Muse back!
May 31, 2008 / Saturday
Pinnacles National Monument
We continued our Whitney training this week with a hike at Pinnacles. Wake-up time: 6:30. Normally, this would be an ungodly wake-up for me, but a week of morning meetings has me thinking that's not so early after all. Went to bed early the night before and rolled right out of bed when the alarm went off. Piece of cake!
We entered the park through the East entrance and started our hike from the Bear Gulch Visitor Center. Up to Scout Peak we went, then up the steep and narrow part of the High Peaks Trail, which was pretty cool. There were steps carved into the rock along hand rails to help people along. We then descended along the Tunnel Trail, which, as the name suggests, included a sizable tunnel carved through the rock. Next, a pit stop at the parking lot on the other side of the park, followed by a visit to the Balconies Cave. I finally got to use the super cool headlamp I got for Christmas. :)
After the cave, we stopped for lunch, then discussed route options back to the car. A couple of us had boot issues, so we chose the shorter of the two routes and booked it on back to the car for a total mileage of 9.4 miles. Not quite as many miles as we'd hoped for, but a good hike nonetheless.
We talked to a nice ranger during our stop at the far parking lot. We saw her later at the visitor center, and observed the following exchange between her and a tourist...
Tourist: Excuse me, can you tell me where the monument is?
Ranger: You're IN the monument.
I guess the tourist had been expecting some sort of drive up and take a picture statue thing. I've been laughing about it randomly ever since.
As is tradition, I found an animal to count and name. I now present to you the list of lizards we encountered on today's hike:
- Lizzy - What else would you name a lizard?
- Scurry - I saw it. It scurried.
- Chase - I chased it down the trail. It scurried also, but that name was already taken.
- Zippy - This little lizard did not scurry. It zipped away.
- Godzilla - This lizard was HUGE. Godzilla huge.
- Stupid - We found this one with half its body sticking out of a hole. Loren slowly waved his boot at it, and instead of hiding in the hole it took off and ran in Aaron's direction.
- Spidey - It ran on a rock wall!
- Planck - I saw it on one of the planks of a wooden bridge. The extra 'c' is in honor of Max. You know, that guy with the constant.
- Venom - It was just hanging out on a rock wall, not caring that we were there. Cooler than Spidey. Way cooler.
- Stubby - This one was in the process of growing back its tail.
Oh! I totally forgot to talk about the scenery. The giant rocks (okay, mountains) there are awesome, and I was totally blown away by the whole volcano-that-moved thing. Plate tectonics FTW!
Meet Godzilla. It's not nearly as big as I remember it to be, but all the other lizards before it were really little!
• • •
I forgot to waah about my pains.
Pain 1: I tweaked my right ankle again. I did this during last week's hike, too. My ankles suck. They sprain easily, and I am paranoid about hurting them on uneven terrain. My last big sprain was on a backpacking trip. Off-roading by foot is dangerous!
Pain 2: After tweaking said ankle, I relaced my boots super duper tight, which after a couple miles, caused swelling and soreness in the tendon that runs down my leg and into my foot. Good job, me.