After our epic six days exploring four of Utah's ‘Mighty five’ National Parks, we made our way into Nevada and Great Basin National Park. As we left Utah we switched back to Pacific Standard Time (PST) for the first time in 3 months. It’s always nice in these long drive days to gain an extra hour back, although short days and long evenings are very noticeable now.
Great Basin National Park
This was a brand new park for us and once again we seemed to be following the blue skies, snow capped mountains route... boy have we been lucky with the weather!
The Wheeler Park Scenic Drive is a must do, but only 25% of it was open due to heavy snow fall. This unfortunately meant most of the best hiking was inaccessible, but with the ranger's suggestion, we drove as far as we could, either exploring up the road or along the creek. We ended up hiking another 3 miles up the scenic drive across the snow on foot... The ranger at the visitor centre was very insistent we didn’t need snowshoes, but as we neared our turnaround spot it was definitely the wrong advice as we were the first to make tracks in 10-12 inches of snow. We came back with very cold feet, but living out of van, we had fresh socks and shoes readily available!
We also had not realised that this park contained a cave system - Lehman Caves that weave two miles into the Snake Mountain Range, and was the main reason this part of Nevada gained its National Park status. We joined an hour led ranger tour that took us through some pretty cool stalactites, stalagmites and two new formations for us 1) helictites - delicate branching formations that defy gravity and look like curly hair coming out of the wall and 2) cave shields, that look like the top of an octopus. Although not as mesmerising as Mammoth Cave or Carlsbad Caverns (we’ve just been spoilt over the last 3 months), it still ranks as one of the top 5 caves in the US.
Crater Lake
We were very much on our last leg of our roadtrip, but couldn’t complete our National Park tour without making a stop at Oregon’s only park on the way back to Portland. It was one of our longest journeys, at 11.5hours between the visitors centre from Great Basin to Crater Lake, so we decided to break up the journey and stopped in a small mining town just off I80 called Winnemucca that was almost bang in the middle.
Crater Lake was a phenomenal park to end this camper-van trip. We have been before, but only in the heat of an Oregon summer and it’s been on our bucket list to return and see it again in it’s winter glory. Known for getting over 40ft/13M of snow every year, most of the park becomes inaccessible in winter. The only road that is open, closes after big snow storms, but luckily we were able to drive into the park and all the way to the lake. The road that circumvents the lake closes upon the first snow and becomes a skier/snowshoe route. We learned from our experience in Great Basin, and had hired snowshoes for our explorations. We ended up hiking an epic 5 miles around part of the lake with only other snow shoe and skier tracks to keep us company. It was by far the largest amount of snow we have seen this trip but it felt so festive and magical to end a breathtakingly amazing 3 months. Words don’t do this park justice so here are the pictures…
What’s next?
A week back in Portland to catch up with friends and some neglected life admin. Then we head to California for Christmas with our friends that are flying in from Singapore… We may have even convinced them to come to Channel Islands National Park with us! So stay tuned… more adventures to come!
Comments