August 9-10, 2011 – Great Basin National Park, NV
We left Ely on Tuesday morning and drove 69 miles to Baker, NV a small town by the entrance to Great Basin National Park. We are staying at the Whispering Elms Campground, Motel and RV Park - a small park with 24 RV sites and a 6-room motel. It has lots of trees so we have lots of shade, which is good as it is hot here. We arrived here just before noon so after lunch we headed to Great Basin National Park. The Great Basin is a large area centered on Nevada and stretches from California’s Sierra Nevada to Utah’s Wasatch Mountains. It is named 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 is not just one but many basins, separated by mountain ranges. Great Basin National Park was created in 1986 to protect a small portion of the Great Basin. We stopped at the Visitor Center and tried to get tic...