www.montereycountyweekly.com january 5-11, 2023 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 19 Pinnacles home, is perched atop a spire. It’s a stunning sight—it’s one of the largest birds on Earth—and it inspires communication, and recognition. “Hello, beautiful.” Climbing on a narrow trail that winds east around that spire, with only a metal railing to protect a hiker from falling down a cliff, the condor soars by on the level, about 50 feet to the east. With a wingspan of nearly 10 feet, it’s a jaw-dropping spectacle as the bird effortlessly circles over the canyon a few times, and then soars north to perch on another spire, out of sight. There are a few parties of other hikers on the trail traveling south, and they speak in various languages, including English. They don’t get to experience how quiet this place can be—at least not on this day. At the Tunnel Trail junction, a hiker hooks left and back down south, toward Juniper Canyon. The sun is soon to set over the spires to the west, which lie in shade. After about a half-mile, approaching the trail’s namesake feature—a 120foot tunnel, built in 1932, that bores through a spire—the late afternoon sun is hitting it just right, and the latter end of the tunnel is golden, aglow. It looks like a portal, or perhaps a giant keyhole, but which door it unlocks is up to whoever is passing through. When former president Barack Obama signed the legislation to make Pinnacles a national park on Jan. 10, 2013, there was no fanfare, no press conference, just a stroke of a pen. And with it, California eclipsed Alaska as the state with the most national parks—nine. The inspiration, and much of the work to get that legislation to Obama’s desk, was led by former longtime Central Coast congressman Sam Farr, D-Carmel. The idea to form a national park in the region was planted in Farr’s mind by former California Senator Alan Cranston, who once told Farr, “When you create a national park, it’s forever.” At a rotary club meeting in San Juan Bautista in the late ’90s, a suggestion was made to Farr to advocate for making Pinnacles, then a national monument, into a national park. “At the time, I didn’t think it wasn’t worthy of that,” Farr says. That changed when filmmaker and documentarian Ken Burns made a documentary series for PBS titled The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, which was released in 2009. One of the biggest criticisms of the park system in that documentary, in Farr’s estimation, was that the parks were primarily only used by white people. So after an evening reception for Burns in Washington, D.C. celebrating the launch of the series, Farr introduced himself, noting that he was a longtime friend of Ansel Adams, who had lived in Carmel Highlands, and whose photographs were instrumental in convincing Congress to create Kings Canyon National Park in 1940. Farr told Burns he had come around to think that Pinnacles should indeed be a national park. Burns, who Farr says visited Pinnacles in his youth, wholeheartedly endorsed the idea, and so Farr got to work—Ken Burns is a weighty endorsement. Though the bill didn’t get through Congress until 2012, Burns wrote a letter in 2009 with screenwriter Dayton Duncan in support of it. “In studying the history of the evolution of the national park idea, we learned that many of today’s national parks were at one time national monuments,” they wrote, noting that the Grand Canyon and Death Valley are among them. “While changing an area’s designation from ‘monument’ to ‘park’ does not necessarily change its crucial attributes, it nonetheless alters its place in the American imagination.” Top: Looking up at the cliffs along the trail approaching Bear Gulch Cave, from the east. Below: The Tunnel Trail’s namesake feature—a 120-foot tunnel built in 1932—lights up in the late afternoon sun. David Schmalz karen Loutzenheiser
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