This week I'm in Great Basin National Park in Nevada.

You likely don't know much about this park if you've even heard of it at all.

It sits equidistant from Las Vegas and Salt Lake City.

And getting here isn't easy.

It's quite a long drive from either place.

One of the routes you can take is along the loneliest highway in America.

I came here from Los Angeles via Las Vegas, and as soon as I left those cities behind, it was open road for hours and hours.

This park has some incredibly surprising landscapes and stuff that you would likely not expect in Nevada.

There are alpine lakes, some of the oldest trees in the world, a glacier which you can see a little bit of behind me, and some of America's darkest skies.

I'm Alice Ford and we're back in Northern Norway.

This is the Garden Island, Kauai, Hawaii.

As you guys can see, it is absolutely beautiful down here.

The views are just already stunning.

And we are on our way to Antarctica.

So right now we're having a traditional tea here.

Wow.

There's a road in Nevada called The Loneliest Road in America.

That's not a nickname somebody made up.

The federal government actually put this on a map this way.

U.S.

route 50 cuts east across the state through almost nothing.

And somewhere along that, nothing.

Sitting exactly.

Almost halfway between Las Vegas and Salt Lake City is a national park that most people have never heard of.

So after hours of driving the open road, you hit the last stop before the park, the teeny tiny town of Baker.

Take a quick stop here for a peek into the visitor center.

For a map and some context about what you're about to drive into, and then make a turn onto the Wheeler Peak Scenic Drive.

This scenic drive starts almost immediately once here in the park.

You turn off the main highway, the pavement narrows, and within the first mile you can already feel the elevation starting to pull the desert apart.

The sagebrush is still out the window, but the mountains are right there ahead of you, and they are much bigger than they looked from the highway.

The elevation gain on this drive is equivalent of driving from Nevada desert floor to somewhere close to the Canadian Rockies in terms of climate.

By the time you reach the top of the road, you've left the desert entirely.

The valley floor you see below is classic Great Basin desert.

Sagebrush, Shadescale, open sky in every direction.

It looks exactly like what you'd expect Nevada to look like.

But the thing about Basin and Range country is that those long, flat valleys are separated by fault block mountains.

Ranges that got pushed straight up as the crust stretched apart over millions of years.

We're up above 9000ft now, and one of the prominent things you see along this drive is the view of Wheeler Peak, which you can see behind me.

This is the second tallest mountain in the entire state of Nevada, sitting at 13,063ft.

And this mountain in particular, this range, the Snake Range, actually creates its own weather.

So while it might be hot and dry down in the valley up here, you could have rain or even snow.

This whole mountain range sits in what's called a rain shadow.

Storms moving inland from the Pacific lose most of their moisture crossing the Sierra Nevada and the ranges beyond it, which is why the valley floor down there gets almost no rain.

But at this elevation, enough precipitation falls and stays a snowpack long enough to feed a glacier that is sat on the north face of Wheeler Peak since the last ice age.

This is an area of America that has seen the climate change drastically over its millennia, about 11 to 30,000 years ago.

These valleys actually would have been filled with shallow lakes, and there would have been an abundant amount of large animal life.

Sabertooth cats and American lions wandered this very valley floor during the Pleistocene age.

Since then, the climate has warmed considerably.

Those lakes that once filled this valley were part of a vast network of ice age lakes across the Great Basin, including the massive Lake Bonneville to the east.

Ten times the size of today's Great Salt Lake and Lake Lahontan to the west, which at its highest standard have submerged present day Reno and Carson City entirely.

As the planet pulled out of the last glacial period roughly 11,000 years ago, temperatures rose, rainfall declined, and those lakes began to shrink and disappear.

The water retreated upward.

What's left of that wetter world today survives only at elevation in small alpine lakes like Stella and Teresa, fed by snowmelt instead of rainfall carved into the mountain by glaciers that no longer exist.

The valley floor below tells the rest of the story.

What was once lake bed is now a sagebrush desert.

The animals that depend on that water the camels, the horses, the mammoths, the giant ground sloths, and the saber toothed cats and lions that hunted them were all gone within a few thousand years of the lakes disappearing.

Whether it was the climate, the arrival of early humans, or both.

