Latest / Wildlands Podcast — National Parks, Public Lands & Survival / #001 - Great Basin, Part 1: The History | Lehman Caves & the Oldest Trees on Earth

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#001 - Great Basin, Part 1: The History | Lehman Caves & the Oldest Trees on Earth · Wildlands Podcast — National Parks, Public Lands & Survival

0:11
Picture a man on a horse. Eastern Nevada, the
0:16
1880s. The kind of country where the next ridge
0:20
looks exactly like the last one, and the silence
0:23
has weight to it. His name is Absalom Lehman,
0:27
a rancher. And on this particular day, Somewhere
0:31
on the dry flank of the snake range, the ground
0:33
opens up. A hole. A dark mouth in the earth that
0:39
nobody knew was there. He goes down into it.
0:43
And what he finds stops him cold. Room after
0:48
room of stone that looks alive. Shapes hanging
0:52
from the ceiling, rising from the floor, draped
0:55
down the walls like frozen water. Formations
0:58
so strange and so delicate they don't look like
1:00
they belong on this planet, let alone under this
1:02
dry, empty mountain. Here's the thing Lehman
1:06
couldn't have known, standing down there with
1:08
his lantern. Everything he was looking at was
1:12
old. Not old like a building is old. Old like
1:17
the ocean is old. The rock around him had once
1:21
been the floor of a tropical sea. The cave had
1:25
taken millions of years to hollow out, and on
1:28
the mountain above his head grew trees that were
1:31
already thousands of years old, when the pyramids
1:34
were new. That's the real story of this place.
1:39
Not who named it. Not who signed the paper. The
1:43
story of how a corner of the loneliest desert
1:47
in America came to hold a cave, a glacier, and
1:51
the oldest living things on Earth. all stacked
1:54
on a single mountain. This is Wildlands. I'm
2:02
Sean Spanauer. Know the land before you reach
2:06
it. If this is your first time here, here's how
2:10
the show works. Every major park gets three episodes.
2:15
Part one, this one is the history of the place
2:18
itself, how it formed, what lives there, and
2:22
how it came to be. what it is. Part two is the
2:26
visit, everything you need to actually go. Part
2:30
three is where to stay. And between parks, I
2:34
run survival episodes on the skills that keep
2:36
you alive out there. But today, we go deep on
2:40
Great Basin. And I want to be straight with you
2:43
about what kind of history this is. A lot of
2:47
park stories jump straight to the politics who
2:49
pushed the bill, who signed it, what year it
2:52
became official. We'll get there. That's the
2:55
last chapter, and it's a good one. But it is
3:00
not the main event. The main event is the mountain,
3:04
the rock, the cave, the trees, the ice. Because
3:10
that history is millions of years deep, and the
3:14
human part, all of it fits into the last eye
3:18
blink. So we're going to build it the way the
3:21
land built it. From the bottom up, from the bottom
3:25
of an ancient sea, to the top of a 13 ,000 -foot
3:30
peak. Start with the rock. Because everything
3:35
here begins with the rock. And before I throw
3:41
a number at you, let me give you a way to actually
3:43
feel it. Because the timescales here are so far
3:47
outside normal human experience that the numbers
3:50
just slide right off. So try this. Imagine the
3:56
entire history of this rock, start to finish,
3:59
squeezed down into a single 24 -hour day. Midnight
4:04
to midnight. On that scale, the rock forms at
4:08
breakfast time. The mountains get lifted in the
4:11
afternoon. The cave gets hollowed out in the
4:14
last hour before midnight. The oldest bristlecone
4:18
sprouts about four seconds before midnight. And
4:22
every human being who ever lived in this valley,
4:25
every rancher, every park ranger, you, me, this
4:30
podcast, all of it happens in the final blink
4:34
before the clock rolls over. Hold on to that.
