Posted on April 5th, 2010 in
Hiking Trails
Pinnacles National Monuments is a place I love to visit. It’s different from what’s around, and it’s remote. For quite some time, I had been wondering whether it was possible to connect two trails that dead-end in the South part of the park. It seemed silly to have to backtrack, while connecting those two trails would make for a beautiful (and probably strenuous) loop. The trails are the South Wilderness Trail, which I have never been on before, and which seemed relatively flat, following Chalone Creek, and The Chalone Peak Trail, which goes from the Bear Gulch reservoir up to the Chalone Peaks. Now, I had been to Chalone Peaks before, and I knew what to expect on that trail. I knew that from North Peak onward, the trail was more or less following a “pig fence”. A quick look at Google Earth showed what seemed like a very straight service road going from South Chalone Peak to the creek. A loop seemed doable. I asked around but could not get any “from the field” indication that the “road” could actually be taken. I called the Park but the person I had on the phone had no clue. Doing some more research online, I found that a “meetup” group had done, or at least planned to do the same loop. There was no trip report though. Searching some more, I found something more useful: an everytrail trip by ilya_ktsn. I contacted Ilya who confirmed that he has done the loop, and that it was doable, with minimal bushwhacking, we just had to follow the fence. So what looked like a road on Google Earth was actually a clearing on each side of the fence. All good. I was hoping to be able to do this loop sometimes soon, before it’s too hot, and while the wildflowers are blooming. Antony was interested and ready to go so we just went for it. We arrived at the Visitor Center by the Campground at 8:30, registered, and drove up some more to the Bear Gulch area, where we parked. The first step was to reach the Bear Gulch reservoir. We bypassed the caves because we had big packs, poles, and going through the caves would not be convenient. We then started our climb to North Chalone Peak. It was a nice climb to 3300 feet (we started at 1260 feet). The trail was nicely graded. Wildflowers were abundant. Goldfields, shooting stars (even though it’s late in the season), fiddlenecks, bush poppies, larkspurs… The last part of the climb, from the pig fence to the lookout was the steepest. At noon, we were having lunch at the summit. The views are incredible. The High Peaks don’t look so high from up there. We then went down and up to the next step: South Chalone Peak. The climb was a bit tougher, especially after lunch, but one hour later, we were on top of South Peak. Or close. The trail misses the summit by a few hundred feet. It’s not too clear exactly where the real summit is. Probably lost in the thick chaparral. I don’t think it matters anyway. We continued on the trail, which died against the pig fence and we knew this is where the unknown started. The area around the fence looked very clear. No thick bushes, it was well maintained. The only issue was the footing, all the more when we realized how steep the descent was. It looked like a joke. And so, down we went being very careful not to fall. Holding the fence poles (and not the barbwire) as needed. We could see the fence almost all the way down to the canyon. It was a pretty impressive sight. We stopped from time to time to take pictures, enjoy the view, and make sure we were tracking properly. I used the everytrail application on my iphone and pulled Ilya_kstn’s track and periodically checked that we were on his track. Each time we stopped, we look behind us and were amazed at the “wall” we just climbed down. We wondered how Ilya_kstn could have climbed it up. We finally reached the creek and by then we were quite tired. We kept following the fence which by then was following the creek for a while. We saw the first Chinese Houses flower of the season. We wandered around a little bit in the creek bed, trying to figure out where to connect with the South Wilderness trail. We had the cross the creek many times until we spotted the trail, slightly above us, behind a wall of poison oak. We continued bushwhacking until we found a good way to cross the creek again and finally reached the trail. From there on, it was just a nice stroll along the trail, which was following a riparian corridor, a terrain we are quite familiar with. We walked at a good pace, stopping only to take pictures of an awesome Giant Western Cranefly that we spotted on the side. Once we reached the road, we decided to continue 1.7 miles more back to the Bear Gulch area instead of flagging down a shuttle. This was a beautiful trail, rocky, and very close to Bear Gulch. Poison oak was quite abundant so we were pretty careful not to touch it. By the time we reached the car, we were happy and tired. We had done it!
Continue Reading Pinnacles gone crazy – Chalone Peaks, Pig fence, and South Wilderness Trail
Tags: bear, chinese, cross-the-creek, fence, google-earth, iPhone, north, park, phone, south, summit, time, Trail
