Great Basin National Park Trivia
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49 free Great Basin National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Great Basin National Park trivia quiz covers the quiet park in east-central Nevada near the Utah line, where the Snake Range rises out of the sagebrush to Wheeler Peak and its tiny glacier, and where Lehman Caves winds through the limestone below. Questions cover the geology and cave shields, the ancient bristlecone pines including Prometheus, the tree that turned out to be the oldest known when it was cut down, the Great Basin itself and why its water never reaches the sea, and the wildlife from Bonneville cutthroat trout to Townsend's big-eared bats. The human story runs from Absalom Lehman, the Australia gold-rush veteran who guided the first cave tours in 1885, through the Osceola gold camp, Warren Harding's 1922 monument and Harry Reid's 1986 park, to the Winchester rifle found leaning against a juniper in 2014 and the observatory that made this a Gold Tier dark sky park. Difficulty runs from easy to expert and is marked on every question, so it suits a campfire game or a serious park-nerd challenge. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia or National Park Service pages and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy it, try our US National Parks and Yellowstone quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Most Americans can no longer see which sight from home, one that Great Basin's dark skies still show clearly?
The Milky Way
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.
Q 02The 1986 law creating Great Basin National Park kept which activity going?
Grazing
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.
Q 03Which president proclaimed Lehman Caves National Monument in January 1922?
Warren G. Harding
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.
Q 04Which small town, five miles east of the park entrance, is home to the Great Basin Visitor Center?
Baker
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.
Q 05The Great Basin is 'endorheic', which means its rivers and streams never do what?
Reach the ocean
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.
Q 06Which explorer coined the name Great Basin after crossing the region on his 1840s expeditions?
John C. Frémont
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.
Q 07The Great Basin lies between the Sierra Nevada and which range to the east?
Wasatch Mountains
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.
Q 08Boundary Peak tops Wheeler Peak as Nevada's highest point, yet it is really a shoulder of a mountain in which state?
California
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.
Q 09Wheeler Peak takes its name from George Wheeler, who led what in the late 19th century?
A US Army survey of the West
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.
Q 10Doso Doyabi, a Shoshone name for a peak beside Wheeler Peak, replaced one honouring which Confederate leader?
Jefferson Davis
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.
Q 11Mostly desert Nevada has only one of which feature, tucked beneath the cliffs of Wheeler Peak?
A glacier
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.
Q 12Which bristlecone pine, felled on Wheeler Peak in 1964, turned out to be older than any tree then known?
Prometheus
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.
Q 13Dense, resinous wood from slow growth protects the oldest Great Basin bristlecones from what?
Pests and rot
Q 21The marble holding Lehman Caves began as sea-floor sediment long before the dinosaurs, in which geological period?
Cambrian
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.
Q 22Absalom Lehman, who began guiding visitors into Lehman Caves in 1885, was what by trade?
Rancher
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.
Q 23Before settling in Nevada, Absalom Lehman of Lehman Caves prospered as a miner on which continent?
Australia
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.
Q 14Losing Wheeler Peak's record tree in 1964 left which White Mountains bristlecone as the oldest known living tree?
Methuselah
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.
Q 15Great Basin bristlecone needles can stay green on the tree for roughly how long?
45 years
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.
Q 16Nevada's two state trees are the bristlecone pine and which other conifer?
Single-leaf pinyon
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.
Q 17Which bird's seed caches are thought to leave multi-trunked bristlecone pines?
Clark's nutcracker
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.
Q 18A 1965 science-fiction film shot scenes inside Lehman Caves, casting them as the caverns of which planet?
Mars
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.
Q 19Which mineral, left behind by dripping and seeping water, builds the stalactites and columns of Lehman Caves?
Calcite
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.
Q 20Lehman Caves holds more than 500 of which rare, round type of formation?
Cave shields
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.
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.
Q 24In one local legend, which of Absalom Lehman's animals found Lehman Caves by breaking through the crust over the entrance?
His horse
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.
Q 25Which celebrated mountaineer toured Lehman Caves with his family in 1962?
Edmund Hillary
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.
Q 26Roughly how many people visit Great Basin National Park each year?
140,000
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.
Q 27What is the only fish native to Great Basin National Park?
Bonneville cutthroat
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.
Q 28Great Basin National Park's only native trout has been the official state fish of which state since 1997?
Utah
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.
Q 29Which animal of the Great Basin's open valleys is the fastest land mammal in North America?
Pronghorn
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.
Q 30Which Great Basin rodent can live on dry seeds alone, never needing a drink of water?
Kangaroo rat
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.