4:38
We are at the very, very end of this story. Roughly
4:44
half a billion years ago. And I want you to actually
4:46
sit with that number. 500 million years. This
4:50
part of Nevada. wasn't desert. It wasn't even
4:53
land. It was the edge of a shallow, warm, tropical
4:59
sea. North America was somewhere else entirely,
5:03
sitting near the equator, and this was its drowned
5:05
western coastline. And in a warm, shallow sea,
5:11
life is busy. Tiny marine creatures live, build
5:15
shells out of calcium carbonate, and die. By
5:18
the trillions, over millions of years. Their
5:22
shells and skeletons drift down and pile up on
5:24
the seafloor in layers, layer on, layer on, layer,
5:29
slowly compacting under their own weight. And
5:33
that is how you make limestone. Limestone is,
5:39
quite literally, the compressed bodies of an
5:42
ancient ocean. The mountain that holds Lehman
5:45
Caves is a graveyard of sea life turned to stone.
5:51
And it's not abstract, either. The rock layers
5:55
in this park have names and ages, and they're
5:58
packed with fossils. Trilobites, those armored
6:02
little creatures that scuttled across the seafloor
6:04
half a billion years ago. Brachiopods, corals,
6:08
the hard remains of a vanished ocean world. So
6:13
when you're standing on the Snake Range looking
6:15
out over a bone -dry Nevada valley, shimmering
6:19
with heat, not a drop of water in sight. The
6:22
ground under your boots was once a seabed teeming
6:25
with life. The desert is the last place you'd
6:28
look for an ocean, and it's standing on one.
6:32
Stack up enough of that, mix in some shale from
6:36
finer mud and some sandstone from beaches, and
6:39
you've got the raw material of the Southern Snake
6:42
Range, thousands of feet of ancient seabed. lying
6:48
there, flat, for a few hundred million years.
6:53
Then, the Earth goes to work on it. Over enormous
6:57
spans of time, the collisions and pressures that
7:00
build mountains squeeze this region. Heat and
7:04
pressure cook some of that rock and change it.
7:06
What geologists call metamorphism. Limestone,
7:10
under enough heat and pressure, recrystallizes
7:14
into marble. Sandstone hardens into quartzite,
7:18
which is so tough it forms the high cliffs and
7:21
the summit of Wheeler Peak itself. So inside
7:25
Lehman Caves, when you hear that the walls are
7:28
marble and limestone, that's why. The fire and
7:32
the squeeze turn part of that old seabed into
7:34
stone, polished smooth. But here's the move that
7:38
makes this landscape look the way it does. The
7:41
signature of the entire region. Starting roughly
7:46
17 million years ago, the crust under the western
7:48
United States began to do something unusual.
7:51
It started to stretch. Pulled apart, east to
7:55
west, like taffy. And when the brittle crust
7:58
gets stretched, it doesn't bend smoothly. It
8:02
cracks. It breaks into enormous blocks along
8:06
faults. And those blocks tilt. Some drop down.
8:11
Some lift up. The blocks that lifted became mountain
8:15
ranges. The blocks that dropped became the valleys
8:19
between them. Range, valley, range, valley. Over
8:25
and over, hundreds of times, marching across
8:28
Nevada in long parallel strips running north
8:31
to south. Geologists call this the basin and
8:36
range. And if you've ever driven across Nevada
8:39
and felt like you were doing the same thing forever,
8:42
Climb a mountain range. Drop into a flat valley.
8:45
Cross it. Climb the next range. Drop into the
8:48
next valley. You weren't imagining it. You were
8:52
driving across the broken, stretched, tilted
8:54
blocks of the Earth's crust, one after another.
8:58
Somebody once described it as an army of caterpillars
9:01
marching toward Mexico. Once you see it, you
9:05
can't unsee it. And these ranges are big. The
9:11
drop from the top of a range like the snake range
9:13
down to the valley floor can be the better part
9:15
of a vertical mile. That's the height of the
9:18
crustal block that got shoved up relative to
9:21
the one that dropped down. Picture the scale
9:24
of force that takes. Slabs of bedrock miles wide
9:28
and thousands of feet thick lifted and dropped
9:32
along cracks in the planet. Not all at once.
