Pinnacles National Park is a national park located in Central California. Some popular activities to do here include camping, hiking through caves, or rock climbing.
The first thing you need to know is that there are TWO entrances to Pinnacles National Park and they are NOT connected! So it is extremely important that you know where you’re going and go to the right entrance.
Contents
Hours
East Side: 24 hour access to trails. No overnight parking. Campground hour
West Side: Trail access is 7:30am to 8:00pm
Directions
When navigating to Pinnacles National Park, either navigate to the Pinnacles Visitor Center (East entrance) or the Pinnacles Visitor Contact Station (West entrance).
You can see from the map below that there is no connection and if you accidentally go to the wrong entrance, you’ll need to drive about an hour to get to the other side.
Admission
The fee for one vehicle is $30 for 7 days. We actually decided to get an annual pass to National Parks since we plan to visit more national parks in the future (Yosemite is next on our list, again!). I got the America the Beautiful pass the day before at REI for $80. You can also purchase the national park pass on the NPS website but it wouldn’t have gotten here on time for our trip.
Internet & Cellular Service
There is no internet/cellular service but they do offer wifi for purchase (one day or 7 days).
Pets
Pets are allowed in the park but just not on any hiking trails.
Camping
Pinnacles Campground is located in the East side of Pinnacles National Park. The campground offers tent, group-camping, and RV sites. We booked one of the RV sites for the electric hook-up for the RV we rented as well as my Tesla. They offer 120 volts with 30-amp. If you plan to charge your Tesla here be aware that the 30-amp that came in the NEMA adapter bundle will not work. The 30-amp that you’ll need is this one. We found out the hard way since we arrived pretty late Friday night and only had about 40 miles left. I was hoping to be able to charge on the 30-amp but unfortunately was not able to use it. I plugged into the slow charging one (~3-5 miles per hour) and eventually just used one of their paid charging stations nearby.
Electric hook-up 
Paid charging 
Paid charging
You will need to make reservations on their website up to 6 months in advance – there are no first-come first-serve sites.
Camp-site check-in is at 1PM and check-out is at 11AM.
Things to Do
There are numerous hiking trails and rock climbing areas in Pinnacles National Park.
Hiking
We did the Moses Spring and Rim Trail loop. We started early (around 8AM) to avoid the scorching sun in the afternoon. This hike loop is about 2.5 miles round trip and is easy to moderate difficulty. There are restrooms at the beginning of the trail.
During the hike, we did some bouldering and went on some rocks to take pictures.
We also went through the lower Bear Gulch cave. The other caves were closed unfortunately.
From the cave we passed by the Bear Gulch reservoir and spent a few minutes here resting and taking in the view. To get back, we went on the Rim Trail – there are a lot of signs on the path so don’t worry you can’t possibly get lost. Just make sure to bring a lot of water.
On the way back out, there was actually a ranger that stopped people from starting the hike since the temperature was over 100 degrees so good thing we started early!
If you get hungry and didn’t bring enough food with you on your camping trip, don’t worry there is a shop where you can buy drinks and snacks as well as other items.
This was our first time camping in an RV and maybe it was because of the heat but we stayed inside a lot more than other camping trips we’ve been on. It was nice to have a bed, a shower, and AC but I kind of missed the actual part of camping where you sleep outside haha. Although we have just been camping in my Tesla.
Don’t forget to stargaze while you’re here! The night sky was so clear and filled with stars.
