Great Basin National Park

July 26, Great Basin National Park. After driving two days across some of the most terrifyingly scenic roads in America, we arrived last night at Great Basin National Park.

History/geography lesson: The Great Basin is an area that covers Nevada, western Utah, Wyoming, eastern California, and part of Oregon. It is called the Great Basin because there is no outlet to the ocean. All the water drains and stays right here. It's mostly desert. And there used to be a giant inland sea here.

Terrifying driving lesson: You may or may not realize that our trailer weighs about three times as much as the truck that is pulling it. Just take a brief moment to think about the physics of that. Works pretty well on, say, the NYS Thruway between exits 48 and 45. But we have driven steep, twisting, mountain roads continuously for 1200 miles in the last week. That seem to allllways have a cliff on the other side. And I just need to drive through Kansas. Or sleep. I'm seeing “8% grade downhill next 10 miles” road signs in my deepest nightmares.

When we were driving in yesterday, we learned that there is a nearby wildfire, and the potential for a monsoon. And so we set off today determined to cram as much into one day at GBNP as we possibly could. And so we did. And it turns out that both the fires and the monsoon have missed us, but we've done everything we wanted to do. And so we are leaving. Tomorrow is Mom's birthday, and her choice is to scram and head east into Utah. We don't actually know where we are going or what we are doing yet, and every campground is closed for the night. So tomorrow will be slightly disorganized spontaneity.

But today we visited two visitor centers (because, seriously, what else are you going to do there?), hiked to two alpine lakes and a grove of bristlecone pine trees, took a cave tour, went out to dinner, watched another film on caves, and would have gone stargazing but it's too cloudy. 

And so what exactly is so special about bristlecone pines? First of all, they are beautiful, all twisted and gnarled but with this amazing color of tans and browns and oranges and reds that exactly matches both the rocks and the sunset of the high desert. Second, they are the oldest living things on Earth. Trees in this grove are five thousand years old. Do you know what's not 5,000 years old? Christianity. The Roman Coliseum. The Acropolis and the Parthenon of Ancient Greece. The Pyramids of Friggin' Giza. Yet these trees are here, still alive, and still immune to disease, and fire, and even rot after they finally die. (Seems like we could learn a thing or two from them.) 

The folks here have compared overlapping ring patterns in living and dead trees, and have found downed or dead bristlecones here in the Great Basin that are nine thousand years old. And this is what was happening when those trees were born.

Our hike was 4½ miles, which shouldn't have been too much of a workout after a month on the trail, but we suddenly found ourselves at more than 10,000 feet of elevation, and were about fifty feet onto the trail before we were all sucking wind and wondering why this seemed like a good idea. We must have stopped to rest every 100 feet. But, no matter the terrain, who was always out front? Who did everyone else have to always play catch-up with? Yes, that's right, it's the folks who got into the park on their Golden Age Senior Pass.

Our afternoon tour of Lehman Cave was fantastic and fascinating. It was as much history as geology, as we learned that Mr. Lehman ran the cave as a for-profit venture for 50 years before the park service got involved. And ran it with a “if you can break it, you can take it” policy. So nearly every stalagtite and -mite has been broken off, including some that required picks and sledgehammers to fracture. 

Still, it was fascinating, especially for Izzie, who is too young to remember any of her previous cave explorations.

We are heading east into Utah tomorrow and don't know where we are staying or the state of 3G/4G/LTE/WiFi. So maybe we'll see you soon?