As we drive southeast out of Lassen National forest and join up with route 395 north of Lake Tahoe, the morning temperature quickly rises. It was a cool 60 degrees when Becca and I set off from our camp in the forest that morning, but by the time Interstate 80 gets us through the desert metropolis of Reno, Nevada the temperature is almost to 90. It’s late September and Reno is already much cooler than the week prior, but after spending my last four summers in Alaska, this is the first time I can even remember turning on the air conditioning in my truck.
We exit I-80 in Fernley, Nevada, opting instead for Highway 50 heading due east through the center of the ‘Silver State.’ We pass through a few small towns before route 50 opens up to nothing but Nevada desert, earning its name of the “Loneliest Road in America.” When the speed limit jumps to 70mph, I cut the A/C, roll down the windows and embrace the 95-degree day as I smile at the vast amounts of open, empty desert all around me.
Amidst all this heat, the Nevada Desert seems an unlikely place to find a glacier, but that is precisely what Becca and I intend to do.
Great Basin National Park is home to the last remaining glacier in Nevada, and, I reckon, one of the most out-of-place glaciers in the world. The environment in the Great Basin is not exactly conducive to year-round snow, but we now know that ice once covered and shaped this land. Massive glaciers scraped open the broad valleys of the Great Basin some 15,000 years ago in the last ice age, and one small remnant of that ice remains tucked away in the shadow of 13,000 ft. Wheeler Peak. The not-so-creatively-named Wheeler Peak Glacier is relatively small and nearly entirely covered with rock, but it remains an active, moving glacier even in the face of seemingly impossible odds.
We spend the night in the middle of nowhere on a gravel road somewhere west of Ely, Nevada under billions of stars. I remember staring up at the sky for hours before I drifted off to sleep. In the morning we fueled up in Ely, and headed to Great Basin National Park. We got to the visitor center around noon, where they informed us that the Wheeler Peak Glacier was “not like a real glacier,” but there were a few spaces left on a 2:00pm tour of Lehman Caves, and a free talk about the bristlecone pines starting in an hour. Okay, well those both sound fun, but what do you mean, not like a real glacier? The ranger clearly had a history of deflating people’s excitement about crystal blue ice and ice caves, explaining that this glacier was covered in rock debris. He added that while some ice may be visible at the very top, it was dirty and brown and rockfall hazards from the 2,000ft vertical cliff above made it dangerous to get too close. Of course, we already knew this glacier was mostly covered with rock, and we were still excited about hiking to it – especially since they had a 3 mile ‘moderate’ trail that led right to it!
We left the station puzzled at the ranger’s apparent attempts to ruin our enthusiasm, but we did let him talk us into signing up for both the tour and the free talk. On top of that, the next night there would be an astronomy presentation with National Park Service members pointing at cool things in telescopes. I had completely forgotten that Great Basin NP is famous for it’s caves, which my parents took me into many years ago, and that it had not one but four groves of the infamous bristlecone pines inside the park. It’s also designated a ‘Dark Sky’ park, meaning it’s so far from any cities there’s very little light pollution to interfere with views of the night sky. I’ve always loved astronomy but I rarely get a chance to look through a nice telescope. Becca and I were thrilled that our next two days had just turned into four adventures instead of one.
At one o’clock a ranger begins her “20-30 minute” talk about the bristlecones with only four of us in attendance. Becca and I are joined by an elderly jokester, Pete, and his lovely wife. We learn about the strange growing habits of the bristlecone pine, like the fact that they seem to thrive in environments where few other things can survive, due to low water, shallow soil, high winds and extreme temperature swings (anywhere from -40 to 120F) to name a few. The trees also grow with a sectored architecture, such that each root is responsible for one, and only one, section of the upper tree. If one root dies, the connected section of the tree dies with it. The remaining ‘sections’ of the tree go on living and producing viable seeds-even if there is only one live branch on an otherwise entirely dead tree.
