24 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY january 5-11, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com Walt Disney (a cave, with a waterfall, in Central California?). Lights are also a necessity in the pitch-dark Balconies Cave on the east side of the park. Parking spots on the western side, accessible from Soledad, are fewer. They total about 100, with 75 near the trailheads, despite being closer to where more people live, at least locals (for those traveling from the Bay Area, it’s about the same distance to each park entrance; there is no throughroad, but hikers can go from one county to the next). The park is already at carrying capacity on busy weekends, and the parking lots on the west side are prone to fill up. When they do, prospective visitors are forced to turn back. The same is true on the east side, where there are about 240 parking spaces. Rich Moorer, a Pinnacles spokesperson, says overcrowding has become less of an issue since they installed a roadside sign on the western approach, which can be programmed from afar, to inform drivers heading to the park of the wait time. He says it’s drastically reduced the number of visitors who have to turn back. Oddly, and perhaps inaccurately, the National Park Service’s data on visitation to the park shows its record year was 2011, with 393,219. That’s before Pinnacles became a national park. The only other year that’s sniffed that number is in 2021—348,857. But what could explain why, in 2019, visitors only numbered 177,224? Moorer says he thinks there was a problem with the data in 2011, but he can’t confirm that, or speak to what that means if it’s true. He also adds that bad weather on prime weekends— for Pinnacles, that’s spring—can drive down visitation numbers in a big way. There have been substantive improvements to park infrastructure recently, most notably to the western side’s visitor center, which had been in the works for 10 years and opened in 2012, just before Pinnacles was elevated to park status. There have also been a few new trails on the western side, one of which travels from the visitor’s center to the trailhead, and another that’s ADAaccessible that climbs from the western visitor center to an overlook that offers a sweeping view of the park’s rock formations. The admission price has also increased, from $5 per vehicle to $30, in part to support shuttles on the eastern side to take visitors to the trailheads—but those shuttles haven’t resumed since the pandemic hit. And while admission revenues help boost the park’s budget incrementally— the park’s budget went from $3.4 million in 2012 to $3.6 million in 2017 to $3.8 million in 2022—that’s about it as far as changes. Pinnacles was already being managed by the National Park Service when it was a national monument, and many of the improvements made over the last decade were already years in the planning, before the park designation. Brent Slama, the city manager of Soledad—which is located directly west of the park—says he believes the uptick in city tax revenue since Pinnacles was granted national park status can at least be partially attributed to the name change. But Slama also hedges, saying that he can’t be sure what is driving that increase. That said, he adds there are some folks—Americans and foreigners alike—who put visiting every national park on their bucket list. Pinnacles is now on their map. When Farr’s bill came to Obama’s desk a decade ago, Farr says that Obama’s staffers pressed him on how many jobs it would create. Perhaps that’s why, when describing it, Farr loves to say, “It’s not just pretty scenery. It’s jobs.” How true that is remains to be seen, but unless the park can add more parking spaces, it’s hard to see how it can increase its visitor numbers and therefore, its impact on the local economy. And as for what Alan Cranston told Farr with respect to national parks, they’re not forever. They will only last as long as the United States. The spires at Pinnacles are on a different clock. They move in geologic time. Pinnacles National Park is accessible from two entrances. The campground and east entrance are at 5000 East Entrance Road, Paicines, off Highway 25; the west entrance is located east of Soledad, at the end of Highway 146. $30/entrance per vehicle. (831) 389-4486, nps.gov/pinn. Left: The outhouse on North Chalone Peak offers the most scenic throne of anywhere in the area code. Right: The view east from North Chalone Peak offers sweeping views of the rolling, arid hills to the east. “It’s not just pretty scenery.” A waterfall gushes out of the Bear Gulch Reservoir, into the Bear Gulch Cave, after a late December storm. karen Loutzenheiser karen Loutzenheiser karen Loutzenheiser
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