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USA: Nevada: Carson City, Cathedral Gorge, Ely, Great Basin, Hoover Dam - Lake Mead, Lake Tahoe, Las Vegas, Lehman Caves, Primm, Red Rock Canyon, Reno, Virginia City

Great Basin, Nevada, USA: More than what meets the eye
by Prakash Bang, Editor in Chief

At first glance the vast landscape looks monotonous – a sea of pale green shrubs. But looks deceive. Above the sagebrush sea, mountain ranges form a high elevation archipelago as islands of cooler air and more abundant water. Richly varied plants and animals live up there that could not survive the lower desert.

After breakfast in Ely, our next destination was a visit to Lehman Caves which falls in the Great Basis National Park. Visitors can spend days together exploring the other attractions in the Great Basin. However, since time was limited, we had to be content with a visit to the Lehman Caves. I have featured the cave separately.

We drove part of Highway 50 which is popularly known as “the loneliest road in America”. The total distance of Highway 50 is 287 miles from Fernley to Baker. We did the journey from Ely to Baker which is 64 miles.

Great Basin has been named so because for its lack of drainage. Its streams and rivers mostly find no outlet to the sea and water collects in shallow salt lakes, marshes and mud flats to evaporate in dry desert air. It’s not just one but many basins separated by mountain ranges roughly parallel, north to south. The Great Basin Centered on Nevada, stretches from California’s Sierra Nevada to Utah’s Wasatch Mountains.

After visiting Lehman Caves, we began our drive towards St. George in Utah. On the border of Nevada and Utah we made a stop at Border Inn. As the name suggests, the Border Inn is bang on the border. Its rooms are in Utah and its restaurant which also has a casino is in Nevada!

We picked our boxed lunch from the Border Inn and carried on.

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