Great Basin National Park, 2015

We visited Great Basin National Park way back in 1990, not long after it opened. I climbed Wheeler Peak while the girls did the Alpine Lakes Trail. Obviously, it was much earlier in the summer, as our photos show considerable snow, even down to 10,000 feet. Thus: http://roadeveron.blogspot.com/2012/02/wheeler-peak-nevada-1990.html. Among memories of that visit were the bugs that descended--at 10,000 feet--on our camper then and devoured all the bug guts accumulated in our drive from Dallas. In 2015, Vicki and I contented ourselves with a couple of 3 mile hikes from the Wheeler Peak campground. At 10,000+ feet, that was plenty for us just now.

The night before visiting Great Basin we camped at a nice,
new BLM campground at Sacramento Pass

Wheeler Peak from the east

Fall color well underway

Shorter, more rugged half of the mountain

In the bristlecone pine forest

Bristlecone pines are among the oldest living things, some in
this forest clocked (dendrochronology) at more than 5,000 years

With the harshness of location and altitude,
they have to be pretty rugged, adaptive
specimens

This one, I think, was rated at 3,200 years old

Terrain about 10,400 feet

Note the bristles

More of the terrain

Ditto

Looking down to the basin...smoke arriving from the disastrous
California fires

Artsy view from a rest stop

Next day, Lake Stella, a fragment of its 1990 self; there was
barely enough water in Lake Teresa to photograph; both will
be dry lakes in the near future

But the color was grand, especially the orange quakies