One day in Great Basin National Park (2020)

D and I visited Great Basin National Park as part of our 8-year anniversary road trip to Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks. You can read about how we spent 3 days in Zion NP and 2 days in Bryce Canyon NP.

After spending close to a week in Utah, it was time to drive home. Instead of returning the way we came via the I-5 and through Central California, we turned our road trip into a loop by taking Highway 50 from Utah through Nevada and back to the Bay Area via Lake Tahoe. This detour added about 30 mins more overall to the drive back to the Bay Area compared to taking the I-5, and gave me the opportunity to check off a new national park as part of my goal to visit all US National Parks.

Great Basin National Park is near Ely, Nevada and the closest settlement is the small town of Baker, Nevada. The park is pretty much on the Nevada and Utah border. It's one of the most remote national parks since it's not close to any cities or any other well-known points of interest.

Great Basin National Park geology

Great Basin NP is an ecological island due to the the drastic elevation changes from the floor of the Great Basin Desert to the highs of the 13,063-foot summit of Wheeler Peak. There are sage-covered foothills, montane, subalpine, and alpine ecosystems that support over 800 species of plants and trees, and over 300 species of animals. In fact, you can see everything from jackrabbits and squirrels to large mammals like elk, cougars, and pronghorns!

The national park is located within the Great Basin, a dry and mountainous region between the Sierra Nevada in California and the Wasatch Mountains in Utah. You can define the boundaries of the Great Basin using the hydrographic definition (the way water flows), geologic (the way the landscape formed), or biologic (the resident plants and animals), but the hydrographic definition is the most commonly used. Going by this definition, the Great Basin covers 200,000 square miles and includes most of Nevada, half of Utah, and sections of Idaho, Wyoming, Oregon, and California!

The Great Basin is actually made of many small basins that separate multiple, north-south trending mountain ranges that number in the hundreds -- incredible, right? These ranges make Nevada the most mountainous state in the country!

One of the park's famous scenic features is the Lehman Caves, a giant karst and limestone cave system, similar to what you'd see at the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico or Mammoth Cave NP in Kentucky. The NPS has some cool virtual cave tours available on their site.

Some other famous features are the Lexington Arch (a giant natural arch carved from limestone), the Stella and Teresa alpine lakes, the Wheeler Peak Glacier (one of the southernmost glaciers in the United States), and the longest-living tree species in the world, the ancient bristlecone pines.

With regards to native history, the Great Basin has been occupied by tribes for several hundred to several thousand years: the Western Shoshone, the Goshute, the Ute, the Paiute, and the Washoe. All the Great Basin tribes are Numic speaking, with the exception of the Washoe tribe.

Bristlecone Pine Glacier and Teresa Lake trails

Our time in Great Basin NP was really short due to the long drive we had leaving Panguitch, UT to Baker, Nevada. I really wanted to see the Lehman Caves, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the cave tours hadn't been reinstated yet.

The drive to park was mind-blowing the whole way through. Just reading descriptions of the park doesn't really prepare you for how unique and vast the landscape of the Great Basin is.

You rise and fall with each mountain range like a series of musical turns: a rhythm of flat, empty, and vast desert. Then, suddenly, towering peaks. And then you fall, back to a hum as you come over the mountain pass, and drop down to the desert floor. It was beautiful experience being in the desert, like a pause in the music.

We also encountered several golden eagles along the way, and they were absolutely majestic. If you're unfamiliar with golden eagles, they are huge raptors, with wingspans of up to 8ft in length! They have the fifth largest wingspan of living eagle species. We felt so lucky to be able to see not just one, but several of these majestic creatures just hanging out on posts along the highway. A few even got into a bit of a kerfuffle over what I'd guess was a territory dispute. My reflexes were unfortunately not fast enough to get any close-ups of the eagles before they took off, but I did manage some blurry photos of them flying away. It was honestly one of the main highlights of the whole trip.

