Pinnacles

Left to Right: Chris Glenn, Randall Diamond, Brent Spencer, Jeremy Glenn, Dallin Earl, and Travis Neal (me)

Back in March, our troop went to Pinnacles National Monument for a camp out. Pinnacles is a place full of hiking trails, caves, rocks, and other cool stuff. We left to go on the Camp Out on a Friday. The only scouts that went were Travis Neal (me), Dallin Earl, Jeremy Glenn, and Chris Glenn. Our troop leaders were Brother Spencer and Randall Diamond. We stopped at In-N-Out for dinner and had hamburgers, cheeseburgers, fries, and milkshakes (I think Dallin had a lot of milkshakes)!

Then, we ran out of gas. We were stopped on the side of the highway for a while. Luckily, a lady named Linda lived nearby where we were stuck, so Randall went with her to go get a jug of gas. The bad news was it took a while. The good news was that we could see the sunset!

We waited and waited. Dallin started getting hyper and started to run out in the middle of the street, so I had to stop him. I think it was from all those milkshakes. Finally, we got enough gas to get to a gas station to fill up more gas (we had the jug in the car with us, so it smelled like gasoline inside). We wanted to be nice, so Jeremy made a card that said, "Linda, you saved our bacon!" and he drew a plate of bacon on it.

Finally we got to our campsite and made peach cobbler. Oh and then Dallin and Chris heard some guy fart really loud in the bathroom, but that's a different story! Yeah, and we were too tired to make a tent, so we slept on a tarp.

The next day, we woke up and made Sunrise Stew (Chris made up its name), which is hash browns mixed with eggs, bacon, sausage, and peppers. It was pretty good! Except, we made it in a Dutch oven, so there was a bunch of left over liquidy stuff.

Then we went on our hike. We stopped to explore some small caves. They were pretty cool, but not as cool as the ones we were going to see!

We hiked a while until we got to Bear Gulch Caves. These caves were awesome! There were waterfalls you could actually reach out and touch!

We hiked through the caves and found a small canyon-like crevice with a giant boulder that looked like it was going to fall on you!

We explored the caves and followed the arrows painted on the walls until we got to a stream. There were no stepping stones and it flowed right in front of our path. Also, it flowed right through a narrow hole. That hole was our only way through to the other half of the caves. Only Dallin, Jeremy, and I could fit through, and we all had our packs on (and remember, we had those big packs, not little day packs). We were about to turn around and go back, but Chris had an idea of hauling all our packs through first, then start climbing through.

So that's what we did. Chris hauled the packs to Dallin and Jeremy, and I told them where to place them. Finally, we all made it through, and we stopped in a huge cave to eat some beef jerky.

Then came the harder part of the hike. We hiked up to a reservoir with a bunch of weird rock formations around it.

Then we kept hiking and looking at the rock formations. I remember one looking like a baseball glove, and one looked like Snoopy at one angle.

Finally, we got to the top! We ate cold pizza for lunch and then we hiked down.

We hiked 5 miles! And the great part was that Pinnacles is a Rimrover hike! The Rimrover, or Rim of the Bay, are six mountain hikes around the San Francisco Bay Area.