Bristlecones are famous for living a very long time, (some trees live up to 5,000 years, and several 3,000 year old trees exist in the park), but interestingly the cones produced by a tree 5,000 years old are just as viable as those produced by young trees. Almost every organism known to man loses fertility as age sets in, but not the bristlecone pine. Pete is quick with the jokes to keep us all laughing and enjoys drawing comparisons between the trees and himself, saying he knows a little something about old age, minus the fertility part. After an hour, Becca and I have to excuse ourselves as to not miss our now sold-out cave tour. While the ‘official’ ranger talk only meant to last an hour, Pete and I kept her talking long past that with all the jokes and questions.
Outside the cave entrance, we line up with 18 other visitors to go underground. Our 90-minute tour is led by an energetic ranger with a love for bats and flashlights – he carries three on his belt. Flashlights, not bats. He tells us about all the usual cave stuff like stalactites and stalagmites, columns, cave bacon, curtains and flow stone. An interesting feature unique to this cave, he says, is the cave shield. A cave shield is a large round-ish disk with curtain-style formations pouring off of it to create a sort of parachute-like shape. They can form at any angle or direction and are fairly common here, though they happen in very few caves throughout the world. It is still unknown what forms the initial disk shape.
Lehman Caves are also home to a few unique species of insect yet undiscovered anywhere in the world outside a few small caves within the park. Another fun fact I learned is that a certain species of long-eared moth native to the area is adapting to survive against bats – by fighting back against their echolocation. When the moth hears the bat’s shriek, the moth responds with an opposite sound of it’s own which cancels out the bat’s sound waves bouncing off the moth. In a function similar to noise-canceling headphones, the result of perfect timing on the moth’s part is that the bat will not hear its call bounce off the prey. The bat just flies around wondering where all the food is.
After we resurfaced from our cave tour, Becca and I headed out to a campsite and watched a most spectacular sunset on the clouds above us. From the narrow canyon we had no view of the horizon, but the colors were mesmerizing non-the-less.
Right after sunset the wind picked up. All night the truck was rocked side to side by strong gusts and we hardly slept out of fear we’d be crushed by falling tree branches. We prolong getting out of bed as long as possible, but we have several miles to hike today and don’t want to be doing it in the heat of the afternoon. However, heat is not the issue as we get to the trailhead at 9,800 feet. We hike in fleece sweaters and warm hats to protect from the cold wind. The parking lot and lower trail is crowded with people, but most of them stop at the bristlecone grove 1.4 miles in. Becca and I keep going up the Glacier Trail, deciding to postpone the quarter mile interpretive loop through the grove for our way down. I expect the trail to stop well short of the glacier, but soon the rocks in the middle of the valley take on a classic glacial bulge, and I suspect, though I am uncertain, that we are on the glacier already.
Far up the bulging rock debris through the middle of the valley, we get a great view of the rocky cirque of Wheeler Peak. Much further onto the glacier than I imagined, the ‘official’ trail stops with a simple brown sign:
Behind the sign, a few small trails branch off in various directions. On a small rise to our left was a group of four people with abnormally large packs for this roughly 6 mile round-trip hike. Next to them stands a large wood post probably eight feet tall, with no obvious purpose. We walk up to check out the post, thinking maybe it’s another sign (it wasn’t – maybe an old light-post or something), and one gentleman introduces himself as Ben, a glaciologist from North Dakota State University. Becca and I both lit up with excitement. Glaciologist, you say?
The school had been hired by the National Park Service to map out the glacier and share any info they could gather. Specifically, the NPS wanted to know how much ice was down there, and how long it would last. Even covered in 40-50 meters of rock, the ice below melts all summer long. The melting ice provides much needed water to the desert ecosystem, even though they actually have no idea where the water goes after it leaves the glacier. That’s right, there’s no river running out below the glacier, the water seems to percolate down through the gravel into the ground. There also aren’t any nearby springs so perhaps it drains into an aquifer underground. In any event, the Park knows that water in such a harsh environment is very precious, and they are concerned about the effects of losing that source of summer water.
Ben and his team of grad-students are laying ‘targets’ for an imaging UAV quadcopter “drone” to scan as it flies overhead. The drone, which will be flown via Ben’s remote control, can be programmed to take a series photographs along a certain path. The images will later be compiled into a 3D model of the rocks on top of the glacier. In future years, the same path will be flown and imaged again to see how the glacier has shifted and melted over a 5-10 year period.
Unfortunately, due to the strong winds, the drone will not be able to fly today and the team hopes to return early tomorrow morning to make the flight.
