Today is Friday, our last day here in Paicines and we don’t want to go back to the coast since it’s a good 1 1/4 hr drive over and back so, what to do? I’m sure you know the answer to this question. Why not hike in Pinnacles again? We enjoyed the caves and high peaks trail so much that we decided to do it again - a first. We seldom hike a trail twice in a year, much less twice in a week. But, it was challenging, fun, had great views and had a variety of terrain. Besides, I can get much better pictures than I took the last time we hiked here - I won’t take any pictures with the lens cap on and I’ve got the right settings for the camera so the pictures will be bigger. Even these old dogs can learn new tricks.
We decided to hike clockwise, just as we had on Tuesday with the caves first. Since I didn’t think I would enjoy the caves as much if we did them after the heavy hiking, we decided to do the hike the same way as Tuesday. Same hike, different pictures.
We still had to step from rock to rock in the bottom of the cave.
I looked up at the right moment and saw the sun glinting through a crack in the rocks above.
Here I am in the middle with my headlamp on.
The CCC built some marvelous steps in the deep interior of the cave with switchback. This has to be the only cave with switchback steps in it. Here’s Gary letting some others pass him so I can take a picture of him on the ‘trail.’
After the cave was the hike up the hills to the High Peaks where the CCC had blasted some footholds into the rocks so we could climb over them. At times the trail is definitely single file.
Gary is actually standing on a small bridge that the CCC built here before the trail takes a sharp left and heads down the rock face.
And summiting is always marvelous (from now on, it’s all downhill - wheee. )
And, we enjoyed this hike as much as we had the previous one although, I will admit, it was as gruelling. We especially enjoyed the sections that were more wooded than we are used to in the desert Southwest where we do most of our hiking.
We met a woman who had just retired at the top of the high peaks. She was hiking with her daughter and, as we talked, she peeled an orange. Then she said, ‘let me get rid of these peels’ and she turned aside and began to toss the peels into the rocks. ‘No’, we both said and explained to her that orange peels take 30 years to disintegrate and that she shouldn’t toss anything into the wild: not into forests, not into the oceans, not into the local park. Like your own yard. ‘Here, we’ve been picking up some other orange peels we found on the trail - we’ll take yours too.’ Interestingly, we had picked up lots of orange peels as we had hiked up the trail, tossed there by another careless hiker. And, we put hers in the bag with the rest.
What a dichotomy. Here is a person out enjoying nature and she wants to toss some garbage into it. I suppose the problem is that if adults don’t know enough not to toss trash into nature, how can we ever teach kids?
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