Great Basin National Park
After our morning shoot at Snow Canyon, we took a hot shower and then headed up through Cedar City (to stop off for some great pizza) on our way to our next stop, Great Basin National Park. The drive from Utah into Nevada was interesting and we timed our entrance into the park as several vehicles were departing the campground.
Yet again, we found ourselves another great campsite (of which we’ll say more later), at the campground nestled at the bottom of a canyon between two mountains.
But once our sleeping accommodations were nabbed, we departed camp to explore what we could at the park. We headed up the main road into the park and climbed, and climbed and climbed until we hit a road closed sign. We’d heard that the road to the top had opened a couple of weeks earlier, but I guess the rainy weather we’d been having dumped more snow. So we stopped at the lookout at the gate to check things out.
You can see we were just below the snow line. Unfortunately so because there is another campground higher up and several trails through high-elevation meadows that we unfortunately wound up missing.
Still the views were beautiful and I wished we have made our way down to the aspens and the meadow below, but there was no trail to be seen.
At that stop we met a couple from Germany who were amazed at what we’d done with our Mercedes. “You don’t find those in Germany. Too bad for us!” They’ve been coming to the US for years and asked us for suggestions about where to go from there. They’d been to Utah, and all the National Parks so they’d seen the obvious at one point or another. We then told them about the Alabama Hills, and a couple of other locations between there and Las Vegas and they were thrilled at the idea of some place new - and that had been the site of Wild West movies.
We then headed back to our campsite. It was a narrow parking pad with trees on both sides that was simply gorgeous in the late afternoon sun.
But as good as it was for an RV/van, it was an even better camping site. You had to walk across a small bridge to get to the camping area, which was on an island with the creek flowing on both sides. If we’d had a tent, I would have been tempted to sleep out there on the ground.
As it was, we were close enough to have the sound of running water right outside our windows. Needless to say, we slept like babes that night!
After we set up camp for the night, we took a walk around the campground and checked out the creek a bit farther downstream. It was a lovely little creek. Not much to photograph, but certainly one to enjoy.
On our walk we discovered a trail, and then a signboard that indicated distances to points along the trail. One was “Meadow - 1.6 miles”. I was sure that was the meadow I’d seen from the viewpoint, so we decided that we’d take the hike the next day. Little did we know that we were going to need the energy gained from that good night’s sleep.
The hike was, well how to put it. A lot more difficult than we’d imagined. Looking on a map, it seemed like the climb wouldn’t be too bad, and would end before a long series of switch-backs climbed up a steep part of the mountain. Couldn’t be too bad, could it?
Well, the hike may have been only 1.6 miles long, but it was on a rocky, sometimes muddy, trail. And it climbed from 7,600 feet to 9,100 feet in elevation. As we’d learned in the Grand Tetons a couple of years earlier, lungs used to hiking at 2,000 - 3,000 feet don’t seem so robust when you’re hiking at 6,000+ feet. 9,000 feet was a killer.
Call it sheer exhaustion, an oxygen deprived brain, or just a bad shooting day, but the photography was frustrating once we got to the meadow. Which, after a while, I became convinced was not the same meadow (confirmed by a Google Earth search later on), and didn’t seem nearly as elegant (it wasn’t).
Still, one must make photographs, and the place really was lovely.
Photographically, however, there was so much visual chaos that I couldn’t find images that satisfied me. There seemed to be a lot of material (check out those aspens and the Utah junipers) but I just couldn’t find the right position to capture what I was feeling. It must have been too little oxygen to my brain.
I even tried a couple of compositions that wound up pretty bad.
I then started thinking in black and white and tried working with that in mind. Not a total success, but a bit more satisfying.
I was able to vary my scale a bit and simply play with pieces here and there.
And even make an image that captures the starkness of the vegetation at altitude in the harsh sunlight.
But overall, I was less than totally satisfied and had to be happy with a wonderful (although exhausting) hike through a new landscape.
That afternoon as we were resting from the hike, swarms of people came driving by (to include a Park Ranger who asked permission to photograph Beast because, "That is the coolest thing I've ever seen!"). We realized the weekend was approaching and, even worse, the Memorial Day weekend. We started rethinking our plans heading home - which included winging it by the Alvord Desert. It didn’t seem to us that this was the weekend to be taking chances at finding open campsites.
So that night we had a doubly good night of sleep (the lovely sound of the creek and sheer exhaustion), and got up bright and early. Worst case scenario was we’d drive all the way home.
Driving through Nevada introduced us to a brand new landscape in what in our minds was not supposed to be a very appealing place. Wrong again. It also confirmed our worst fear as we saw RV park after campsite full to the brim, and every little pull out area with some sort of vehicle or tent parked for the weekend.
We decided to call it good and just drive home. The end of a wonderful expedition!