Monday September 30, Great Basin National Park, Nevada

Gopher snake at the National Park

All our plans have flown out the window this morning with the news that there is an issue with the budget not being approved by the Republicans, or something to that effect, but the end result is that all the National Parks could well be closed from tomorrow for an indeterminate length of time.

We stopped for fuel this morning in Ely and went online to load the blog and collect our emails, and Lynn alerted us to an issue with the Parks, we had not heard anything about it. We had a great drive along 50 this morning to the Great Basin National Park where we were heading and they confirmed the issues. As staff they won’t know exactly until midnight tonight, but they will be closed tomorrow. This was really the start of  us visiting the other National Parks in Utah, Bryce Canyon, Zion and probably Canyonland, so as you can imagine we don’t know what we will do at this stage.

More beg skies and landscape

Anyway we had come to the park to see the Lehman Caves, so booked in for a 3 o’clock tour and nabbed a campsite in the park (only $3 with our “Old Age Pass”!).  They park rangers said that in fact we can stay for a further 48 hours after the closure if we choose. It is a really nice camp at 7,500 feet above sea level, set amongst aspens that are turning golden and the really pretty Lehman Stream.

We were walking along the path for the start of the tour when we spotted a small snake on the pavement, it was about half a metre long and was just meandering along the pavement and into the rocks. A ranger came along and was able to identify it as a Gopher Snake, she said that it was in fact quite a small one and was completely harmless, although I wasn’t that impressed.

The 1 ½ hour tour of the caves was great, we walked ¼ mile through the limestone caves with one of the park rangers and 20 others, it was really stunning.  We weren’t allowed to take tripods into the caves so all the photos were hand held with a high ISO, but it gives an idea of the beauty.

Back to the camp and we lit a fire again tonight with some wood that Ian had found at last nights camp. Who knows what tomorrow will bring, but guess that is another day.

I have just finished reading a really great book, one of the many that Sherry sent me off with, “Olive Kitteridge” by Elizabeth Stroud. See that it won a Pulitzer Prize and can understand why.

Lehman Caves

A nice campsite for the night in amongst the Aspens