Bus Stop #14, Great Basin National Park, Nevada, 6-13-11

Goodbye Utah - Hellow Nevada!



From Beaver Utah, we had an easy travel day, North and West through dry, canyon type country, which was our last bit of Utah. With long flat stretches of road, Deb broke out a James Michener book to read out loud that helped to pass the time. Before we knew it we passed into Nevada and the West Coast time zone. A few miles more and we came to the tiny town of Baker and made a welcome turn out of the flats and south, on a straight and steep rise through sagebrush ranch country and up into snowy, pine and spruce covered mountains to Great Basin National Park - one of the least visited parks in the system!


Of five campgrounds, only three were open because of recent heavy snow.  We found a nice site in the first of these, but as we exited to begin our little ground survey, we were immediately accosted by our would-be neighbors, Suzie and John.  They were long-on-the-road RV'ers and seemed desperate for someone besides each other upon whom to debrief.  As we got out, John on me, Suzie on Deb, the onslought of intense, one-way dialogue overwhelmed us - both of them frantically talking at the same time.  I looked over at Deb and our wide, traumatized eyes met and silently declared:  "Not this spot!  No way!"  We climbed back in to resume our site search, and I swear, John and Suzie were still talking and waving arms in the rear view mirror!  Whew!

So on and up we went, driven to the highest and most remote site we could find.  It was a beautiful and fairly private spot near the top of the last of the open campgrounds. Heavy snow, meant heavy snow melt, so the normal water courses through the camp had swollen so that pretty clear water cascaded everywhere around us.

We took a strenuous hike up the mountain hoping to reach a lake at the base of the summit. The course was vertical so our scenery morphed from scrubby pine, to majestic spruce to surprising white groves of aspens in the flats near the top.

 Heavy water and fallen trees blocked us from seeing the lake, but we used up the biggest part of the afternoon as it was, and needed to beat the sun back down to our camp.

Sitting around the fire that night, we were surprised to see the moon rise over the ridge just beyond the camp.  It was full and it's rise traced the steep sloping ridge, so that the moon appeared to climb the mountain as the night went on.

We mostly broke camp that evening after a dinner of spicy beans, sausage and rice with a bottle wine, so we could shoot out early for big dry crossing of the first ½ of Nevada on Highway 50, known as “The Loneliest Highway in America”.