Great Basin NP & Lehman Cave

Dec 5-8, 2021

Very few people travel through Nevada, except the LasVegas area. When we needed to get from Las Vegas to Reno, we drove up the eastern edge of the state on Highway 93, then crossed its midsection on Highway 50, which is justly named “The Loneliest Road in America.”

We loved this part of our trip! Nevada’s sky is huge, tall mountains sandwich the road, and the cloud formations create an ever-changing horizon.

Along the way we stopped to hunt trilobites, explore Cathedral Gorge SP, and tour the Lehman caves at Great Basin NP. We boondocked (camped without hookups).

Sunday, Dec 5, 2021

Taking Care of the Usual Road Business

Early on Sunday morning we broke camp in Pahranagat NWR. In Alamo we noticed an RV park that advertised “dump and fill” for $5. When you’re boondocking in a remote area you take care of your tanks when you can.

The RV park was deserted. Doug knocked on a rig which appeared to serve as an office. Inside, a silver-haired man wearing a bright white shirt was counting money. He was irritated at being interrupted, but was willing to take the $5 bill that Doug handed him. Our guess — he was a Mormon elder, counting the morning’s offering.

After the dump and fill, we went a little further down the road to gas up at a Sinclair station ($3.79 per gallon). Also bought a few groceries at the attached GBF, Great Basin Foods, which was surprisingly well-stocked.

Oak Springs Trilobite Stop 

Not too far north of Alamo, we passed a green road sign labeled “Trilobite Hunting.” This spot was not marked on our maps. “Shall we stop to celebrate the pre-Cambrian era?” Doug asked me. How could I resist?

There were picnic tables in the parking area, so we ate our lunch, then hiked to the hunting site, which was a hillside pockmarked with holes. Shale is a brittle rock made up of compacted layers. To find a trilobite, you break a piece of shale and hope for the best. It’s about as effective as hunting for gold or diamonds!

Cathedral Gorge SP

After we reluctantly gave up on our search, we drove on to Cathedral Gorge State Park, arriving late in the afternoon. This park is famous for dramatic, cave-like formations made of bentonite clay. Spires form “caves” without roofs.

Imagine a slot canyon made of wet mud so that everything sags and drips. Now go inside.

We camped overnight (lots of spots available) and enjoyed a lovely sunset.

Great Basin NP, Dec 6-7 

I’ll be honest, before this trip I had never heard of Great Basin National Park. It’s one of the least-visited national parks, which is a shame, as it includes a 13,000 foot peak and a great cave, which you can tour.

I appreciated the description in the park brochure:

“Welcome to Great Basin NP, where you can experience desert heat and alpine cold in one day. The park rises from a sea of sagebrush to treeless rocky summits. Its name refers to the huge geographic area where waters have no outlet to the sea. Streams and rivers drain into shallow salt lakes, marshes, and mud flats, eventually evaporating into dry desert air. The Great Basin contains many smaller basins separated by mountain ranges running north to south. This undulating basin-and-range topography stretches across Nevada and into four other states.”

Camping in Great Basin NP

We arrived late in the day but had no trouble finding a camping spot on Lehman Creek. In fact, we were the only ones in the campground. The creek beside us, about a foot wide, trickled quite loudly even though it had frozen over in places.

Since we hadn’t enjoyed a campfire in quite a while, I scrounged firewood from the nearby campsites while Doug set up. Supper was a frozen lasagna and a bag of salad. Then I “cobbled together” a cobbler — a can of fruit cocktail with a package of blueberry muffin mix sprinkled over, topped with a lot of melted butter. Bake for 30 minutes.

We ate the delicious mess hot out of the oven next to our smoky campfire. Bliss!

It rained all night, a rain so cold that the drops pelted Big Blue like sleet. An uncomfortable lullaby. The overnight low was 33°.

In the morning the sun shone. After weeks amid canyons and rocks it felt wonderful to be surrounded by pine trees and the possibility of animals like elk. Snowcapped peaks were visible in the distance, and sagebrush-studded foothills stretched all around. It struck me that I loved Wyoming when I was 19 years old, and this region feels like Wyoming on steroids, plus mountains.

Tickets for Lehman Cave Tour

We had purchased cave tour tickets online the day before. The website is not easy to navigate and you have to buy the non-refundable tickets at least 24 hours in advance. The other tricky bit is knowing what time it actually is. Our iPhones kept switching back and forth between Pacific time and Mountain time. Sometimes the two phones read two different times.

(It turned out that the park stays on Pacific time even though it’s acreage actually extends into Mountain time. The clerk at the Visitor Center said that people often miss the tour because of this. Why is there no explanatory comment on the website?)

Because of the time kerfuffle, we arrived two hours before the 1:00 tour. The Park Ranger suggested we take a gravel road called Strawberry Creek to reach an open meadow with mountains around. She said we might see elk.

As we climbed in elevation we saw lots of fresh snow — it had probably fallen the night before. Before long the road became completely snow-covered and a sign said “No trailers beyond this point.” We turned back and hiked in a meadow we had passed. No elk, but we did see a small herd of mule deer, flocks of birds, and some solitary shrikes, perhaps drawn by the water in Strawberry Creek.

Touring the Lehman Caves

The 1:00 cave tour was just over an hour long. Nine participants plus one guide.

The guide gave a fairly concise and interesting history of how these caverns were formed. The limestone, which originated near the equator, was the result of metamorphic activity. Sulfuric acid created pockets deep in the earth. Carbonic acid brought calcium carbonate down through water seepage. Calcium carbonate creates formations like soda straws which start out hollow. They grow at the rate of an inch per century. Eventually they plug up and become stalactites and stalagmites.

When we came through the “Inscription Room” where people signed their initials with candle soot, I appreciated how the guide interpreted this piece of history.

The guide also told about the origins of the commercial cave. In 1891 a man named Absalom Lehman got rich in the gold rush, not by finding gold, but by selling supplies to the prospectors. Osceola was a gold rush town and Lehman grew beef and fruit to sell to the miners.

When he heard about this cave, Lehman saw another opportunity. He wrote and published a fantastical story about how he discovered the cave — involving a picnic lunch, a thieving packrat, a horse who chased after the lunch and fell into a cave, and a quick lasso as Lehman clenched the horse with his strong leg muscles until they were saved. (a story worthy of Mark Twain!)

Enough back story. The cave was gorgeous with a plethora of cave decorations. I’ll let the photos do the talking.