The Pinnacles National Park - October 2018

In early October we paid a short visit to Pinnacles National Park for a couple of nights camping.  Pinnacles are in the middle of California, on the eastern edge of the Coastal Range. They are a series of tuff and breccia volcanic peaks sitting adjacent to the San Andreas Fault Line.  

Early Morning Sun on the Pinnacles High Peaks

There are two entrances to the park, an east and a west but no road through connecting them.  We stayed on the eastern side where there is the only campsite at Bear Gulch. I picked a nice quiet site just the right distance away from the toilets with no close neighbors.  After our site was set up along come a family with a baby who make an incredible amount of noise erecting their tent - hammering stakes in the ground so it would withstand a hurricane.  What was worse was the baby - crying incessantly. I know babies cry but this went on for a long long time. There were lots of other campsites why did they park themselves there.

The baby did eventually get settled and we all slept well at last.  There was a fair bit of rain in the night and for the first time in many a year the tent’s flysheet got tested.  All was well and dry inside.

The park is not very big and it can be hiked across in a morning.  We took something called the Bear Gulch Trail to a series of “caves” which we scrambled through.  They are not really caves in the classic sense merely tunnels formed by boulders falling into narrow gorges creating space to crawl through.

The Reservoir 

After the caves we climbed up to the reservoir area, a beautiful reservoir built to supply water to who knows who or where.  The water level was quite low in this late fall season.

After the reservoir we took the High Peaks Trail which climbs through the higher peaks of the Pinnacles complex.  There are some beautiful rock faces, much loved by the climbing community, and some interesting narrow pieces of the trail where steps have been cut into the rock.  The section known as the Narrows are quite steep and of course, narrow and are well protected by metal fencing.

We made our way back to Bear Gulch via the Condor Gulch trail.  Unfortunately today the Condors were not cooperating in showing themselves.  There is a breeding colony here that after the captive breeding program has successfully established itself in the wild.  Possibly later on back in camp there was a sighting of one soaring high over the peaks way in the distance.

There were other wild life sightings though - lots of Pileated Woodpeckers, Phoebes, California Quail and even a rare red-legged frog and a bobcat.  I don’t think I have seen a bobcat before and this one was a beauty.

In the evening due to a lack of acceptable wine we made a 60 minute run to fetch wine from the nearest town which is Paicines.  Not that it is a big town, blink and you miss it, but it has a store that sells wine, albeit cheap wine.

Balconies Trail

That night we moved campsites to avoid the crying baby but as far as we know the baby was quiet.  In the morning we broke camp early and I went for a run (training for the half-marathon at the weekend).  A gorgeous 5 miler along the Chacone Creek on the Balconies Trail. As the sun came up the early morning light was catching the peaks and the light was just wonderful.

There are more photos here.

Chesterfield Canal - September 2018

Near where I grew up in Derbyshire there is a canal, the Chesterfield Canal.  In its original form it ran some 46 miles from Chesterfield to West Stockwith on the River Trent which then allowed water access to the North Sea.  It was designed by James Brindley and was completed in 1777. It allowed goods and materials from the Peak District to be transported out to the Trent and thereby the North Sea and the world outside.  Among other things cannonballs were produced in Chesterfield for use in the Napoleonic Wars and stone for the building of Westminster Abbey were transported on the canal.

I have a very hazy memory from my childhood of seeing an old canal barge being pulled along by a horse but that must have been when I was very young as by the end of the 1950’s there was no commercial trade on the canal and it fell into disrepair and much of it was filled in.  

Railway Bridges near Chesterfield

Since the late 1970’s there has been an effort to rebuild the canal for leisure purposes and and there is now a 5 mile section from Chesterfield to Staveley that is restored and is navigable by canal boats.  This new section has become one of my favorite places to run - it is a great

surface and being a canal it is flat except for the odd lock.  There are some quite beautiful sections along the route and all the reconstruction work on locks and bridges has been done to a very high standard.

I ran with my phone the other day and took some photos along the way.  It is truly a treasure of the area. One day it is hoped that it will be completed all the way out to the River Trent again but the completion date keeps getting pushed back.  There is a new housing estate to be bypassed and a now collapsed tunnel to be rebored. That being said there is only 9 more miles of the original 46 miles to restore, but it is a difficult 9 miles.

There has been a resurgence of wildlife too.  In my youth everything was so polluted you rarely saw much wildlife, but now there are geese, swans, kingfishers, deer along the banks, and even fish in the canal.  

Chesterfield Church - the Crooked Spire, not too crooked from this perspective

The restoration work continues in Hartington, Staveley.

One of the interesting historical notes along the way is at Newbridge Lane between Brimington and Whittington.  Apparently in 1603, well before the canal was built, there was an outbreak of the plague in Brimington and there was a bridge at this site over the River Rother that runs alongside the current canal.  The bridge was pulled down to stop the spread of the plague.  The replacement bridge built after the plague was therefore called New Bridge.

There are more photos here.