Onward to Great Basin National Park! This park is in eastern Nevada, near the Utah border. The park is located in the Great Basin Desert, but most of the park is actually mountainous terrain, with its centerpiece Wheeler Peak soaring to an elevation of 13,000 feet. We really don’t know much about this park and hadn’t even heard about it before we started planning this trip. Highlights of the park include Lehman Cave, full of beautiful marble and limestone formations, as well as an ancient bristlecone pine cone forest.
Nevada has the loneliest roads on the planet, with eerie lunar-like landscapes, and in the highlands the trees and bushes are seven and eight shades of green (with the most beautiful shade of sage green we’ve ever seen). Driving across Nevada is a constant crossing of mountain ridges separating the high desert floor. Very pretty and very remote. A coyote shoots across the road as we drive along. Very lonely but beautiful scenery.
We are staying outside the park in Ely, Nevada. The KOA has daily pancake breakfasts so Elle is very excited – pancakes are her favorite. She is also very excited about the KOA playground. If it was up to Elle we would only stay at KOAs. It is nearly an hour drive to the park, but we opt for the certainty of reservations and the comfort of hook-ups since the campground at Great Basin is dry camping and only first-come, first-serve.
We get tickets to the Lehman Cave tour and have to undergo a special cleaning of our shoes since we have recently been in other caves. They do this to make sure no one tracks the fungus that causes white nose syndrome. We remove our shoes and soak the bottoms in the special sanitizer before the tour. Then we take the hour -long tour of the caves to see the wild, impressive rock formations.
After a quick lunch at the surprisingly good café at the visitor’s center, we drive 10,000 feet up the mountain on the Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive. We decide to hike the 2.8-mile trail (with 800 feet of elevation gain) up to the ancient bristlecone pine forest. What a great hike – beautiful scenery. Dramatic rocky and tree-filled mountain views. We finally arrive at the ancient bristlecone pine forest. The gnarly old bristle cone pines are grotesquely beautiful, some are nearly 5,000 years old and they often grow where other trees cannot survive. On the hike Elle makes friends with another little girl and the two of them have a wonderful time hiking back down the trail, “watering” the trees on the way down with their water bottles.
This part of Nevada is quite dramatic – the desert portion huge, dry, flat and brown, ringed by layers of green scrub, these in turn ringed by rugged mountains. Barren yet so beautiful. Hard to capture on film but magnificent to behold.
