Great Basin National Park

Great Basin National Park
Who knew?

Great Basin National Park, as you can tell by the map, is located in far eastern Nevada. If you’ve never heard of it, you’re not the first. Annually, around 80,000 people visit the park. Zion, our next stop on the trip, gets about 2,500,000 people annually. Those 2,420,000 people don’t know what they’re missing. (As an aside, that expression makes no sense. Of course they don’t know what they’re missing! How would they know what they’re missing if they didn’t go to the park, which would then mean they would be seeing it and not missing it?) We certainly had a great time at the park. After a quick stop at the visitor’s center, we decided to head down to Lexington Arch, which involved 10 miles on primitive dirt roads. Hey, as long as it’s dirt and not sand or snow, we should be fine. We managed to take a wrong road, and while not getting stuck, we got lost. The van did admirably powering us up some nasty little roads, which only enabled us to get more lost. Nate saved the day and proved what gadget freaks we are when he broke out the laptop and GPS, hooked them together, and found our little unknown dirt road on the map. He then downloaded all the local maps to the GPS, and we were on our way. Is technology awesome or what? We finally found the right road and the right trail up to the Arch. It turned out to be quite impressive, and we climbed all over the place and up to the top of the arch. We certainly took advantage of the ranger’s advice to “stay on the trails, when there is a trail.” In most national parks, if you stray off the designated paved trail, lights start flashing and Dobermans jump out of the woods and pin you down until the ranger arrives with the tazer and punishes you for your dirty deeds. So instead of taking the trail back out, we just headed straight down the stream bed which lead back to the van. Along the way, Nate found an old mineshaft hidden in some bushes. Ignoring all common sense and prior warnings, we went in a little ways to check it out. No, nobody died and Lassie didn’t have to go find help for little Timmy. Thankfully (at least in my case) the mine shaft was very short and we were forced to turn around only 100 feet in.

After the hike, we wanted to make it back in time for the next tour of Lehman Caves, the reason 90% of the visitors come to Great Basin National Park. We had long since established that I am the fast driver and Nate gets better gas mileage, so I was put behind the wheel with a directive to make it back in time. We ended up tearing down the dirt road at 50 mph, full on Baja-style weaving around rocks and sliding to a stop at creek crossings. I was cutting things so close that I managed to knock both of the side mirrors back against the van. Nate said he felt like I was in control 98% of the time. Ha ha, fooled you! And we missed the cave tour by 10 minutes.

The next day was a big one. Since we are both closet overachievers, we went for the Great Basin Trifecta. There are three major attractions in the Park: Lehman Caves, Wheeler Peak and the Bristlecone Pine trees. Why not see all three in the same day? We started off with the 9 am cave tour, which included lots of information about the cave and the chance to look around some. I had never been in a cave like this before, with all of the stalactites (“tight” to the roof) and stalagmites (“might” reach the roof). The cave is also famous for its abundance of shields, which you can see in the photos.

After the cave tour, we drove on up to 10,000’ and the trailhead for Wheeler Peak. Wheeler peak is the second highest mountain in Nevada at 13,063’, and one heck of a hike. It’s 10 miles round trip, a third of which is through snow and rocks with some trace of a trail. It was the highest I’d ever been, and I got a nasty altitude headache to commemorate my achievement. I also taught myself how to self arrest with ski poles, after glissading my way over a pile of rocks. (Glissading is sliding back down the mountain on any available snow fields. Self arresting is digging in your ski pole/ice axe to stop the slide if it gets out of control. I should have learned the latter before trying the former).

Upon reaching the bottom of the trail, we noticed there was still some daylight left and we both had our headlamps, so we took a 4 mile detour to a grove of Bristlecone pines, which are the oldest known living things on the planet. We saw a few trees that were over 3,000 years old. The oldest tree, named Prometheus, was cut down in the 60’s by a grad student who wanted to know how old the trees were. What I had never heard before, and read only once in the visitor’s center, was that the grad student actually had a permit to cut down one tree and he managed to pick the oldest one. Nobody ever includes that, because it’s way easier to be mad at the guy for cutting down the oldest living thing on earth. Damn grad students.

After completing our trifecta and some tasty burritos, we left the isolation of Great Basin headed out towards Zion National Park. The only bad part of the day was when Nate decided to play chicken with a big deer. He saw the deer about a mile away down the road, and started taunting it and speeding up. “What’s the matter deer? CHICKEN!? What, are you going to give me the old ‘deer in the headlights’ excuse!?” Not really; we both saw it jump out about 15 feet in front of us and there wasn’t anything that could be done. Pretty sad really, he was a big guy with a big set of antlers. That turned out to be the only incident of the drive, and the next day we would be in Zion.

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