gigantic problem here in the campground,” Neidhardt said. “People get marauded by a pack of wild pigs at night.”

Catch a glimpse of the biggest birds in North America

There’s one animal that makes any effort getting to the park and up into its craggy mountains worth the effort: the California condor.

It’s one of Pinnacles’s more than 180 species of birds, but unlike any other. In fact, condors are the largest land birds in North America, with wingspans reaching nearly 10 feet.

Unlike their cousins, the turkey vulture, condors are huge: They can weigh around 20 pounds and fly up to 200 miles in a day.

But if you’re not up close and can’t tell the difference, Neidhardt said you can look at the way they fly — condors are smoother fliers, with straight-out wings, versus the rocky, tipsy flight of a turkey vulture.

And the condors you’ll see at Pinnacles are all tagged, so if you see a colored tag with a number on it, typically on its wing, you know it’s a condor. And you can look it up later using a website called Condor Spotter, developed by a staff member at the Ventana Wildlife Society.

Condors gravitate toward this park because they love nesting in cavities in the rock formations here, Neidhardt said. Plus, rangeland surrounds the park, “so there’s a lot for them to eat,” he said — including those wild pigs, which they’re apparently quite partial to pork.

“This is just absolutely ideal condor habitat,” he said.

But these rare birds are threatened, primarily by lead poisoning found in the animal carcasses they scavenge on. When a bullet kills an animal, the lead from that bullet explodes and enters the flesh around the wound — the same meat a condor might consume. While each bit of lead might be small, the cumulative effect is poisonous and, over time, kills the bird.

“Almost 60% of deaths in wild and free-flying condors is caused by ingesting lead from ammunition,” Neidhardt said. “It’s a vicious thing.”

Plus, it takes a long time for condors to reproduce — the females typically lay just one egg every two years, Neidhardt said.

In the 1980s, their population crashed to just 22 individuals. To prevent them from going extinct, these condors were captured and bred.

Now, across the Western United States, there are four captive breeding programs and five release sites, including here in Pinnacles. The park gets young 1-year-old birds, bred in captivity, and keeps them in the flight pen with adult wild birds to act as a “mentor bird,” who helps teach the young birds how to fly and about the pecking order, Neidhardt said. Then, after about a month, they release the young birds.

“Condors are very hierarchical, and there’s a real pecking order,” he said. “And if we got these rookies from the captive breeding program and immediately released them, they’d get beat up — or worse — by the dominant members of the flock.”

Neidhardt said there are 117 condors in the Central California flock right now, ranging from around the central valley to the coast and up north as far as Mount Diablo.

And their numbers are increasing. The Pinnacles Foundation’s Novo said that he never used to spot any condors in his early days of hiking in Pinnacles in the 1990s, but by 2010, he started seeing them all the time.

“It’s common now,” Novo said.

“Last year we had a record number of wild nests in the Central California flock,” Neidhardt said.

If you want to increase your chances of seeing one yourself, head to the High Peaks, where I spotted two: one pruning itself, another soaring high above.

Explore Pinnacles’s pitch-black caves

That same movement due to the San Andreas Fault line slowly tumbled rocks and boulders around Pinnacles, producing a handful of caves that visitors to the park today can explore.

“As pieces of the rock erode or big chunks fall off, they fall into the steep canyons below the eroded rock formations,” Novo said. “The falling boulders are big enough and have enough space within them that they’ve created what’s called ‘talus caves.’”

Just be aware: The upper Bear Gulch Cave is closed for 50 weeks out of the year while its resident bats hibernate and raise their pups. Always check the park’s website before heading out to see if the caves are open.

I got lucky: The day I was there, they were open.

Drop into Pinnacles’ caves, and you’ll be surprised at what you see — or don’t see. Because these caves weren’t carved out in the traditional sense, you may think that means they feel less underground, Novo said, “but it’s pitch black.”

After descending into the tiny opening and looking around, I couldn’t see a thing.

But when I turned on my headlamp to reveal a rickety metal staircase winding down the cave, I saw a flowing waterfall pouring from the reservoir above.

See the park’s geologic history firsthand

Pinnacles’ spires were formed around 23 million years ago when a volcano erupted, piling on material that was later carved away by time and erosion and sculpting the park’s iconic mountaintops.

In fact, if you do make it up to the High Peaks, you’ll spiral up and around the pinnacles themselves, getting a literal bird’s eye view of the park.

“A lot of what you see there is the original lava rock,” Novo said.

The thing that may surprise you: that volcano actually erupted hundreds of miles away to the southeast, in what’s now the present-day Mojave Desert city of Lancaster.

Highway 25, the route to Pinnacles, sits “pretty much right on top of the San Andreas Fault all the way down from Hollister,” Novo said. So these rock formations that give the park its name have traveled north inch by inch, day by day, over millions of years along that fault, right to where they stand today.

Get to know this place’s living history

Pinnacles’ earliest inhabitants, the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band and Chalon Indian Nation, lived on and cared for this land.

After the Spanish missionaries converted, enslaved and killed native people here, many of the native traditions were lost. Today, tribal members are working to bring their cultural history and knowledge back to the park, Regan said.

The legacy of the park’s homesteader settlers who inhabited the area in the 19th century is also on display at the park, where a historic homestead hike brings visitors to the Bacon Ranch and Butterfield Ranch, named for two of the original homesteaders of the property that helped create the park.

Also to thank for the park’s infrastructure is the Civilian Conservation Corps, which, in the 1930s, developed its highlights, including the treacherous High Peaks trail and Bear Gulch Reservoir.

Today, the park is mostly cared for by the National Park Service and the Pinnacles Foundation, which has a team of volunteers that helps plug the holes in the park’s budget — even now that it’s a national park.

“There was no money attached” to attaining the national park status, Regan said. “They didn’t have enough money even to put up a sign to say ‘Pinnacles National Park.’”

The foundation staffs the visitor centers, helps fund the condor program and builds new trails and signs throughout the park — even buying $3,000 worth of lamb carcasses from Costco for the condors during a period of avian flu.

“Whatever is needed is kind of what we do,” Regan said.