Great Basin: Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive

At the start of the tour

Welcome to Great Basin Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive

Welcome to Great Basin National Park. This tour follows the park's mountain road for twelve miles, from the visitor center at Lehman Caves, at around seven thousand feet, to the trailhead for the bristlecone pines, at nearly ten thousand.

First, the name. The Great Basin is a region of about two hundred thousand square miles, covering most of Nevada and half of Utah. Its creeks and rivers never reach the sea. The water evaporates, sinks underground, or gathers in lakes that are mostly salty. And the name is a little misleading. It's really many small basins, separated by mountain ranges that run north and south. Those ranges rise out of the sagebrush like islands in a sea of desert, and the Snake Range, where you are now, is one of them.

Congress made this piece of it a national park on October twenty-seventh, nineteen eighty-six. The park grew around something much older: a national monument protecting the cave, declared in nineteen twenty-two.

Here's how this works. I'll tell you a story on the way to each stop, and another when you get there. As you climb, the plants change in bands: sagebrush first, then pinyon pine and juniper, then mountain mahogany, mixed conifer forest, and finally aspen groves near the top. Each band is a life zone, and you'll pass through them in order.

Point 1 · At the stop

Lehman Caves Visitor Center

This is the Lehman Caves Visitor Center. The building dates from the Mission sixty-six years, when the park service spent more than half a million dollars here on a visitor center, housing, new road and a picnic area.

Next to it stands the Rhodes Cabin, a small log cabin, nineteen feet long and eleven wide. Clarence and Bea Rhodes built it in the nineteen-twenties as one of several cabins for visitors to the cave, which they ran at the time. It has since been moved and restored, and it's on the National Register of Historic Places.

Below the lower parking lot is an orchard of apricot, pear, peach and apple trees, begun by the rancher who first guided people through the cave. Some of the trees are more than a hundred years old, and visitors may pick the fruit for their own use.

The cave's natural entrance is close by, and nobody knows for sure who found it. The park has turned up more than forty differing accounts. In one, the rancher's horse broke through a crust covering the opening. In another, his brother Ben felt a strong wind blowing out of a hole in the ground. The most likely year is eighteen eighty-five. That April, a newspaper in Ely reported that he and others had struck a cave of wondrous beauty, with stalactites of extraordinary size, and that they planned to come back with sledgehammers to break into the next chamber.

Long before that, Native people knew this entrance, perhaps as early as a thousand years ago. Bones found beneath it were almost certainly placed there on purpose. Today the cave is seen only on ranger-guided tours, with a ticket, while up on the mountain a different kind of history is waiting.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Osceola Ditch

Next, we're heading to the Osceola Ditch, and a gold rush on the far side of this mountain.

In eighteen seventy-two, two prospectors found gold about three miles west of what is now the park. Five years later came the discovery of placer gold, loose gold mixed into the gravels, and mining began to flourish. By eighteen eighty-two, the new town had more than fifteen hundred people, with several stores, a butcher and a blacksmith, a Chinese restaurant, and two stagecoaches running regularly to the town of Ward. The gravels gave up almost two million dollars in gold, including one nugget that weighed twenty-four pounds.

But placer mining runs on water. The gold is washed out of the gravel, and the west side of the range didn't have enough water to do it. A company built a sixteen-mile ditch there in eighteen eighty-four and eighty-five. Within months, the local paper reported the mines running about two hours a day, for lack of water.

So the company looked east, to this side of the range, and to Lehman Creek. It bought water rights from the rancher who had recently found the cave below. In September eighteen eighty-nine, several hundred men went to work with hand tools, wagons, horses and mules. For ten months they dug an eighteen-mile ditch to collect the creek water and carry it to the mines. Local sawmills cut lumber for more than two miles of wooden flumes, and for the beams of a six-hundred-and-thirty-three-foot tunnel blasted through a ridge near Strawberry Creek. It was finished on the Fourth of July, eighteen ninety, at a cost of a hundred and eight thousand dollars.

For a while it worked. By June of eighteen ninety-one, the mine was running twenty-four hours a day. But the gold came out slower than the money had gone in. The company's gross yield was about sixteen thousand dollars in eighteen ninety, and about twenty thousand the next year. Then came mild, dry winters, starting in eighteen ninety-two. There was water theft, leaky flumes, and legal fights over water rights. By nineteen-oh-five, mining there had come to a virtual standstill.

It never quite ended, though. Miners came back from nineteen thirty-six to nineteen forty-two, and again after the Second World War, and claims there still rework the old tailings. All told, the district has produced about three and a half million dollars in gold.

Point 2 · At the stop

Osceola Ditch

This is the Osceola Ditch trailhead. The trail here follows the path of the old ditch along the mountainside, toward Strawberry Creek, and it's relatively flat. Along it you can still find remnants of the original flume: century-old pieces of wood, baking in the sun.

