49 Fun Facts About Great Basin National Park

Most Americans can no longer see which sight from home, one that Great Basin's dark skies still show clearly?

The Milky Way. The glow of towns and cities washes it out for most people, but the park lies hours from any big city, so even the Andromeda Galaxy shows there to the naked eye.

The 1986 law creating Great Basin National Park kept which activity going?

Grazing. Nevada's senators took the cattlemen's side, so the act said grazing 'shall' continue at its 1985 level, and cattle roamed the park for years, until a change in the law let conservation groups buy out the permits.

Which president proclaimed Lehman Caves National Monument in January 1922?

Warren G. Harding signed the proclamation on January 24, 1922. The campaign was led by C.C. Boak, a Tonopah mining broker and booster of the new Highway 50, who explored the caves, had them photographed and petitioned Washington.

Which small town, five miles east of the park entrance, is home to the Great Basin Visitor Center?

Baker. In August 1922 a crowd put at about 500 gathered up the road from the town to dedicate Lehman Caves as a national monument, weeks after old settlers had seen off a plan to rename the caves after Teddy Roosevelt.

The Great Basin is 'endorheic', which means its rivers and streams never do what?

Reach the ocean. Every drop that falls there evaporates, soaks into the ground or drains to a landlocked lake, and because water leaves those lakes only by evaporating, they turn salty, like Great Salt Lake.

Which explorer coined the name Great Basin after crossing the region on his 1840s expeditions?

John C. Frémont, known as the Pathfinder. His report on the 1843–44 expedition pointed the Mormons toward the Salt Lake Valley, and their 1847 vanguard set out carrying a map based on it.

The Great Basin lies between the Sierra Nevada and which range to the east?

Wasatch Mountains, the wall behind Salt Lake City. Despite its name, the Great Basin between those ranges is no single bowl: it is a patchwork of many separate basins divided by north-south mountain ranges.

Boundary Peak tops Wheeler Peak as Nevada's highest point, yet it is really a shoulder of a mountain in which state?

California. Boundary Peak rises only about 250 feet above the saddle joining it to taller Montgomery Peak, just over the state line, so by the usual measure Wheeler is the tallest independent mountain in Nevada.

Wheeler Peak takes its name from George Wheeler, who led what in the late 19th century?

A US Army survey of the West. Lieutenant Wheeler set out in the 1870s to map everything beyond the 100th meridian, until Congress shut down his survey and its rivals in 1879 and founded the US Geological Survey instead.

Doso Doyabi, a Shoshone name for a peak beside Wheeler Peak, replaced one honouring which Confederate leader?

Jefferson Davis. An 1850s military expedition gave his name to what is now Wheeler Peak while he was US Secretary of War; it later shifted to the neighbouring summit, which was renamed Doso Doyabi, meaning White Mountain, in 2019.

Mostly desert Nevada has only one of which feature, tucked beneath the cliffs of Wheeler Peak?

A glacier. The little Wheeler Peak Glacier survives because the peak's northeast-facing headwall keeps it in shade, but the Park Service has warned that a warming climate could melt it away within a couple of decades.

Which bristlecone pine, felled on Wheeler Peak in 1964, turned out to be older than any tree then known?

Prometheus. Researcher Donald Currey had official permission to cut it for a climate study, and only when its 4,862 rings were counted did anyone realise it was the oldest tree ever dated.

Dense, resinous wood from slow growth protects the oldest Great Basin bristlecones from what?

Pests and rot. Trees on the harshest sites grow slowest and lay down the tightest wood, too hard for most pests and fungi to invade, so bristlecones in gentler spots grow faster but die far younger.

Losing Wheeler Peak's record tree in 1964 left which White Mountains bristlecone as the oldest known living tree?

Methuselah. Dated in 1957 at well over 4,700 years, it was outdone only by a ring count of the felled Nevada tree, so the older tree was already a stump by the time its age came to light.

Great Basin bristlecone needles can stay green on the tree for roughly how long?

45 years by the longest counts, with other tallies a little over 40. Because the needles are shed so rarely, they pile up for a foot or more along each branch, which is what gives a bristlecone its bottle-brush look.

Nevada's two state trees are the bristlecone pine and which other conifer?

Single-leaf pinyon, whose pine nuts the peoples of the Great Basin have gathered for thousands of years. It held the title alone from 1953 until lawmakers added the bristlecone in 1987.

