Pinnacles Partnership launches ambitious agenda
A science camp that invites school children to engage in
research while living like visitors did 100 years ago and even
national park status are real possibilities as Pinnacles National
Monument approaches its 100th year.
Pinnacles Partnership launches ambitious agenda
A science camp that invites school children to engage in research while living like visitors did 100 years ago and even national park status are real possibilities as Pinnacles National Monument approaches its 100th year.
A group of park staff, conservationists and people with ties to Pinnacles met this week in the first meeting of the Pinnacles Partnership Board of Directors.
“The real thing that we need are people,” said Pinnacles Superintendent Eric Brunnemann. “Visitation to parks nationwide is actually diminishing. We need to bring people back into our parks again.”
Tim Regan, who lives adjacent to the sweeping monument, offered opening remarks to the group of 18. Regan later was elected president of the nascent organization.
He noted that the first meeting to consider forming a support group occurred just last fall, and that nonprofit status was secured in March of this year in near-record time.
Denise Louie, a resource management specialist on the park staff, briefly recounted the history of San Benito County’s only national parklands.
Local residents recognized that the landscape dominated by spires of igneous rock, undershot with talus caves, was special, and began lobbying to have the area conserved as a park.
In January 1908, Pinnacles National Monument came into being on 2,060 acres. Today, the park encompasses 26,000 acres, including 2,000 acquired just last year, Louie said. The park sees some 160,000 visitors each year.
While the park’s planned centennial celebration may include some fund-raising component, the real goal is to use it as a “friend raiser,” Louie said.
“We need an organization that will help bring us all together,” she said.
Part of the group’s mission will be to support long-term projects.
“We have some lifetime commitment projects,” Louie said. “We have probably the largest pig exclusion area in the continental U.S.”
After a 20-year effort, 24.3 miles of sturdy fence surrounds the most sensitive areas of the park, and a concerted multi-year effort removed all feral pigs from within the fence. Keeping the destructive non-natives out will require long-term maintenance.
Volunteers also might accelerate efforts to remove invasive weeds and restore habitats, Louie said.
“What we’re really all about is caring for the next generation,” she said. “That’s something we can do together.”
“We need to take the next century and build upon what we accomplished in the last century,” said Carl Brenner, volunteer coordinator for the park.
A tentative list of objectives for the Pinnacles Partnership’s first three years includes development of a science camp. The park now offers educational programs and curriculum support for school-aged youth, but the vision is for something larger.
“The next step beyond bringing kids out to the park … is to bring kids into camp,” Brenner said. “They could spend three days in the park. It’s science in the day. It’s social science at night. We’re going to put them in tents just like the first settlers. They’ll have to cook their own food. They’ll have to carry their own water.
“We can include, rather than exclude,” Brenner said. “If we can keep the costs down, we can keep it accessible to everyone.”
Already, 25 local teachers donated five days’ time to develop curricular materials.
Louie mentioned that the park’s profile has grown markedly in recent years, when it was selected as one of just five sites worldwide for the re-introduction of California condors into the wild.
The group also discussed the possibility of forming a sister park relationship with a park in a foreign country, and of playing host to regular “star parties” for amateur astronomers.
While the ideas and plans are developing quickly, the idea behind the Pinnacles Partnership is to create a sustainable relationship with the park.
“Over the course of the next few years, we must arrive at how we come to develop,” Brunnemann said. “Big ideas are on the table.
Editor’s note: Mark Paxton sits on the Pinnacles Partnership Board of Directors.