Farther along, the trail reaches Mill Creek. A remnant population of Bonneville cutthroat trout was found there, the park's only native trout, and those fish became the catalyst for bringing the species back to other streams in the range. Fire damaged the trail in twenty sixteen, so ask at the visitor center how far it's open before setting out.

Now look around you. You're above eight thousand feet, in the montane life zone. Pinyon and juniper still grow here, mixed with bigger conifers: white fir, ponderosa pine and Douglas fir. Life zones aren't drawn with a ruler; they blend into one another. Listen for the melodic song of the Cassin's finch, and the repetitive call of the red-breasted nuthatch. And take in the view over the Snake Valley.

The ditch never made its owners rich. But for a few years, water from this side of the mountain was carried eighteen miles to wash gold out of the gravels on the other.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Mather Overlook

Next, we're heading to Mather Overlook, named for Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service. Most national parks have a Mather Overlook, set at one of the best views in the park.

Mather's link to this mountain runs through the cave. In his annual report for nineteen twenty-one, he noted that his service had been asked to consider reserving the cave near Baker as a national monument. It was reported to be very extensive, the report said, and with a little more work it would rank with any of the better-known caves in the United States. Then it added, plainly: No inspection of the cave has been made by park officers.

In January nineteen twenty-two, President Warren Harding declared it a national monument. But for years the Forest Service ran it with a light hand, through private custodians: Clarence and Bea Rhodes, who had bought fifty acres next to the cave entrance in nineteen twenty. Bea Rhodes is the first woman on record to guide commercial tours through the cave. In nineteen twenty-eight she wrote to Mather himself. When they first came, she said, it had taken them ten days on horseback to find the caves, because there were no roads. They had forty-eight visitors in nineteen twenty-one, two hundred and eighty-seven the next year, then seven hundred, and three thousand eight hundred by nineteen twenty-four.

The Rhodes made it a small resort. A tour cost a dollar and often lasted three hours or more. There were weddings in the cave, and music played on the stalactites and stalagmites. In nineteen thirty-three, President Franklin Roosevelt moved the national monuments to the National Park Service, and the caves came under Mather's agency at last.

The road you're on has a story too. The Forest Service built it in the nineteen-sixties, and at first it was called Asilo Verde Drive. When the survey line ran into what was considered a record-sized limber pine, the road was resurveyed to swing around the tree. In another spot it was redesigned to save a spruce fifteen feet around. The plan once carried the road all the way to Stella Lake, higher up. Conservation groups objected, and in August nineteen sixty-five the Forest Service stopped that work and ended the road at a campground about a mile below the lake. It was paved in nineteen sixty-eight.

Point 3 · At the stop

Mather Overlook

This is Mather Overlook. From the boardwalk, you look across to Wheeler Peak and the Wheeler Cirque, the great basin high on the mountain where ice gathered and carved the rock. Here you'll find a plaque honoring Stephen Mather, and a bronze relief map of the peak and the cirque.

Now look back down the mountain. From here you can see the life zones you've climbed through, from the desert shrub around the town of Baker, down in the valley, up to the montane forest where you're standing. The mountain mahogany in view is a good sign you're in this zone.

In autumn, groves of aspen on these slopes turn yellow, red and gold, usually starting in the second or third week of September.

Look, too, for the chronolog sign on the boardwalk. Following its instructions helps the park's research. It's a small thing, and a good way to leave something behind at a place that asks you to leave everything else as you found it.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Wheeler Peak Overlook

Next, we're heading to Wheeler Peak Overlook, for the best view of the mountain, and of a mountain with more names than most.

The first American name came in eighteen fifty-five, when an Army officer, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Steptoe, named it for Jefferson Davis, then the Secretary of War. Four years later, the explorer James Simpson called it Union Peak, as the country edged toward civil war. And there's a story that two miners named the twin spires at the summit Jeff Davis and Lincoln, because one of the men was born in the South and the other in the North.

In eighteen sixty-nine, Lieutenant George Wheeler of the Army Corps of Engineers led a reconnaissance through eastern Nevada, mapping more than twenty-four thousand square miles in six months. His orders were to find routes, sites for Army posts, and the country's wood, water and minerals. Here, his party left camp at Rattlesnake Springs at two in the afternoon. Wheeler and two companions reached the summit at eight that evening, then had to go back down to the limit of the trees for food and fuel. The rest of the party reached the top the next morning. On the way up, they put the timber line at eleven thousand five hundred feet. At the suggestion of the expedition's geologist, the Reverend White, the party agreed that the summit should be called Wheeler's Peak.

Wheeler wrote that it was one of the highest crests between the Sierra Nevada and the Wasatch, and with careful barometer readings he put it at thirteen thousand and sixty-three feet. That's the same height the park gives today. Even so, local settlers kept calling the mountain Jeff Davis Peak for decades.

