The Hidden National Park

I grew up in a small dairy-farming town in California’s Central Valley. The Redwoods sits to the north, and the Sierra Nevada mountains are nestled close to the east. The great Pacific Ocean builds and takes away the rock faces and granulated sand of the shore to the west, and a number of populated cities sit next to the desert spaces that serve as America’s driest and hottest spot to the south.

There were brief mentions of these different landscapes during school. Still, I never heard anything about the public lands that we could visit to experience all that California had to offer until I moved away for college past the Grapevine mountain range that separated the San Joaquin Valley from the rest of Southern California. I was shocked to realize later that I had unknowingly visited Sequoia National Park as a kid multiple times, but I lived right next to Pinnacles National Parks growing up, never visited the park, and didn’t even know it.

I recently went to Pinnacles National Park for the first time. What could have been a short day trip as a kid turned into a larger road trip as an adult with an entire group of people who had also never been to the park. I didn’t know anything about the national park growing up and didn’t hear anything about it until I was no longer living right next to it. This made me think about how this situation could have been avoided.