59th National Park

We have a new National Park: Pinnacles in Utah. :http://www.nps.gov/pinn

Sorry, Gary. Pinnacles National Park is in California, just an hour and a half drive south of where I live, not Utah. It is a fantastic rock climbing area, and a location where many famous American climbers developed a lot of their skills. I use it for the main outdoor session and testing area for the Boy Scout adult leaders' Climbing Instructor course I have been teaching twice a year for the last 12 years (ever since the training syllabus became approved by National). The most popular intro climbing areas are School Rock (aka Top Rope Rock, aka Scout Rock - though there is another Scout Rock in the park), Lower Sister, Tourist Trap, and the Carousel. It is also one of the major centers for the recovery efforts for the California Condor. It is home to a wide variety of wildlife. I have often seen bobcat, coyote, and the bats that live in the caves below Discovery Wall (a more advanced and challenging climbing area). I first climbed there in the 1960s.

Couple photos:

Mike Sherrick on the Thumb - Mike and I were taking a bunch of intermediate climbers up the Thumb in Pinnacles in the mid-1960s. Mike and I have been friends and occasional climbing partners for years. He was on two of the climbs featured in the book 50 classic Climbs in North America - the face of Half Dome in Yosemite and on Mt Robson (in the Canadian Rockies).

At the end of one of my Climbing Instructor courses, we were standing on top of Top Rope Rock looking toward the east and saw these interesting mammatus clouds. If you were in the MidWest, you might expect one of those down-hanging blobs to drop a funnel cloud any minute, but tornadoes are rare here in California (not unseen, just rare)

pinnacles is in california. always wanted to go there...

I saw the article at one of my outdoor yahoo egroups and thought it said it was part of one of the parks around Moab? Maybe the person who posted it didn't know either...

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