After years traveling past Great Basin National Park we finally made it into the park! The Great Basin is an area that covers most of Nevada, and lots of other neighboring states including Utah and Arizona. In the Great Basin area, rain and snow melt flows into an area that doesn’t eventually flow into the ocean – it is trapped in lakes and only evaporates away. This area is a catchment basin which began millions of years ago and has a number of mountain ranges around and in it including Sierra Nevada and the Snake Mountain ranges. You can read about our stay on the other side of the Sierra Nevada Range near Bishop, California.
Camping in Great Basin
The only campground open was Lower Lehman Campground. It is small, with about five pull throughs large enough for RVs like ours. I think there were around 12-15 actual camping sites and all were first come first served. Being so early in the spring, there was no one there when we first arrived on Friday morning. Over the long weekend, different sites had tent, car and RV campers. Our site was next to a stream and we fell asleep listening to the snowmelt flowing by the RV.
Hiking
We took a few little hikes and one large hike. The trails, higher elevation campgrounds, and Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive are completely covered in snow!
Native American Sites
One of our small hikes took us to the petroglyphs in small caves in the Snake Mountain range. The hike to the petroglyphs was very short, so we extended it past there and along the 4×4 road that is closed to traffic due to snow. The petroglyphs are painted on the walls. People are not permitted into these caves out of respect for the local tribes.
We also wandered along a small trail near the town of Baker to the Baker Archeological Site. This is one of the best described archeological sites we have been to. I highly recommend walking the trail with the booklet (you can find it in the metal box on site) created by Brigham Young University. The researchers describe the Fremont Village and the people that may have lived there.
Lehman Cave’s Natural Entrance
The trail around the Lehman Cave Visitor Center gets you to the natural opening of the cave and beautiful views of the mountain range and desert below. This is a small hike and worth spending a few minutes before or after a tour of the visitor center or cave.
Wheeler Peak hike
We also parked at the Upper Lehman Campground lot and hiked over the snow to Wheeler Peak. This was a difficult hike and we needed our Yaktrax to prevent slipping on the packed snow. Several people used snowshoes on the trail days ahead of us so even when the snow was over three feet deep we were mostly able to stay on top of the pack with a few exceptions. Round trip, our hike was about 8 miles, over 25oo feet elevation climb up to 9865 feet at the campground. The weather was overcast, really windy, cold, and beautiful! I wanted to make it to the Bristlecone Pines, but that would have been another four miles and who knows how many more feet in elevation, and there was no way I was going to make that in the cold.
Lehman Cave
Great Basin National Park also has a stunning cave. The cave and campgrounds are named for the miner that found the cave and started taking people on tours there in the 1800s. They destroyed and took many of the beautiful parts of the cave as souvenirs over years of tours.
This cave is continuously building shields, stalagmites, and stalactites due to the snow melt running through cracks in the granite, picking up and depositing mineral drops every year. The guided tour was about an hour and a great experience. You do need to pay a fee and I recommend scheduling before you arrive as there were a number of people that showed up hoping for the opportunity but the tours were already full.
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