9:36
A few feet at a time. in earthquakes spread across
9:40
millions of years. Every one of those mountain
9:44
fronts is the scar of countless quakes stacked
9:47
up over an unimaginable span of time. Wheeler
9:51
Peak and the Snake Range are one of those uplifted
9:54
blocks. A chunk of ancient seabed, cooked into
9:58
marble and quartzite, then shoved over 13 ,000
10:01
feet into the sky. And this is not finished.
10:06
The basin and range is still stretching right
10:08
now, a few millimeters a year. There are still
10:12
active faults, still earthquakes. The mountain
10:17
you'd hike is still, very slowly, on the move.
10:21
This is a living landscape, not a finished one.
10:26
Now one more piece, and it's the piece that explains
10:30
the name of this whole show's first park. All
10:34
that stretching created hundreds of valleys with
10:36
mountains walling them in on every side. And
10:40
in a lot of the West, when rain falls and snow
10:43
melts, the water runs downhill, joins a river,
10:47
and eventually reaches the ocean. Here, it can't.
10:51
The water runs down off the ranges into those
10:55
closed valleys and has nowhere to go. No outlet
10:59
to the sea. It either sinks into the ground or
11:03
evaporates into that big, dry sky, leaving the
11:06
salt behind. That's why you get those white salt
11:09
flats and dry lake beds out in the basins. An
11:14
entire region bigger than most countries where
11:17
not one drop of water reaches an ocean. It all
11:20
drains inward and stays. That's the Great Basin.
11:27
That's the name. A whole world. that keeps every
11:31
drop it's given. So that's the stage. Ancient
11:37
seabed lifted into a desert mountain. Now, let's
11:41
go back underground and actually answer the question
11:44
Lehman couldn't. How do you carve a cathedral
11:48
out of solid rock? It comes down to one quiet
11:53
chemical fact. Limestone and marble dissolve
11:57
in acid. Not strong acid. Just barely acidic
12:03
water. When rain falls, it picks up a little
12:08
carbon dioxide from the air. When it soaks into
12:11
the soil, it picks up more. That turns ordinary
12:15
water into a very weak carbonic acid. The same
12:20
mild stuff that's in a glass of soda water. On
12:25
its own, in one pass, That water does almost
12:28
nothing, but runs slightly acidic water through
12:33
cracks in limestone for hundreds of thousands
12:36
of years, drop after drop after drop, and it
12:42
dissolves the rock away. The cracks widen into
12:46
seams. The seams widen into passages. The passages
12:51
open into rooms. That's how you hollow out a
12:57
cave. Not with force. With patience. Water and
13:02
time, which around here are the two most powerful
13:04
forces there are. At Lehman Caves, that process
13:08
got a boost during the Ice Age. When the climate
13:12
was wetter and there was far more water moving
13:15
through the mountain, the flow carved the system
13:18
deeper and wider. Then, as things dried out and
13:23
the water table dropped, It left those rooms
13:25
standing open in the rock. Air -filled chambers
13:29
a quarter mile into the mountainside. And then
13:34
this is the part that gets me. The very same
13:38
process that dug the cave out. Starts decorating
13:41
it. In reverse. Water seeps down through the
13:46
rock carrying dissolved minerals. It reaches
13:50
the open air of a cave room. Hangs there as a
13:52
drip. And as it sits, a tiny bit of that mineral
13:57
comes out of the water and is left behind. A
14:01
speck of calcite. Microscopic. The next drip
14:06
leaves another speck. And the next. Drip by drip,
14:11
the cave builds formations back up out of the
14:13
very rock it dissolved. A drip from the ceiling,
14:17
leaving its mineral behind a little at a time,
14:19
builds a stalactite reaching down. The drips...
14:23
that hit the floor build a stalagmite reaching
14:25
up. Given enough centuries, the two meet in the
14:29
middle and form a column. And the rate of this?
14:34
A stalactite might grow on the order of an inch
14:37
in a century. Some grow far slower. The formations
14:42
you'd see on a Lehman Caves tour represent tens
14:46
of thousands of years of patient dripping. Now
14:50
Lehman Caves has the usual cast stalactites,
14:53
stalagmites, columns, flowstone -draped -like
14:57
curtains. But it's world -famous for something
15:00
rarer. Shields. A shield is a formation that
15:05
looks like two flat plates of stone fused together,
15:08
sticking out from a wall or ceiling at an angle,
15:10
often with stuff hanging off the lower edge.