Which bird's seed caches are thought to leave multi-trunked bristlecone pines?

Clark's nutcracker. It buries pine seeds by the thousand as a winter larder, and a forgotten cache can sprout several seedlings at once, which may fuse as they grow into what looks like one many-trunked tree.

A 1965 science-fiction film shot scenes inside Lehman Caves, casting them as the caverns of which planet?

Mars. The film was a space-age retelling of The Wizard of Oz, in which four astronauts, one of them named Dorothy, follow a golden road to a wizard played by John Carradine; its title was The Wizard of Mars.

Which mineral, left behind by dripping and seeping water, builds the stalactites and columns of Lehman Caves?

Calcite. Water seeping into the cave carries far more carbon dioxide than the cave air, so it fizzes like an opened soda, and once the gas has escaped the dissolved calcite can no longer stay in solution.

Lehman Caves holds more than 500 of which rare, round type of formation?

Cave shields. Park lore long put their number at about 300, until a formation-by-formation survey in 2020 found 504; each is a pair of round plates split by a hair-thin crack, the best known being the Parachute.

The marble holding Lehman Caves began as sea-floor sediment long before the dinosaurs, in which geological period?

Cambrian. The rock settled as limy mud in a warm, shallow sea more than 500 million years ago, but the cave itself is far younger: acidic water rising from below hollowed it out only a few million years ago.

Absalom Lehman, who began guiding visitors into Lehman Caves in 1885, was what by trade?

Rancher. With his brother he ran a dairy of 25 to 30 cows, a big garden and an orchard, selling to the mining camps, and fruit trees from that orchard still bear beside the Lehman Caves Visitor Center.

Before settling in Nevada, Absalom Lehman of Lehman Caves prospered as a miner on which continent?

Australia. After a failed try as a forty-niner he sailed there around 1850, developed a mine, opened several wool stores and married; he came back to America in 1861 after his wife and a daughter died.

In one local legend, which of Absalom Lehman's animals found Lehman Caves by breaking through the crust over the entrance?

His horse, in one of more than 40 conflicting accounts of the discovery; the Park Service thinks it likelier that Lehman or one of his hired men simply stumbled on the entrance.

Which celebrated mountaineer toured Lehman Caves with his family in 1962?

Edmund Hillary. Nine years after climbing Everest, and four after driving tractors to the South Pole, he brought his family to the caves on a government-sponsored tour of the region.

Roughly how many people visit Great Basin National Park each year?

140,000 by the Park Service's count, a sliver of the millions at the best-known parks. Great Basin is one of the most isolated parks in the lower 48, hours by road from any big city and more than 230 miles from a major airport.

What is the only fish native to Great Basin National Park?

Bonneville cutthroat. Its ancestors swam in Lake Bonneville, an Ice Age lake about as big as Lake Michigan, and when the lake dried up some of them took refuge in the cold streams running off the mountains.

Great Basin National Park's only native trout has been the official state fish of which state since 1997?

Utah, which gave it the title in 1997. Nevada had already chosen a different native trout as its own state fish, so the park's one native fish is the emblem of the state next door instead.

Which animal of the Great Basin's open valleys is the fastest land mammal in North America?

Pronghorn. Often called the American antelope, it is no antelope at all: its closest living relatives are the giraffe and the okapi, and its speed may be a leftover from outrunning long-extinct American cheetahs.

Which Great Basin rodent can live on dry seeds alone, never needing a drink of water?

Kangaroo rat. Its body makes water as it digests the seeds, and it wastes almost none of it, passing very concentrated urine and waiting out the heat of the day in a cool burrow.

What do all ten or more bat species found around Great Basin National Park eat?

Insects. Many of the bats roost in abandoned mine tunnels, so when the park seals a dangerous old shaft it can fit a gate with bars spaced for bats to fly through, as it did at a Lincoln Canyon mine in 2010.

Which tree along the Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive often grows as whole groves of genetically identical trunks?

Quaking aspen. A grove spreads by sending up new trunks from one shared root system, so a whole hillside can be a single plant, which is why its leaves all turn yellow together while the grove next door stays green.

The Forgotten Winchester, a rifle found in Great Basin National Park in 2014, was leaning against what?

A juniper tree. The rifle's grey, cracked stock and rusted barrel matched the old trunk so well that it stood unnoticed for perhaps a century, and less than two years after it was found a wildfire burned the tree to a stick.

