Pinnacles

This is the eroded heart of the old volcano — a dense cluster of rock towers, fins, and pinnacles standing where the thickest, hardest lava once pooled. The trail that threads through them is the reason many people come: it climbs steeply into the spires, passing close beside the towers. Everything you walk among here is what survived. The softer rock that once buried these shapes has long since weathered away and washed downhill, leaving only the toughest cores standing up against the sky. It is also a good place to watch for condors, which nest and roost among high crags like these and ride the warm air the sun-heated rock sends up. Give yourself the morning; the route is steep, exposed, and slow, and the point is not to hurry through but to stand inside the volcano’s broken center and look up.

Off the high trails stands a row of slender spires, narrow towers of the same stiff lava that built the rest of the park, weathered down until only these thin fins remain. They are a clear lesson in how this landscape comes apart. The lava cooled with cracks running through it, and ever since, water, frost, and the slow shudder of the ground have worked those cracks wider, prying the solid rock into separate blades and columns. What stands is the rock between the cracks; what is gone was the rock along them. Seen from the side, the spires line up like a hand held edge-on. They are also good, quiet ground for the cliff birds — white-throated swifts that stitch back and forth across the rock faces, and canyon wrens whose falling song spills down the walls. Come for the shapes and stay for the sound.

A single tall tower of rock stands here on its own, set apart from the main cluster of spires — a clean block of the old volcanic rock that the weather has been unusually slow to bring down. It is worth the walk even if you never leave the ground. A tower like this survives because it is made of especially solid, unbroken rock. Where the lava is riddled with cracks it comes apart into fins and rubble; where it is dense and whole, it stands, while the ground around it wears down and drops away, leaving the hard core exposed as a lone spire. Standing at its base and looking straight up is the plainest way to feel how much rock the weather has already carried off from everywhere else, and how slowly it is working on what remains.

A short but steady climb out of the valley brings you to this overlook, set on the slope facing the main spires across a deep gulch. It is one of the easiest places to take in the eroded core of the volcano whole — the towers, the gullies between them, and the raw rock faces all laid out together rather than seen one at a time from below. The overlook takes its name from the great birds that use this airspace, and the open view makes it a natural place to stop, sit, and watch the sky over the crags. The warm air rising off the sunlit rock gives soaring birds an easy lift, so the gulch tends to hold whatever is aloft. Bring binoculars if you have them: the difference between a distant condor and a common vulture is much easier to read up close, and the wait is more rewarding when you can see the wings.

On the drier east side of the park stands this knot of weathered rock, reached by trail through open chaparral and oak. It is a good place to step back from the spires and see them in their setting — the towers standing highest on the skyline, the country falling away below toward the valley, and the whole tilted, broken landscape reading as one piece. The rock here has been sculpted the way it is everywhere in the park: cut and hollowed along its cracks, left standing where it is hardest. From a viewpoint like this the pattern is easier to see at a distance than from directly beneath a single tower. It is also a quieter corner than the popular high trails, with the chaparral birds — wrentits, towhees, and the granary-building acorn woodpeckers in the oaks — going about their business in the brush.

Teaching Rock earns its name: it is a good place to stop and actually read the stone the whole park is made of. Up close, the rock is not the smooth, even sheet you might expect from cooled lava. It is a jumble of angular chunks — pebbles, cobbles, and blocks of older rock set into a finer background — the sign of an eruption that blew itself apart and then welded and cemented the pieces back together as they settled. This kind of shattered volcanic rubble is a minor feature amid the clean flows that built most of the park, but it is part of why the rock here weathers into such rough, pitted towers instead of smooth cliffs. Give the surface a close look before you move on. Once you have seen the embedded fragments here, you will start to notice them in every spire and wall you pass for the rest of the trip.

On the park’s west side, the trail runs beneath high rock walls where the country closes in. This is the best place to see what happens to a landscape this steep and this broken over time. Blocks of rock, pried loose from the cliffs above by frost, roots, and the shudder of the ground, tumble into the narrow gaps and jam against the walls before they ever reach the bottom — piling into rough archways and choked passages of fallen stone. It is a slow, ongoing collapse, and standing among it is a plain reminder that the tidy word erosion means, up close, actual rock coming down. The west side is also cooler and shadier than the exposed high country, and the walls throw sound around, so the cliff birds here carry a long way. Move through with an eye upward as well as underfoot.

This is high ground in the park, and reaching it is a long, steady climb well beyond the popular spire trails — a half-day’s effort at least, out through chaparral and open slope with little shade. The reward is distance. From the top the crags that fill most people’s visit drop into their true setting: a small, hard knot of old volcanic rock set in a wide sweep of California ranch and valley country. Off to the west the land falls toward the long trough of the Salinas Valley; east, the dry ranges roll away in fold after fold. Somewhere across that view runs the fault that tore this volcano in half and carried this piece of it north to where you stand. You cannot see the fault move, but from up here you can begin to grasp how far the rock has come — a long reach of country between it and the half it left behind.