15:14
They form when acidic water gets forced out through
15:16
a thin crack under pressure. depositing minerals
15:19
on both faces of the crack at once. They're uncommon.
15:24
Most decorated caves have a few, if any. Lehman
15:28
Caves has more than 300 of them, one of the densest
15:33
collections of shields anywhere on the planet.
15:36
That's the thing that makes cavers' jaws drop.
15:41
And the cave isn't just rock. It's alive in its
15:45
own strange way. There are species in there found
15:49
nowhere else on Earth. Tiny creatures adapted
15:53
to total darkness at a constant cool temperature.
15:57
A separate little world, sealed in the dark,
16:00
running on its own rules. When you walk through
16:04
Lehman Caves, you're a visitor in an ecosystem
16:06
that has never seen the sun. And I want you to
16:10
picture what that walk is actually like, because
16:13
it's part of why this place gets under your skin.
16:16
The cave holds a steady temperature year -round,
16:18
around 50 degrees, give or take no matter what
16:21
the desert is doing up top. It can be 105 outside,
16:26
and you step through the entrance into cool,
16:29
damp, dead -still air. It is dark in there, in
16:33
a way most people never experience. Not dim.
16:37
Not shadowy. If the lights went out, it's the
16:41
kind of total black where your eyes never adjust,
16:46
Nothing for them to catch. The early visitors
16:49
went down into that with candles and lanterns,
16:52
the flame throwing shapes across formations that
16:55
had been growing in absolute darkness for tens
16:57
of thousands of years, waiting. There's a reason
17:01
people come back up changed. Now, let's climb.
17:07
All the way up to the tree line, near the top
17:10
of the mountain, to meet the residents this park
17:13
is most famous for. Up there, in some of the
17:17
harshest ground on the whole mountain, grow the
17:20
bristlecone pines. And I have to be honest about
17:25
how they look, because it matters. They are not
17:28
majestic. They're not the tall, perfect Christmas
17:31
tree shape you're picturing. A bristlecone is
17:35
short, squat, twisted. Often, most of the tree
17:40
looks stone dead, bare wood, bleached silver.
17:44
and polished smooth by the wind, with just a
17:47
thin ribbon of living bark snaking up one side,
17:50
feeding a few green branches. They look, frankly,
17:54
half -destroyed. And that look is the whole secret.
18:01
Because these trees are the oldest individual
18:03
living things on Earth. Not the oldest by a little,
18:08
by a lot. The oldest known bristle cones have
18:13
been alive for more than 4 ,800 years. Some estimates
18:17
push past 5 ,000. Let me put that in human terms.
18:23
A tree like that was already 1 ,000 years old
18:26
when the Egyptians built the Great Pyramid. It
18:29
was middle -aged when Rome fell. Every empire
18:33
you've ever read about rose and fell while that
18:37
one tree stood on that one ridge, growing. Walk
18:41
it forward and it almost stops making sense.
18:44
While that tree was alive, writing was invented.
18:49
The wheel came into use. Bronze, then iron. The
18:54
Greeks, the Romans, the entire span of recorded
18:59
history. Every war, every king, every book ever
19:04
written. All of it happened inside the lifetime
19:06
of a single tree on a Nevada mountainside. It
19:11
is not a relic of history. It is older than history.
19:16
It was standing there before there was anyone
19:18
around to write anything down. So how? How does
19:24
anything live for 5 ,000 years? And the answer
19:28
is beautifully backwards. They live so long precisely
19:32
because they have it so hard. Think about where
19:37
they grow. Near... 11 ,000 feet. Thin, poor,
19:43
rocky soil. They actually prefer harsh ground
19:46
that chokes out competitors. Brutal cold. Howling
19:50
wind. Almost no water. A growing season that
19:56
might be a few weeks long. Nothing about that
20:00
says long life. It sounds like a death sentence.
