The sky island of Great Basin National Park

West face of Wheeler Park, core of Great Basin NP

 I could see Great Basin National Park long before I could approach the isolated preserve. Try as I might, I could not temper the excitement at hitting a national park I dreamed of visiting for decades. I was far from anywhere in eastern Nevada, but that's what it takes to reach Great Basin. 

A lone white-capped mountain rising from greener foothills becomes visible shortly after Pioche, where the already-desolate U.S. Route 93 becomes the Great Basin Highway, dropping all civilization except for the pavement and the occasional farm or ranch. There’s the ghost town of Atlanta, a failed mining camp populated only by a caretaker. That's not worth a bumpy ride off the paved road. 

Wheeler Peak is the pinnacle of the Snake Range, a 13’er and Nevada’s second-tallest mountain (albeit its most prominent). Wheeler hides Nevada’s only glacier, a shrinking slab of dense ice embedded in a cirque’s steep walls. With the warm winters plaguing the west, its future is dim, and that lonely ice might no longer qualify as a glacier within a decade or two. 

Just its appearance on the horizon urged me forward across these empty miles. After many miles of relentless brown mountains with minimal vegetation beyond sage, juniper, and Gambel oak, such lush mountains provide a welcome respite. 

I finally left U.S. 93 at the junction for U.S. 50, which cuts across the valley west of Wheeler Peak. The path across or around the mountains was unclear until the road swung into the foothills and unofficially signaled another mountain pass to cross. A short, windy stretch carries drivers through a pass in the Snake Range. 

By the time anyone enters Great Basin National Park’s via its main road, a good acquaintance has already been made with Wheeler Peak. Great Basin National Park only protects a tiny portion of the Great Basin, which runs from east of the Wasatch Range only the way to the Sierra Nevada in California.

Blooming aspens, Wheeler Peak Drive

Wheeler Peak and the Snake Range

But the national park definitely protects one of the most delicate, important chunks of real estate in that vast area. During the last Ice Age, much of Utah sat beneath Lake Bonneville, which counts the Great Salt Lake, Utah Lake, and Sevier Lake as remnants. 

The national park lands cover a sky island, a series of high-elevation ecosystems wildly different from their surrounding lowlands. In Great Basin’s case, the lowlands don’t support much life at all, as few plants grow in the salt flats to the east. The Snake Range has proven important for other Lake Bonneville remnants – the Lake Bonneville cutthroat trout, a species that had nowhere to go as the lake dwindled into smaller salt lakes, found refuge in the headwater springs of streams that emerge from the Wheeler Peak and the Snake Range. 

Great Basin is a double-edge sword – with virtually no light pollution, it has some of the Lower 48’s darkest night skies. But it also lies hundreds of miles off the beaten path. There are no services for 50-80 miles in any direction outside of Baker, Nevada, the small town at the park’s base. Millions of visitors descend upon the Utah Five national parks. 

With its remote location, Great Basin rarely crests 200,000 visitors annually. With the park visitor center in Baker, five miles from the actual park, you could stop and never set foot in Great Basin. I couldn’t bear that thought after a full day of Nevada wilderness. 

This trip came with a major fault - I visited too early in spring. 

Before I got in the car, I knew that. Wheeler Peak Drive stays closed at the three-mile mark until May. Lehman Cave tours do not open till May. Usually there would be snow on the road, not just the thin amounts on the park's highest elevations. The dry winter did not change those start dates. Still, I would take what I could of Great Basin. It took me years to get here, and who knows when another trip might coalesce. 

Great Basin turkey crossing

Turkey encounter

 

End of the road till May. 

This park felt like an ecstasy of riches, and I just touched upon the edges. But I think I would have to convince someone else of that to return. Upon the Wheeler Peak drive, I spotted movement – a turkey ambled across the road and back into the pine forest. I couldn’t glimpse any of Great basin’s other elusive wildlife. That would require some extensive hiking and full access to the Wheeler Peak Drive. 

Even with the Lehman Caves were closed, I decided to visit the area. The cave visitor center’s small café reopened for April. Chicken fingers sufficed this afternoon, and I grabbed a few Nevada beers for the hotel room that night. 

As Nevada’s longest cave system, Lehman Caves were the initial conserved area in the region, protected as Lehman Caves National Monument in 1922. Local tribes visited the caves, and a homesteader offered tours as early as 1885.  

 Next to the cave visitor center sits the Rhodes Cabin, a cabin from 1928 built by early park rangers to accommodate visitors to Lehman Caves. It has been moved from its original sight, but it represents a different park era, when a 19X11 wood cabin passed for lodgings. 

In 1986, Congress approved rolling Lehman Caves into the new Great Basin National Park, protecting the northern part of the Snake Range. The move was easy enough, since the U.S. Forest Service already covered the Snake Range; the Wheeler Natural Area simply joined the new national park. The southern sections are protected as the Highland Ridge Wilderness. 

From the cave visitor center, one can look down into the past. Lake Bonneville’s waves would have lapped upon shores now covered in salt flats that extend to the next mountain range. That range would have been an island. 

But that was 10,000 years ago. I suspect if I can return to Great Basin in its prime season, I can explore more. The only urgency is to see the glacier, which is already struggling. The Bonneville trout have recovered, and Wheeler Peak seemed to fare better than many Colorado mountains in the snow it received. 

At least the groves of bristlecone pines will still stand and easily outlast most modern visitors to those montane heights.  

Looking downhill at old Bonneville shorelines.