After several hours of driving, we finally reached Great Basin NP's cute and quaint visitor center to pickup another poster to add to our vintage park posters collection. We chatted with a local working the register about the area before driving up the endless switchbacks on Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive.

Suddenly, we were among pine and conifer forests, like we'd been driving through the mountains of Colorado all along, and not the arid desert. The twenty-mile road climbs steeply and terminates at Wheeler Peak Campground.

We would've liked to combine the Alpine Lakes loop with the Wheeler Peak Glacier hike to see Stella Lake on the way to the glacier; however, it was about 3PM when we reached the trailhead. Teresa Lake is only about a 0.5-mile detour off the Bristlecone Pine Glacier trail, so it was not as time-consuming of a detour as Stella.

Don't underestimate the altitude here. From the desert at sea level to the start of the trailhead at 9,800-feet elevation, you only have about 45 minutes in the car to adjust to this dramatic change in altitude. The glacial landscape is pretty harsh and barren, which meant that there was little to no vegetation, and therefore very little oxygen. Both of us found ourselves developing a bit of altitude sickness on the hike: feeling constantly dehydrated, mild-to-worsening headaches, and shortness of breath.

It took us maybe 90 minutes from the trailhead to reach the glacier sign board that marks the start of the glacial moraine. A glacial moraine is essentially a giant field of rocky debris deposited by a glacier as it retreats: from massive boulders to powdery till. From this point forward, you are navigating using colored poles and cairns to find your way to the foot of the glacier -- it's really easy to get lost here, so make sure you're always looking for the next trail indicator.

We finally arrived at the foot of the glacier 45 minutes after the glacier sign board, and reached an elevation of 10,900 feet! It was fucking rough climb. The winds were gusting as they came over Wheeler Peak and were piercing cold. My face felt like it was being ripped apart and my ears hurt from the air. The temperature was dropping pretty quickly since the sun had fallen behind the peak and we were completely shaded at the foot of the glacier. My guess for the temperature with wind chill was probably somewhere around 38-42 degrees Fahrenheit (keep in mind that it was in the 70's in the desert and low 60's at the trailhead).

There wasn't too much ice left on the glacier, but still an incredible sight to see a glacier in the middle of the desert. It is truly a one-of-a-kind experience. If you turn away from the glacier to face the boulder field, look down the moraine and the mountain, you'll have a completely unobstructed view of the whole park. You can literally see the floor of the Great Basin Desert, 10,900ft below. It's wild.

We got our selfies with the glacier and booked it down the moraine because it was way too cold and way too windy. Once we were back in the comfort of the forest, we did the interpretive loop through the Bristlecone Pine forest. I highly, highly recommend making time for this because it is so special. Literally nowhere else in the world will you get to see the Great Basin Bristlecone Pines, which are the longest-living, non-clonal organisms on Earth. Bristlecone pines can live for several thousand years!

The oldest known tree in Great Basin NP was named Prometheus and was estimated to be 4,900 years old until it died. Methuselah is currently known as the oldest tree in the world at 4,853 years old, and it lives in a secret location within the White Mountains of California. Many bristlecone pines have never been dated because taking boring samples can sometimes kill the tree, so there's a very high probability that there are bristlecone pines that are over 5,000 years old in the park! To put this in perspective, that's older than the Great Pyramids of Egypt by several hundred years!!

What allows bristlecone pines to live so long? They grow very, very, very slowly. Some years they don't even add a ring to their trunks! This makes the wood very dense and provides resistance from insects, fungi, rot, and erosion. They are also capable of growing out of limestone rock, which most vegetation cannot. Since the trees are able to survive in harsh conditions where other vegetation can't, this helps limit any impacts of forest fires and disease spreading.

After getting off the trail, it was time to book it down the mountain to get to our last overnight stay of the whole road trip. It was still a drive of over 2 hours from the park!

And that's a wrap for this road trip! On to many, many more :).