National Park Week 2024 Day 3 – Great Basin National Park!

Today, we’re off to Nevada’s only national park – Great Basin National Park!

Great Basin National Park is home to the Lehman Caves. a large cluster of ancient bristlecone pine trees, varied wildlife, and an extensive mountain range.

For reference, we were going there from the Las Vegas area. The park is in the northeast region of Nevada and several hours away from most major cities all around.

It’s a very scenic but very long drive. Most of the route is also pretty remote, with no stores or gas stations, so make sure to top off your gas before heading out.

We finally made it to Great Basin National Park!

Let me warn you, even though Google Maps says it only takes about 5 hours to get there from Vegas, allocate an extra hour or even two hours, especially if you have to get there for a timed tour. The one road up there is a small remote road with several construction stops that can add up to half an hour to each stop.

Unfortunately, we ended up missing our cave tour time by just 5 minutes, and there was no way to catch up with the tour that just left, so learn from our mishap. We had to stop many times on the way there due to construction on the only road up. The lady in the Visitors Center said several groups had been late recently due to all the road construction. Luckily, they were willing to refund our tour fee, but it’s a shame we missed it. The group already went over to the cave and we couldn’t just catch up with them. Bummer!

However, there are still plenty of things to do above ground at this park. We learned about the famous Lehman Caves in the Visitor’s Center exhibits, listened to a ranger talk, and toured the mountain range above the caves, driving up to one of the scenic viewpoints. I believe it was up to 10,000+ feet in elevation! Great views!

There are plenty of options for hiking and other outdoor activities above the caves here. If you time it right, a huge astronomy festival is held here each year that is very popular since this is designated as a Dark Sky Park. Definitely book ahead for that, though.

We headed towards our hotel after exploring the park for a few hours. Note that there are very few hotels in the immediate area of the park, and they fill up fast, so we had to get one in Ely, the next town over, which was an hour away. Make sure to reserve your hotel way ahead of time if you’re planning a trip to this park.

It was a long day of driving, but we finally got to a remote national park that we hadn’t been to on past trips. I wanted to feature this park because it is so remote and thus gets fewer visitors than some of the others. Hopefully, this makes you aware of it. Build in a visit on your next road trip. We’ll have to go back sometime to finally do the cave tour. Still, it was a good visit!

If you like caves, check out our visits to Carlsbad Caverns National Park and Mammoth Cave National Park as well.

Please contact me if you would like to chat about planning a National Park trip.