Great Basin stood out for its extremes: wide-open Nevada desert, tiny Highway 50 towns, unexpected wildlife, ancient bristlecone pines, alpine lakes, rock glaciers, and limestone caves hidden beneath the mountains. The drive through Austin and Eureka set the tone before we reached Baker, then the park shifted quickly from Baker Creek wildlife sightings to high-elevation trails below Wheeler Peak and the underground world of Lehman Caves.
Pick a stop to see its story and photos.
Austin is a small Highway 50 town that provided a practical overnight at the Baptist church campground. The church interior and an old-car graveyard across the road gave the stop more to photograph than expected.
Eureka breaks up the Loneliest Road with a preserved mining-town center. The Sentinel Museum occupies a former newspaper office and retains printing presses, records, photographs, and everyday artifacts from the town's boom years.
The Great Basin Visitor Center sits just north of Baker outside the park boundary. It provides ranger information, a park film, exhibits on the region's ecology and history, and an introduction to the elevation zones visitors encounter on the drive into the park.
Baker Creek Road is a 3.5-mile gravel route to Baker Creek and Grey Cliffs campgrounds and several backcountry trailheads. We camped in this area and saw a badger, wild turkeys, a jackrabbit, deer, and other wildlife along the road and near camp.
These linked trails begin at the Bristlecone Trailhead at the end of Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive. We combined the ancient bristlecone grove, the Glacier Trail to the rock glacier, and the Alpine Lakes Loop past Teresa and Stella lakes into a six-to-seven-mile hike.
Lehman Caves contains dense limestone formations, including stalactites, stalagmites, and uncommon cave shields. The ranger tour also explains the damage and candle-smoke graffiti left by visitors before the cave received federal protection.
Osceola Ditch Trail follows part of an 18-mile waterway completed in 1890 to supply hydraulic gold mining near Osceola. The relatively level route retains pieces of the wooden flume and shows the scale of the failed mining infrastructure.
Austin is a small Highway 50 town that provided a practical overnight at the Baptist church campground. The church interior and an old-car graveyard across the road gave the stop more to photograph than expected.
Eureka breaks up the Loneliest Road with a preserved mining-town center. The Sentinel Museum occupies a former newspaper office and retains printing presses, records, photographs, and everyday artifacts from the town's boom years.
The Great Basin Visitor Center sits just north of Baker outside the park boundary. It provides ranger information, a park film, exhibits on the region's ecology and history, and an introduction to the elevation zones visitors encounter on the drive into the park.
Baker Creek Road is a 3.5-mile gravel route to Baker Creek and Grey Cliffs campgrounds and several backcountry trailheads. We camped in this area and saw a badger, wild turkeys, a jackrabbit, deer, and other wildlife along the road and near camp.
These linked trails begin at the Bristlecone Trailhead at the end of Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive. We combined the ancient bristlecone grove, the Glacier Trail to the rock glacier, and the Alpine Lakes Loop past Teresa and Stella lakes into a six-to-seven-mile hike.
Lehman Caves contains dense limestone formations, including stalactites, stalagmites, and uncommon cave shields. The ranger tour also explains the damage and candle-smoke graffiti left by visitors before the cave received federal protection.
Osceola Ditch Trail follows part of an 18-mile waterway completed in 1890 to supply hydraulic gold mining near Osceola. The relatively level route retains pieces of the wooden flume and shows the scale of the failed mining infrastructure.
After leaving Lake Tahoe, we headed east across Nevada on Highway 50, better known as the Loneliest Road in…
The next morning we continued east across Nevada on Highway 50, passing more of the wide open valleys and…
Our first morning in Great Basin National Park we drove up to the end of the Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive,…
Our final day in Great Basin took us underground into Lehman Caves. It’s a beautiful cave system, full of…