The Confederate president's name stayed on the map, on the neighboring summit. In twenty seventeen, as the country argued over Confederate monuments, people began asking for a change. In January twenty nineteen, Nevada's Board of Geographic Names voted unanimously to recommend a Shoshone name for it: Doso Doyabi. The phrase means White Mountain. Tribal elders say it refers to the summit being covered in snow all year. The park uses that name today.

So one ridge carries a surveyor's name, and beside it, a name from a much older language. Both tell you who has looked up at these mountains, and what they saw.

Point 4 · At the stop

Wheeler Peak Overlook

This is Wheeler Peak Overlook. The big mountain in front of you is Wheeler Peak, thirteen thousand and sixty-three feet high, the second-highest point in Nevada. Beside it rises its neighbor, the White Mountain. The viewing scopes here help you pick out wildlife and distant details.

Look at the bottom of Wheeler Peak's sheer rock face. That lobe of boulders is a rock glacier: angular blocks with ice filling the spaces between them. As the ice freezes, thaws and sags, the whole mass creeps slowly downhill. Seen from above, its surface shows curved ridges, because the middle moves faster than the sides. This overlook is the only place on the road where you can see it.

Tucked into the cirque, at around eleven thousand five hundred feet, is something rarer still: the Wheeler Peak Glacier, the only glacier in Nevada and one of the southernmost in the United States. It's tiny, about two acres. A crevice that opens near its head each summer shows the ice is still moving. It's a remnant of the ice age, when glaciers here reached down as low as nine thousand two hundred feet.

Above the trees is the alpine zone: windswept ground where only grasses, low herbs and wildflowers grow. Bighorn sheep, rosy-finches and American pipits live up there, though they're rarely seen, on a peak that wears its snow for much of the year.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Bristlecone Trailhead

Next, we're heading to the Bristlecone Trailhead at the end of the road, and the story of a tree called Prometheus.

Great Basin bristlecone pines are the oldest non-clonal species on the planet. In this park they grow in isolated groves just below the tree line, where deep cold, a short growing season and high winds keep them growing very slowly. In some years they don't add a growth ring at all. That slow growth makes the wood dense enough to resist insects, fungi, rot and erosion.

In the summer of nineteen sixty-four, a geographer named Donald Currey was studying ice age glacial features below Wheeler Peak. He had permission from the Forest Service to take core samples from the bristlecones growing in a grove there, to work out the age of the ground they stood on. One tree, known to local mountaineers as Prometheus, he believed to be well over four thousand years old.

Accounts differ about what happened next. Some say his coring tool broke off in the tree. Others say the borer was too short for so large a trunk, or that he felt he needed a full cross section. What is certain is that he had permission from the Forest Service to have the tree cut down. When the rings were counted, Prometheus had four thousand eight hundred and sixty-two of them. Because a ring doesn't form in every year, the tree was estimated at about four thousand nine hundred years old, the oldest tree known at the time.

In the Greek myth, Prometheus brought fire, a symbol of knowledge, to humans. The tree gave knowledge too: what was learned from it added to carbon dating and to the record of past climate. Bristlecone pines are now protected on federal lands. The stump is all that remains in the grove, and a slab of the tree is on display at the park's other visitor center, the Great Basin Visitor Center, where you can count its rings for yourself.

Point 5 · At the stop

Bristlecone Trailhead

This is the Bristlecone Trailhead, at the end of the road and nearly ten thousand feet up. Three trails start here. The Bristlecone Trail climbs to the Wheeler Peak grove, about a mile and a half each way, with an interpretive loop among the ancient trees, and the Glacier Trail continues beyond it to the foot of the glacier. The Alpine Lakes Loop, a little under three miles, passes Teresa and Stella lakes. And the Sky Island Forest Trail is a short interpretive loop that's wheelchair accessible.

The Wheeler Peak grove is unusual. Most bristlecone groves grow on limestone or dolomite and face south or west. This one grows on a glacial moraine of quartzite boulders, facing northeast. To tell a bristlecone from the limber pines that grow beside it, look at the needles: about an inch long, in bundles of five, packed all the way around the branch like a bottle brush. The young cones are deep purple. Please leave any fallen wood where it lies; some of it may be thousands of years old.

Take it slowly at this altitude, carry plenty of water, and keep an eye on the sky, because afternoon thunderstorms are common.

And if you can, come back after dark. Great Basin was recognized as a Gold Tier International Dark Sky Park in twenty sixteen. On a clear, moonless night, thousands of stars, the Andromeda Galaxy and the arc of the Milky Way can be seen with the naked eye from nearly anywhere in the park.

Trees that have stood through thousands of winters, under one of the darkest skies in the country. That's the end of the tour, and thank you for coming up the mountain with me.

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