Great Basin National Park United States

Legendary

The park features the Lehman Caves, groves of ancient bristlecone pines, and the 13,063-foot Wheeler Peak.

Photo by Jeff Hollett

In 1964, a student researching ancient ice ages got his drill stuck inside an old pine tree near Wheeler Peak. He had permission to cut the tree down to get it out, so that's what happened.

Only afterward, when someone counted the rings, did anyone realize the tree had been alive for nearly 4,900 years. It was one of the oldest living things ever found anywhere on the planet, older than the pyramids of Egypt.

Losing it convinced a lot of people that this land needed real protection.

The trees are called bristlecone pines, and they live so long because life up there is so hard. Freezing wind blows constantly, the soil is thin and rocky, and there isn't much air to breathe.

So the trees grow very, very slowly. That makes their wood incredibly dense and tough, so bugs can't chew through it and rot can't spread in it.

Three groves of these trees grow in the park. The easiest one to reach sits on the side of Wheeler Peak, which stands 13,063 feet tall and is the highest point in the park.

Far below the trees, there's a whole other world. A rancher named Absalom Lehman found a cave system here in the 1880s and started leading visitors down on rope ladders to see it.

Word about the caves spread across the state. In 1922, President Warren G. Harding decided to protect the area and named it Lehman Caves National Monument.

That August, the town of Baker threw a huge party to celebrate, complete with local schoolchildren and the town mayor.

The caves stayed a national monument for more than 60 years. Then in 1986, Congress made the area much bigger and turned it into Great Basin National Park, adding the mountain, the ancient trees, and the desert around them.

The park's name comes from the land itself. The Great Basin is an enormous stretch of the American West where rain and snow never reach the ocean.

Water that falls here soaks into the ground or dries up in the sun instead.

Take a guided tour into Lehman Caves, where it stays about 50°F all year no matter how hot the desert gets outside. Hike the Bristlecone Trail to stand next to trees that were already ancient when the Roman Empire began.

Then stay after sunset. This is one of the darkest places left in North America, and on a clear night the Milky Way is bright enough to cast a shadow on the ground.