Great Basin National Park
Great Basin National Park was the first stop in a great road trip. We plan to visit four national parks on this road trip bringing our total to 24. There are currently 63 national parks in the US. We are not on a mission to visit all of them, but we have a long list of parks that we do want to visit. As with many of our trips, this road trip started in Steamboat Springs, CO. We spent a week working at our vacation home to get it ready for the winter season rentals before hitting the road.
If you know someone interested in booking a stay with us, please direct them to our VRBO listing:
Rouze Mountain Home VRBO Listing
We began our journey on Monday, September 22. We drove to Salt Lake City, UT for lunch with some old friends, Dave and Joan Kersys. Dave and I met early in our careers back in 1985 and the two couples have been friends ever since. After lunch, we continued our journey to Baker, NV and Great Basin National Park. We arrived late in the day, so we only had time for the Wheeler Peak scenic drive before the sun went down where the aspen trees were showing off their golden fall colors. This park is remote and not nearly as crowded as the more famous national parks. Great Basin NP has some great hiking, camping and the Lehman Caves which are similar to Carlsbad Caverns. However, it might be most known for what is missing…lights. Because of its remote location, it is known to have the darkest night skies of any national park. After dinner, we went back into the park for some amazing stargazing. There was no moon and a perfectly clear night. A park ranger told us about a particularly remote area in the park down a dirt road where there no other cars or lights of any kind. We wore goofy headlamps with “red” lights, so we could see where we were walking. The sky was amazing! We saw a perfect arch of the Milky Way and practiced using some of our iPhones’ great photo features to capture it. Great Basin NP is a small and relatively unknown national park worth visiting.
Baker, NV is just outside the NP but it only has two hotels/cabins, one restaurant and 36 residents. We stayed in a hotel with pretty nice “tiny house’ cabins, but they called us to check-in before dark because the were closing up early.
Be sure to keeping checking our blog as we will be posting every day or two for each of our national park visits on this road trip.
