Complaints Department - Road Edition - Pinnacle Mountain Review

Now that I've had a chance to catch up on sleep and odds and ends needing attention here, I can make this post. I frequented Pinnacle Mountain a lot many years ago. Looks like they've made a few changes, but nothing drastic, to the park. Toilets are still nasty. Funny, on the bathroom doors, people carved "Jesus" phrases ALL over the place, hmmm, WWJD on this??? Anyway, I get to the park around 6:30 and there were already a handful of people in the place. That surprised me, usually I could guarantee the fact that I'd be the first one in and no one showing up for at least an hour. Well, time to bring on the photos:
Here we have the entrance to the park letting you know you made it to the right place:

From there it was time to park and make my way up. At the base of the trail, you pass through this:

As you can see, the trail has a bit of an incline from the get-go. Plus you can see that there are steps landscaped out that show up a little better in this photo:

Now when you go up this trail you will get progress markers along the way. These are welcome sights, when you start getting winded, close to the top and wonder just where the hell you are. You get these for markers:

After hiking less than a quarter of the way, you will get a choice of what trail you want to take. The difference is in the difficulty of course, here's the sign to look for:

It looks a bit confusing so let me straighten it out for you. If you are out of shape and don't want to be covered in your own shit by the time you get to the top, go left. If you think you're a bad ass hiker, then by all means go right. I went left as I haven't had a workout like this in a while PLUS, to me, the view and sights are better. Moving right along, you will come across some great sights like this part of the trail where these large rocks form a wall:

The trail is pretty much all incline and not many flat spots. Once halfway through, the trail goes from mostly dirt to mostly rock. Here's what I mean:

If you look closely, you can see these yellow paint markers here and there. They are there to guide you in the right direction and allegedly the safer route. After getting through that, you may be a bit tired. If you are, there is a place to sit and catch you breath:

Remember those markers I told you about? You'll swear that they stopped labeling or moved them further apart for damn meanness, but they are there...you're just out of shape, deal. And when I mentioned that there weren't many flat spots, this is about as flat as it gets here:

I do believe I mentioned a few posts ago that I had a lot of photos of this place, was I wrong? Oh but wait, there's still more! The terrain get even MORE difficult after marker 7. Here's what I mean:

You get a great sense of appreciation when you see this little number here:

Here's what it looks like from behind me at this point:

Even from here you can take an alternate route to the top, you can always choose this path:

FINALLY! I reach the top and when you are at the top, you'll get 2 vantage points. You'll get to look from the North end or you can swing over to the South end. BOTH have absolutley fantastic views, unfortunately, you get some smog views as well. Little Rock is this way:

From here I'll post my North peak photos:



That last photo was a look behind me from the North peak and the way you go to get off from there and get to the South peak. Speaking of which, here are my South Peak photos:



Look, I know there's a shit load of photos, but I felt that a simple Flickr album posting wouldn't give you the whole story behind all this. Again, these aren't all the photos and yet more hit the cutting room floor. But, at least for now, we've reached the end of the Pinnacle Mountain leg of the journey.

NEXT TIME ON THE ROAD EDITION...THE KINGFISHER TRAIL

TO BE CONTINUED