The Forgotten Winchester is a Model 1873, 'the gun that won' what?

The West. More than 720,000 were made, making it the everyman's rifle of its day; factory records show this one left Winchester in 1882, but not who bought it or carried it into the mountains.

X-rays of Great Basin's Forgotten Winchester, taken at a hospital, revealed what hidden inside its wooden stock?

A spare cartridge. Museum staff in Cody, Wyoming, checked the rifle in at the hospital next door to be sure it was not loaded, and the round tucked in its stock, made between 1887 and 1911, is the best clue to when it was left.

At Great Basin's ranger-led astronomy programmes, visitors may use flashlights of only which colour?

Red. The eye's night-vision cells barely respond to red light, so a red beam shows the path without undoing the dark adaptation that white light would wreck; the park tints its own outdoor lamps red as well.

Great Basin is the first US national park to have which kind of research facility built inside it?

An astronomical observatory. Its telescope saw first light on 25 August 2016, timed for the Park Service's 100th birthday, and astronomers and students at partner universities run it remotely.

The NPS Night Sky Team found the lights of which city were visible from eight different national parks?

Las Vegas. Its glow shows in a Park Service photograph taken 70 miles away in the Mojave, and the team traced city light to parks over 200 miles off, yet its 2004 and 2005 readings ranked Great Basin's skies among the country's darkest.

Nevada is the Silver State, but Osceola, the ghost town beside Great Basin National Park, boomed on which metal?

Gold. Osceola's gravels gave up a 24-pound nugget, but washing them took water the desert lacked, so in 1890 miners finished an 18-mile ditch around the mountains, only for a run of dry winters to leave it short.

US Route 50, which crosses the Snake Range near Great Basin National Park, carries what nickname?

The Loneliest Road in America. Life magazine meant it as an insult in 1986, quoting an auto-club warning that drivers needed survival skills, so Nevada began handing out 'I survived' certificates signed by the governor.

Great Basin's Lexington Arch is unusual among the West's natural arches for being carved from which rock?

Limestone. Nearly all the West's famous arches are sandstone, and this one may not be a true arch at all: cave-style flowstone at its base suggests it began as a passage in a cave, or as a tunnel worn by a creek.

What did each visitor carry for light on Absalom Lehman's cave tours in 1885?

A candle. Candles and later carbide lanterns lit every tour for decades; electric lights arrived in April 1941, but they failed so often that steady lighting had to wait for new generators in 1949.

In the 1920s the couple who ran Lehman Caves staged which ceremonies underground to draw visitors?

Weddings. Clarence and Beatrice Rhodes, ever alert for business, fitted out one chamber for large gatherings, played tunes on the stalactites and held dances, picnics and pageants on the grounds.

Why has the largest chamber in Lehman Caves been closed to tours since 1983?

Falling rock. A block dropped from the ceiling in 1983 and the chamber, the Talus Room, is still judged unstable; almost the only visitors now are the volunteers who come each winter to clean lint off the cave's formations.

Which grey-green shrub, Nevada's official state flower, blankets the valley floors around Great Basin National Park?

Sagebrush. What looks like one endless shrub is really several look-alike species competing for the same scarce water, and after a summer shower it fills the desert air with its sharp scent.

Great Basin is the only national park wholly in Nevada; which other park spills over the state line from next door?

Death Valley. Its small Nevada share includes Devils Hole, a flooded cavern that is the only natural home of one tiny pupfish, and where earthquakes on the far side of the world can raise waves up to two metres high.

Which agency ran Lehman Caves National Monument for its first eleven years, before park rangers took over?

The Forest Service. The caves lay inside a national forest, so the agency kept charge, appointing a local couple as custodians who lived off the tour fees, until Franklin Roosevelt moved every monument to the Park Service in 1933.

Which congressman's advocacy led to Great Basin becoming a national park in October 1986?

Harry Reid, then a congressman. The House passed his plan for a 129,000-acre park, Nevada's two senators cut it to 44,000, and months of bargaining ended in the 77,000-acre park signed into law that October.

Which night bird, often seen sitting on Great Basin's roads after dark, is famous as the first bird found to hibernate?

Common poorwill. It can lie cold and still among the rocks for weeks in winter, a habit science recognised only in the 1940s, though its Hopi name is said to mean 'the sleeping one'.