Pinnacles Campground

The tent cabin made winter camping easy and fun. The Condors were at the campground and could be easily seen from the trail. We were thrilled.

We stayed at cabin tent 81. It was clean and everything was in working order. Thank goodness it had electricity because it got cold and the heater fan they provided was amazing! The mattresses were thick and comfortable. Bring your sheets and sleeping bags. The cover on the mattress is a tarp material so not very comfortable so you’ll appreciate having the sheets.
It is close to the general store and the the bathroom are pretty close to the site. We explored the bear gulch area and parked in a spot close to the trailhead. It is far from the campsite, so I recommend driving to the trailhead, especially with kids.

Campground was nice. Sites are mostly spread out, particularly in the back, and fairly private. Access to bathroom was not great, as nearest was an outhouse. As at many national parks, no showers except at the store is annoying.
Overall, nice camping here, but the park, as a national park is underwhelming. A small, not particularly interesting national park. Also, a Long way to get there from the north, and even longer to get ‘out’ to the south.

Well developed camp ground with showers and a camp store
Very expensive especially on the weekends - $125 for 2 nights and you can only book a minimum of 2 nights for the weekend

Despite paying and reserving a site our tent was removed in the late afternoon while we were hiking. upon returning from our hike, our tent was missing, in a panic we had begun to ask others if they had seen our tent. To which nearby campers told us that employees had removed it from our reserved spot. In 30° weather at 8 PM we had to scramble to find our tent, and the camp store was closed. And we all know there’s no cell reception in that campground. My device had been kicked off their Wi-Fi within a few minutes, so I was unable to use it to call for help. The only thing we could think of was to knock on doors of employees to track down the tent. We had to track down Ranger’s outside of the campground to search for employees to contact regarding where our tent was located. After nearly 2 hours in the cold, looking for our tent, the ranger tracked it down and it was found outside in their “storage area”.

There were several issues at play:

The employees did not check that we were registered at that site the next two days. Also, no sign was put on our marker to reserve the campsite when we had asked if we needed to do anything regarding, they said they would take care of it.

Fortunately, our tent was located before the temperatures dropped too low. Otherwise, it could’ve been a dangerous situation with no way to call for help or get warm after a long day of hiking in the park and 30 degree temperatures at night.

Both bathrooms were closed in our camp area. Requiring up to walk down to the next camp are to use there’s.

It would have been nice to know the bathrooms were out of order before we even booked the cabin sites. I definitely would have found another camp area.

Campsite was smaller than expected, but everything was nice! It is a little far from the bench trailhead (~1.2 miles), but we had a gorgeous hike.

The ADA toilet trailer was out of order (both stalls). The site did have an ADA portapotty (one) near the bathroom buildings, but the way they were dropped was in the dirt/sand (difficult for wheelchairs to traverse. This portapotty was not lit at night like the bathrooms, and they were placed in the dirt in such a way that opening the door fully was a challenge because it jutted up against the parking barrier.

The campground is kept very well and the people that work in the park are always friendly and very knowledgeable. Of course seeing both sides of the park is wonderful, whether hiking it or driving.

We loved Pinnacles. We visited at the very end of July, and the days were hot and the nights warm. Our campsite was great, close to water and the toilets, and had sun and shade to suit our needs. The park was amazing, we started our hikes early-ish (around 7) to beat the heat of the day (check out alltrails.com for some hiking ideas). We'd get back to the campground early afternoon and then enjoy the pool, which was nice and cool. We had two full days, which we spent doing each "half" of the park: the first day we did the balconies trail loop starting from the old pinnacles parking lot, and the second day we took it easy and did the southern trails, starting at bear gulch and doing the condor gulch trail to moses springs and back to bear gulch. Do be wary of the raccoons, which are numerous and bold. We were very careful with keeping our food locked away (there are a few other reviews warning about them which we took very seriously) and nothing got stolen from us, but we heard plenty of other campers trying (loudly) to shoo them off.