20:05
But here's the trick. In conditions that miserable,
20:09
the bristlecone grows incredibly slowly. In a
20:13
hard year, it might add a layer of new wood thinner
20:17
than a sheet of paper. Some years, in the worst
20:21
droughts, parts of the tree don't add a ring
20:23
at all. And slow growth, in this case, is a superpower.
20:29
When you grow that slowly, your wood comes out
20:32
extremely dense. Packed tight and loaded with
20:36
resin. Dense, resinous wood is armor. It resists
20:42
rot. It resists insects. It resists fungus. The
20:48
bugs and diseases that take down a normal tree
20:50
can barely get a foothold. And there's one more
20:55
piece, and it's almost philosophical. A bristlecone
20:59
doesn't try to keep its whole body alive. When
21:03
conditions get savage, Large parts of the tree
21:06
die off. That's the bleached, dead -looking wood.
21:11
But the tree keeps a narrow strip of living tissue
21:14
running from a few roots up to a few branches,
21:17
and it sacrifices the rest. So that dead wood
21:21
isn't failure. It's strategy. The tree keeps
21:25
the ratio of living tissue tiny, which means
21:28
it needs very little water and energy to keep
21:30
going. It lets most of itself die. so a sliver
21:35
of itself can live for thousands of years. There's
21:41
a survival lesson buried in that, and I'm not
21:43
going to oversell it, but I'll say it once. The
21:46
bristlecone doesn't endure by being big or fast
21:49
or strong. It endures by being patient, efficient,
21:54
and willing to let go of what it can't keep.
21:57
Hard country doesn't always kill the things that
22:00
live in it. Sometimes it's the reason they last.
22:05
Now, here's where these trees become priceless
22:07
to science. A bristlecone isn't just old, it's
22:12
a record, a written history of the climate. Every
22:17
year, the tree lays down a growth ring, and the
22:21
width of that ring tells you what kind of year
22:23
it was. A wet, warm year, a fatter ring. A cold,
22:29
dry, hard year, a thin one, or none at all. So
22:33
the rings are a year -by -year diary of drought
22:36
and storm and recovery, written in wood. And
22:40
scientists figured out something ingenious. You
22:43
take the rings from living trees, then you find
22:46
dead bristlecone wood, and remember, that wood
22:49
resists rot for thousands of years. And you overlap
22:53
the ring patterns, like matching the torn edges
22:55
of two pages. Match enough pieces, living and
23:00
dead. and you build one continuous calendar,
23:03
stretching back almost 9 ,000 years. An unbroken
23:08
year -by -year record of the climate, older than
23:10
civilization itself. That record became one of
23:15
the most important tools in all of science. Among
23:19
other things, it's what let researchers correct
23:21
and calibrate radiocarbon dating, the method
23:25
used to date archaeological finds all over the
23:28
world. So a twisted little tree on a Nevada mountaintop
23:32
helped fix the clock that archaeologists use
23:35
to date human history everywhere. That is not
23:39
an exaggeration. These trees are that important.
23:44
Let me take you to one more feature up high,
23:46
because it shouldn't exist here at all. Tucked
23:50
into a bowl just below the summit of Wheeler
23:52
Peak, in the cold shadow of the cliffs, there
23:56
is a glacier. A small one, but a real one. The
24:00
only glacier in Nevada. In one of the driest
24:04
states in the country, on the edge of a desert,
24:07
there is permanent ice. It's a leftover. A survivor
24:13
from the Ice Age. Because 20 ,000 years ago,
24:18
this whole region was a very different place.
24:21
The climate was colder and far wetter. The high
24:25
peaks of the Snake Range were capped in ice.
24:27
and glaciers ground their way down the mountainsides.
24:31
And glaciers are landscapers? A moving river
24:35
of ice scrapes out the rock beneath it, carving
24:38
distinctive bowl -shaped hollows high on a mountain.
24:42
Geologists call them cirques. When the ice later
24:45
melts, those bowls often fill with water. So
24:50
when you hike to the beautiful alpine lakes up
24:53
there, Stella Lake, Teresa Lake, you're standing
24:56
in scoops. that were gouged out by Ice Age glaciers.
