To the east of the agricultural Salinas valley is half of an ancient volcano known as the Pinnacles. The other half of the volcano stayed down in LA when the San Andreas fault started doing it’s thing millions of years ago. It was to the Pinnacles that Page and I journeyed for a weekend of hiking, climbing, ornithology, astronomy, spelunking and getting out of Momma’s hair.

We first explored the Bear Gulch caves. Page’s young eyes helped me navigate through the pitch-black caves after he forgot to bring a light. Just letting her walk in front of me saved be from plenty of shin bangs and any falls down bottomless pits. We followed them up by the Balcony caves on the Sunday. This time I brought a headlamp, which was fortunate because those caves were much more sketchy.

Page was very happy that caves are full of rocks. And rocks make loud noises when you bang them together.

Climbing is for nerds, but Page seemed to be interested.

Camping with Page is fun, and mostly easy, though there do come times when it’s very difficult to look after her and keep your camp stove from exploding in a ball of flame.

We both missed Alex. There is something special about watching the full moon rise over a valley’s rim, but it would have been much sweeter if there had been three of us.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 12th, 2011 at 9:12 pm and is filed under Page, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.