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| Lehman Caves (Ceiling) |
We
hit two milestones on our travels today. We entered the Pacific time zone and went
over 3000 miles driven. We also toured Great Basin National Park. The drive
to the park took us away from the mountains and into the Great Basin Desert for
which the park in named. This area stretches from the Wasatch Mountains in Utah
to the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. The area is generally very flat with salt flats, sagebrush and not much in the way of population. There
is a lot of open grazing lands so there were occasional herds of cattle.
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| Lehman Caves (Columns) |
The
main feature of Great Basin National Park is the Lehman Caves. We booked out
tickets for the Grand Palace tour months ago as they have a max of 20 tickets
for any given tour and we were almost at the max. It really felt like a
personalized tour compared to the one we took at Mammoth Cave last fall. The
cave doesn’t have huge rooms, hence the limit to 20 per tour. The tour was
great and it felt like you were much closer to the formations. Lehman has all
the standard cave formations – Stalactites, Stalagmites, Columns, Drapes,
Popcorn, Soda Straws, Bacon and others that I don’t remember. I would love to
show photos of each, but I have learned over the years that it is very hard to
take good photos in caves, but I’ll post the best.
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| Example of Shield Formation |
Lehman
Caves does have some rare formations called Shields. They are basically two round,
flat plates that are usually joined together and frequently with stalactites hanging down from them. Unlike the other types of formations, no one
knows how the Shields are formed. I borrowed a photo of the “Jellyfish” to illustrate.
The flat part on top is the Shield.
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| Scenic Drive to Wheeler Peak |
After
the cave tour, we drove a scenic drive to the top of Wheeler Peak, or at least
as far as you can go by car. It was pretty and the Aspen are just starting to
turn yellow near the top. We took a short hike at the top (10K feet) which is
difficult if you aren’t used to the altitude. The actual peak is another 3000
feet higher and you can hike to it, but we said no way.
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| Wheeler Peak |
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