24:59
The lakes are filled in cirques. And that little
25:04
glacier still hanging on beneath Wheeler Peak
25:07
is the last working remnant of the ice that shaped
25:10
the whole top of the mountain, a piece of the
25:14
Ice Age that simply never finished melting. Down
25:18
in those same Ice Age valleys, by the way, the
25:21
wetter climate filled the basins with enormous
25:24
lakes. Whole valleys that are bone dry today
25:27
were once deep blue water. The salt flats you
25:31
cross now are the dried out beds of lakes that
25:34
vanished when the ice age ended. The land remembers
25:37
the water, even where the water is long gone.
25:41
And all of this, the depth of the cave, the height
25:45
of the peak, the leftover ice, creates the thing
25:50
I find most remarkable about Great Basin as a
25:53
living place. You can pass through almost every
25:57
climate in western North America by climbing
26:00
one mountain. Start at the bottom in the valley.
26:05
That's high desert sagebrush, hardpan, heat,
26:08
the domain of things built for drought. Start
26:11
driving up, and you climb into piñon and juniper
26:14
woodland. Keep going, and the air cools, and
26:17
you hit tall pine and fir forest, like something
26:20
out of the northern Rockies. Higher still, the
26:24
aspens. the alpine meadows, and then near the
26:27
top, the bristlecones and the bare, frozen, treeless
26:31
tundra of the summit. Desert to Arctic, in a
26:36
few thousand feet of climbing. Scientists have
26:40
a name for a mountain like this. A sky island.
26:45
Picture it. A tall, cool, wet, forested mountain,
26:50
surrounded on every side by a sea of hot, dry
26:53
desert. For a cold adapted plant or animal living
26:57
up high, that desert is as impossible to cross
27:00
as an ocean. So they're marooned up there, stranded
27:05
on an island in the sky, cut off from the next
27:08
mountain by miles of desert they can't survive.
27:11
And over thousands of years, isolated like that,
27:15
populations drift and adapt and sometimes become
27:17
unique to that one range. That's why these ranges
27:22
matter so much more. than their size suggests.
27:25
Each one is its own isolated arc. Great Basin
27:30
National Park protects one of the finest of them.
27:33
A single mountain holding a desert, a forest,
27:36
an alpine zone, a glacier, and a cave, all stacked
27:41
on top of each other. There are not many places
27:44
on Earth where you can stand in a heat haze in
27:46
the morning and on Arctic tundra by afternoon
27:49
on the same slope. End. Some of what's marooned
27:54
up there is left over from the Ice Age itself.
27:57
When the climate was cold and wet, cold -loving
28:00
plants and animals spread down across the whole
28:03
region. Then the world warmed, the desert moved
28:07
back in down low, and those cold -adapted species
28:11
retreated up the mountains, chasing the cool
28:14
air higher and higher, until they ran out of
28:17
mountain. So in a sense, the top of Wheeler Peak
28:21
is a refuge. A little pocket of the Ice Age that's
28:25
been hiding up high for 10 ,000 years, surrounded
28:28
by a desert that would kill it. The bristlecones
28:32
are part of that story. So are the alpine wildflowers,
28:37
the cold water creatures in those glacial lakes,
28:41
things that have no business being in Nevada,
28:43
and are only there because the mountain is tall
28:45
enough to keep a piece of a colder world alive.
28:50
So, that's the place. Half a billion years of
28:54
it. Before we finally get to the people, stand
28:58
here one more minute after dark. Because Great
29:02
Basin is one of the darkest places left in the
29:05
United States. No cities for a hundred miles
29:08
in any direction. Dry desert air, high elevation.
