— — what is left of a volcano the San Andreas tore in half.
“A small national park in central California, set in the dry chaparral hills east of Soledad. The rock spires are the eroded remnants of an extinct volcano that the San Andreas Fault carried roughly two hundred miles north from its original eruption site. Talus caves in the canyon bottoms hold cool air and bat colonies into summer, and California condors ride the morning thermals above the High Peaks. The east and west entrances do not connect by road. You pick a side and walk in.
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Pinnacles National Park sits in the Gabilan Range of central California, east of the Salinas Valley and the town of Soledad. The park covers about 26,000 acres across San Benito and Monterey counties and was redesignated from a national monument to a national park by Congress in 2013, more than a century after Theodore Roosevelt first proclaimed it in 1908. The park is reached by two separate entrances — west from Soledad off US 101 and east from Highway 25 near Hollister — that do not connect by road inside the park boundary.
The spires and walls are the eroded remnant of the Neenach Volcano, which erupted about twenty-three million years ago near present-day Lancaster in southern California. Movement along the San Andreas Fault has since carried this western half of the volcano roughly 195 miles north-west, leaving its other half behind in the Mojave. The visible rock is a mix of rhyolitic breccia and tuff, weathered into the High Peaks and into the boulder-choked canyons that form the park's distinctive talus caves at Bear Gulch and Balconies.
The park is best visited from late autumn through spring; summer temperatures in the canyons routinely exceed 100°F and the talus caves close seasonally to protect Townsend's big-eared bat maternity colonies. Pinnacles is one of the principal release sites for the California condor, and the High Peaks trail is among the most reliable places in the world to see the species in the wild. Camping is available only at the east-side campground; the west entrance is day-use, with the visitor contact station near Chaparral.