Ruby's Rocky Adventures: We won't ever make it anywhere at this pace!

Great Basin National Park & Lehman Caves

On Saturday morning we lost our headtstart, travelling only 80 miles in 4 hours!! BUT, the kids were happy and it set a great tone for our trip. Just after we started driving we stopped at Grimes Point Archaeological Site. We took a great little hike looking at tons of petroglyphs.

We were going to skip Sand Mountain, but as soon as the kids saw the giant sand dunes they begged to stop. Again, the wind made things crummy. Ruby loved it, but the kids only played for 20 minutes before they were done being sand blasted. It was just enough time to ensure that we will be finding sand everywhere for the remainder of our trip. I think it would be fun to go back for a weekend with a group and some sand buggies, as long as it wasn’t windy.

Highway 50 was advertised as “The Lonliest Highway in America”, it surely did feel like that in a lot of places. We found this tree with hundreds of shoes hanging from it.

We stopped for lunch in Cold Springs. There was only two other people there, talking to them at the end of the meal we learned that they are from Roseville! The waitress was super excited to teach the kids about the area. She told them all about the tons of pictures on the walls, let them feel a few taxidermied animals, she even gave them pieces of petrified wood. Leaving there we really felt the need to rush, but the 9 mountain passes we had to cross made it slow. The road would be straight and flat for a while, and then we would summit a pass while it was snowing, repeat 9 times… At one point we were escorted through by police so that they could close the road behind us. Two semis had gone off of the road and I’m sure it took hours to tow them out. So lucky that we weren’t just a few minutes later! Late that night we were finally pulling into Great Basin National Park. The park only has 12 first come first serve sites. Carl assured me as we were pulling in, “of course we will get a site, we’ll have the whole place to ourselves, it’s well below freezing and snowing, no one else is crazy enough to come all the way out here to camp right now”. We got the last spot!!! We definitely were not alone, but we didn’t see anyone since we set up late in the snow, spent the night, and then stayed huddled inside for breakfast.

We had reservations for a 9am tour of Lehman Caves. We have several caves planned during our trip, I honestly thought that this would just be something to break up the driving. The cave was spectacular! Our ranger guide did a great job of teaching us all about the history and geology of the cave. I can tell you that there is no way I would have ventured in there by candle light on one of Ab Lehman’s tours in 1885! One of the rooms far within the cave was covered in graffiti. We had a great discussion about whether or not the Parks Service should preserve the initials that people had written in there in candle soot as early as 1886. We talked about how preservation doesn’t just mean leave it alone, it means actively work to protect the specimen. There is a bacteria growing in the cave that is there only because of the candle soot, someone has some tough decisions to make!

There are A LOT of caves in the world, only 60 of them (including Lehman) have a cave structure known as shields. Interestingly, there was a tour group of 40 people there at the same time as us, turns out they were all from Sacramento and Folsom!

After the tour we took a short hike and made lunch in the picnic area while the kids worked on their Junior Ranger Activities. It was neat that the Ranger’s made such a big deal about becoming Junior Rangers. They talked to them for a long time while reviewing their work, when they gave them their oath and badges the entire room cheered. It made a big impact and the kids are excited to earn more badges as we travel!