Saturday, Nov. 5, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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For a number of reasons, I tend to steer clear of national parks.
Take Yosemite, for example: While the place is undeniably one of a kind, a trip to one of the national forests or wilderness areas right outside the park’s borders can still offer towering granite cliffs, alpine lakes, lush valleys, rushing rivers and waterfalls — all without having to pay an entrance fee or surround yourself with throngs of summertime crowds. You can find beautiful, secluded, free campsites up most dirt roads in a national forest, instead of paying for spots in cramped campgrounds that fill up months in advance. Unlike in national parks, dogs are allowed on hiking trails in national forests. I could go on.
Despite all the smack I talk, I recently leaped at the chance to drive nearly 10 hours across the entire widths of California and Nevada to spend two nights at Great Basin National Park. My reason was simple: I knew it’d be worth it.
Great Basin is a 77,180-acre national park near the Nevada-Utah border, nestled among the mountains of the southern Snake Range and surrounded by hundreds of miles of desert in every direction. Salt Lake City, the metropolitan area closest to the park, is a three-and-a-half-hour drive away. It’s four and a half hours from Las Vegas, six hours from Reno and a whopping nine and a half hours from my home in Oakland. The closest town is Baker, Nev. — population 36 — which sits right outside the park’s entrance.
While this remoteness might be daunting to some, for others — including myself — it’s part of what makes the place so special.
“Ultimately, it’s the isolation that makes the park very much worthwhile,” said Jason Wurtz, one of Great Basin’s park rangers. “It’s something that you don’t get at a lot of national parks. That sense of isolation, that sense of being out here and away from everything, that’s something that a lot of people seek out.”
That’s a big part of why my opinions on other national parks don’t really apply to Great Basin. I’ve never been faced with a crowd of people there or had any problems finding a last-minute campsite, even on weekends in the summertime. There’s no $35 entrance fee. Parking is always plentiful at trailheads, visitor centers and scenic points. (Dogs still aren’t allowed on hiking trails, but hey, you can’t win them all.)
Blissful seclusion and long drive aside, Great Basin is a wonder in itself. Driving into the park in the heart of autumn, I had a difficult time keeping my jaw shut — groves of quaking aspens scattered among pine, juniper and spruce trees stood in shocks of bright gold along the hillsides, always with a backdrop of soaring, rugged mountain peaks.
Tucked away in those mountains is Nevada’s only glacier, which sits at the base of 13,000-foot Wheeler Peak. Below that, you’ll find ancient bristlecone pine trees, including the remains of the famous Prometheus tree, once recorded as the oldest tree in the world. After hiking up past the tree line, I found it impossible to comprehend that some of the majestic, gnarled pines in front of me had been around since the end of the Stone Age.
One of the most coveted features of the park is its night sky views. Great Basin is designated as an International Dark Sky Park, an area specifically protected from light pollution. This lends itself to stargazing so incredible I sat shivering in the dark for hours each night just to gaze above me and take it all in.
“These are some of the best night skies in the whole country,” Wurtz said. “It’s very, very dark out here, one of the darkest national parks in the whole system.”
What’s also dark is the park’s 8 million-year-old cave system, a sprawling labyrinth of growing mineral deposits that hang from the cave’s ceilings and creep up from its floors in underground rooms that make you feel like you’ve left planet Earth. On an hourlong tour of the caves, Wurtz told me they got their name — Lehman Caves — from Absalom Lehman, a rancher who likely “discovered” the caves after one of his cows fell into them from an opening in the ground. Before that, they were used for thousands of years by the Western Shoshone, Goshute, Ute, Paiute and Washoe people, who left paintings on the cave’s walls that still exist today.
On my way back to Oakland, I took a detour to soak in some desert hot springs, the name of which I’ve promised not to share. While neck-deep in steaming geothermal water, I bonded with a stranger about the bristlecone pine trees I’d just left behind. She groaned when I told her of my plans to write about Great Basin.
“Now everyone will know about my favorite place,” she said.
“Yeah,” I told her. “But how many of them will actually make the trip?”
Sam Moore is a columnist for SFGate in San Francisco.