Ben confirmed that the glacier ice extends at least as far as the first cluster of trees, though whether it was part of the active glacier still is something they hope to learn from the current research.
When we finally decided to stop pestering Ben, Becca and I wandered further up the rocky hill. I wanted to get a sense of the start of the glacier, though I could see that getting right up to the edge of the rock wall could be deadly. It was a 2,000 ft. vertical drop from the summit to the glacier in front of me, and quite often we could here rocks breaking free and tumbling down around us.
I walked close enough to see a large mass of glacier ice filling in a massive avalanche path to one side, the ice extending hundreds of feet up the chute, covered in mud and small rocks. As I watched, a number of rocks tumbled down the finger of ice and roll to a stop in front of me. I heard the flow of water under my feet, though I could see ice no closer than 50 feet from where I stood. Somewhere below me flowed a stream of glacier water, probably flowing across the ice searching for a way down to wherever it was all that water was going.
On our way down, Becca and I took the interpretive trail through the grove of bristlecones, visiting ancient giants that had lived through nearly the entirety of human history on this continent.
The Bristlecone in this photo is over 3,000 years old. When it was sprouting out of the rocky soil, agriculture was still in it’s infancy in North America – they were just beginning to learn about irrigation in the Southwest.
Back on the trail down to the parking lot, we hoped for another gorgeous sunset given similar clouds to the night before, so I suggested we get to the overlook to capture the colors. Unfortunately, all we got was cold wind and gray clouds at the 10,000 ft. Wheeler Peak Lookout.
We returned to the visitor center right at 7:00 for the astronomy program, which was kicked off by an unexpected slideshow lecture about the history and current projects of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). While I did find it somewhat interesting, the graphs and details were a bit much and mostly over my head. The many children dragged here by their parents with a promise to see planets and star clusters were running laps around the few people trying to pay attention to the talk. By the time the slideshow wrapped up, parents of all the youngest kids had given up and left. Finally, two large telescopes were pointed at the sky and after a bit of a queue, we got a chance to see the rings of Saturn, a ring nebula left behind by a dying star, as well as a far-off cluster of some 400,000 stars.
Between turns looking through the telescopes, we chatted with a few other people, and overheard many other conversations from those waiting in line with us. I slowly started to gather that many of the people there had come to the Great Basin only because they were on a quest to visit every national park in the nation. Most spent only one night nearby, devoting no more than a full day (or some only a few hours) to explore the entire park. It struck me as odd at first, that very few people had heard of this park before, and so few seemed to want to spend any time here. Lehman Caves is known world-wide by people who are interested caves or bats. The Bristlecone Pine groves are similarly notorious – not to mention the last glacier in Nevada! I found it silly that people would come out just to “check it off the list,” and everyone talked more about the next park they planned to go to than what they were doing while they were here.
One woman, standing behind us in line, commented to another visitor that her drive down from Salt Lake had been absolutely treacherous. She could not believe how barren and ugly the landscape was all the way from Nephi, out past Delta and the complete emptiness and lack of scenery from Delta all the way here. I had to stop myself from turning around exclaiming “I know isn’t it incredible!?” and telling her it was one of my favorite drives, to stare out at the empty desert along the Loneliest Road! Instead Becca and I silently laughed about our differences from the rest of the park guests.
Becca and I left Great Basin National Park the next morning, it having vastly exceeded our expectations for the tiny, out-of-the-way park in the middle of the Nevada Desert. I wished we had more time to explore the lesser known parts of this lesser-known park. It is quite the gem. Hell, even just the drive out on the Loneliest Road is worth going! That is, if you’re into big views of empty nothingness…
As we head east toward Utah – once again along The Loneliest Highway, I smile at the open road, but think bout how easily I criticized others for coming down only to ‘check the box’ of another national park. In a way, that’s the same reason I came here; I wanted to ‘check off’ and explore another glacier. If not for that, I never would have come down this way and wouldn’t have had the chance to see the incredible things this out-of-the-way park holds or talk with the amazing people I met here. In the end it doesn’t matter why we go, it only matters that we get out there, explore and cherish the wonderful and wild places in the world. Some of them won’t be around forever.