29:12
The conditions for a night sky most Americans
29:15
have simply never seen. On a clear, moonless
29:19
night here, you don't look up at a few scattered
29:22
stars. You look up into thousands of them, the
29:26
Milky Way thrown straight across the sky like
29:28
a band of smoke, bright enough to cast a faint
29:32
shadow. And here's the deep time kicker. Some
29:36
of that starlight has been traveling toward your
29:38
eye for thousands of years. You're standing among
29:42
trees, 5 ,000 years old, on rock half a billion
29:46
years old, looking at light. that left its star
29:50
before that tree ever sprouted. This whole park,
29:54
top to bottom, ground to sky, is a machine for
29:58
feeling how small a human lifetime really is.
30:02
And that's the right frame for the last part
30:05
of our story. The people, because every bit of
30:09
human history here fits into the very last sliver
30:12
of all of that. People have lived in and traveled
30:16
through this country. for well over 10 ,000 years.
30:20
The Nui, the Western Shoshone, and the Nuu, the
30:24
Southern Paiute, and the Ute peoples. And living
30:27
here took genius, because this land gives up
30:30
nothing easily. Remember everything we just covered,
30:35
the scarce water, the wild swings between desert
30:38
heat and alpine cold, the food spread thin across
30:41
a dozen life zones. The people who lived here
30:44
turned all of that into a system. They moved
30:48
with the seasons. Spring in the valleys and wetlands
30:52
for greens and waterfowl. Up the mountain through
30:55
the year, following the ripening and the game.
30:58
And in the fall, the centerpiece, the piñon pine
31:03
harvest. Those same piñon woodlands we drove
31:07
through on the way up the mountain produced a
31:10
nut rich enough to store and live on through
31:13
winter. A good pine nut year meant survival.
31:17
A bad one meant a brutal season ahead. They knew
31:21
every spring and seep on the range where it was,
31:24
when it ran, when it failed. A map carried in
31:28
the head passed down across generations. They
31:32
read this mountain top to bottom the way you'd
31:35
read a familiar book. And their descendants are
31:38
still here, still tied to this land. When we
31:42
talk about Great Basin National Park, we are
31:45
standing on ancestral homeland. That's not a
31:49
footnote. That's the oldest human fact of the
31:52
place. Which brings us, at last, to the cave
31:58
and paper part of the story. And it goes faster
32:01
than you'd think, because most of it happened
32:04
in a single lifetime. Absalom Lehman, our man
32:09
with the lantern, did the decent thing when he
32:11
found his cave in the 1880s. He showed people.
32:15
He started guiding visitors down by candlelight,
32:18
charging a dollar a head. One of the first tourism
32:22
operations in this whole empty quarter of Nevada.
32:26
And that exposed the central tension that runs
32:29
under every public land story in the West. What
32:33
is a place like this for? Because the same mountains
32:37
were wanted for mining the West ran on silver
32:39
and lead and tungsten. and for ranching cattle
32:43
and sheep needed the range. And now, this newer,
32:47
stranger idea that a place could be worth more,
32:51
left alone, worth protecting just for what it
32:55
is. Extract it, graze it, or protect it. That
33:01
three -way fight runs through the entire history
33:03
of the American West, and Great Basin is where
33:07
you watch it play out. Protection won its first
33:11
round in 1922 when the cave was made a national
33:15
monument. But notice what that protected. Just
33:19
the cave. A small pocket around the entrance.
33:24
The mountain above it, the bristle cones, the
33:26
glacier, the alpine lakes, the sky island, all
33:29
of it was left wide open. And it stayed that
33:33
way for decades. And then... In 1964, the thing
33:40
happened that changed everything. It involves
33:44
one of those ancient trees we spent so long with.
33:47
And I want to tell it carefully, because it's
33:50
easy to tell badly. A graduate student named
33:54
Donald Curry was up near the tree line on Wheeler
33:56
Peak, studying the climate of the last ice age,
33:59
using exactly the tree ring methods we just talked
34:02
about. He was working with the bristle cones,
34:05
including one particularly ancient tree. later
34:08
named Prometheus. The exact sequence of that
34:12
day has been argued over ever since. The accepted
34:16
version, a coring tool got stuck or broke in
34:20
the tree, and with the approval of the Forest
34:23
Service, which managed the land then, the tree
34:26
was cut down so its full record could be read.
34:31
They counted the rings in the stump. and the
34:35
numbers stopped everyone cold. This tree was
34:40
somewhere around 4 ,900 years old, possibly more
34:44
than 5 ,000. It was, as far as anyone knew, the
34:49
oldest living thing on the planet, and it had
34:53
just been cut down. I'm not here to pile on one
34:58
young scientist. Nobody that day knew they were
35:02
standing in front of a world record. It looked
35:05
like many other trees in the grove. The agency
35:08
signed off. Curry carried it the rest of his
35:12
life. That's the hard truth of it. It wasn't
35:16
cruelty. It was not knowing, not understanding
35:20
what was there until it was on the ground and
35:22
counted. But the story got out, and it would
35:26
not let go of people. The oldest living thing
35:30
on Earth, gone. and the protected monument down
35:33
the hill had only ever covered the cave, never
35:36
the trees. Prometheus became a symbol, proof
35:42
in the starkest possible form that this mountain
35:45
held things that were irreplaceable, and that
35:48
protecting only the cave had left the real treasures
35:51
exposed. From there, the long campaign finally
35:57
found its feet. The idea... Of a full Great Basin
36:01
National Park, the whole mountain, not just the
36:03
cave, had been floated since the 1920s and had
36:06
failed again and again. Ranchers feared losing
36:10
grazing. Mining interests wanted the ground open.
36:14
And in Nevada, where the federal government already
36:18
manages around 80 % of the land, plenty of people
36:21
are wary on principle of Washington locking up
36:24
more. Those were, and are, real. concerns. Creating
36:31
a park changes somebody's access. The fight wasn't
36:36
villains versus heroes. It was a genuine argument
36:39
about what the land is for and who decides. The
36:44
person who finally pushed it through was a Nevada
36:46
senator named Harry Reid. Years of coalition
36:50
building and compromise, letting some existing
36:52
uses continue, drawing boundaries smaller than
36:55
some wanted. That's how these things actually
36:58
get done. Not clean, not perfect, but done. On
37:06
the 27th of October 1986, President Ronald Reagan
37:09
signed it into law. Great Basin National Park.
37:14
77 ,000 acres. The cave, the bristle cones, Wheeler
37:20
Peak, the glacier, the alpine lakes, the whole
37:24
sky island. finally protected together as one
37:27
thing, the way the mountain always was one thing.
37:30
One of the youngest national parks in the country,
37:33
and still one of the least visited, which, if
37:39
you ask me, is part of its gift. So look at the
37:43
whole arc one more time, and notice the proportions.
37:47
Half a billion years to make the rock. Tens of
37:51
millions to lift the range. Hundreds of thousands
37:55
to dig the cave. 5 ,000 years in a single tree.
37:59
10 ,000 years of people reading this land. And
38:04
then at the very, very end, a few decades of
38:08
argument and one signature in 1986. That's the
38:13
human chapter. The last sentence on the last
38:16
page of a very long book. That's... the history
38:22
of Great Basin. The real history, the sea, the
38:27
stretch, the cave, the trees, the ice, and the
38:32
short, recent human business of finally deciding
38:35
it was worth keeping. Next episode, part two,
38:40
we get practical. How to actually get to Baker,
38:44
Nevada off the loneliest road in America. How
38:48
to book a Lehman Caves tour before it sells out.
38:51
The drive up Wheeler Peak, the walk through the
38:54
Bristlecone Grove, and what it really takes to
38:56
stand on that summit. And because so much of
39:00
this park is best seen after dark, some of the
39:04
blackest, clearest night skies left in the country.
39:07
We'll talk about that too. Everything we covered
39:11
today, maps, conditions, full written guides,
39:14
lives at wildlandsnews .com. And since... Wheeler
39:19
Peak tops out over 13 ,000 feet. The survival
39:23
episode after this series is on altitude. What
39:28
thin air actually does to your body and how to
39:31
stay ahead of it. If you're going up that mountain,
39:34
that one's for you. I'm Sean Spanauer. This has
39:40
been Wildlands. Know the land before you reach
39:47
it. I'll see you on the next one.