Scientists still debate it.

What isn't debated is the result.

What you're looking at down there isn't just a dry valley.

It's a floor of a vanished world.

Last year, this park saw just 150,000 people.

Some more popular parks.

See that?

Many people in a weekend.

So this park is definitely a place where you are likely not to run into a lot of crowds.

Because of that, it's also one of the few parks in America that also has no entry fee.

You will still need reservations if you plan on camping, but other than that, it's a great place to explore and this park is going to surprise you because it has some incredible ecosystems that you would never expect here in Nevada.

The scenic drive ends here, right at the base of the Wheeler Peak Campground, and also the starting point for several of the park's best hiking trails.

I'm heading up the Alpine Lakes Trail.

This is less than three miles and only has about 400ft of elevation gain.

But because we're sitting at just under 10,000ft, if you're not used to the elevation, this trail is going to feel like a struggle, even though it's not that steep.

I'm also currently pregnant, so I'm likely going to be huffing and puffing a little bit more than I normally would, so I'm taking things a little bit more easily than I often do in my videos.

Wheeler Peak will likely have to wait for another visit, but this trail is spectacular and there are a lot of other trails here in the park for easy and moderate hikes.

I'm really excited to see the alpine lakes at the end of this one, and I can't wait to see what else we see along the way.

The trail starts in thick subalpine forest, Engelmann, Spruce, and White fur and for the first stretch it feels like walking through shade.

The path is rocky, but not technical.

At this elevation, you notice your breathing before you notice the grade.

Great Basin sits in a college.

It's called a sky island, a mountain range so isolated from other ranges that the plants and animals living at its upper elevations are effectively cut off from similar habitat anywhere nearby.

The Snake Range rises alone out of a sea of desert, and the species that made it up here long ago have been adapting in place ever since.

Some of them found nowhere else on the planet.

One of those is the Pika, a small rabbit relative that lives in the rock field near the tree line and is acutely sensitive to temperature.

Pikas can overheat in conditions that would barely register as warm to a human, and researchers tracked them here as an early warning system for warming alpine environments.

They make a short, sharp call when startled, and it's definitely worth listening for.

There's a specific kind of quiet that happens on trails that don't get much use.

No voices ahead of you or behind you, just the wind moving through the fir trees and whatever you brought with you in your head.

The Alpine Lakes Trail on a summer weekday is that kind of quiet.

This part gets compared a lot to more famous neighbors.

Zion, Bryce, Arches all within a reasonable drive, but all significantly more visited.

What those comparisons miss, is that the solitude here isn't a consolation prize.

It's the whole point.

The trails are empty because almost nobody comes, and that is worth telling people.

These are the moments on trips like this that I absolutely love.

When nature shows you something that most people have no idea exist.

Here we are in one of the driest states in America, sitting next to an alpine lake, its basin carved by glaciers thousands of years ago, and the mountain range here carved by ice that seldom remains anywhere today.

Just a little that remaining which we will be seeing tomorrow.

Despite how dry this whole state looks from a distance, this park alone supports more than 800 plant species, and keep watching the ridgelines as you hike around.

Sometimes there's golden eagles riding the thermals up there, and you might even catch a Clark's nutcracker, a bird best known for spreading whitebark pine seeds, but it helps spread bristlecone seeds too.

Just past Stella Lake is Theresa Lake one of the other alpine lakes on this loop trail.

It's a little bit more tucked into the trees, but just as scenic in its own way, and the perfect spot for a last reflection before heading back to camp.

All right.

What a great first day here in the park.

I'm now at my campsite here at the Wheeler Peak Campground.

There are a lot of sites here, I think around 30 for both tent camping and RVs.

I'm going to put my tent over here in this flat spot, but I'm kind of tucked behind this beautiful meadow with aspen trees, and I'm sure we're going to be seeing some deer overnight.

It's about 6:45 right now, so perfect timing on getting here to camp.

I've got plenty of time to get the tent set up, get some food going and settle in for the night.

I think I spent more nights alone in a tent than with anyone else, and I mean that as a compliment to my tent.

There is something about a solo trip that I genuinely cannot recommend enough, and I'm aware that sounds like the kind of thing people say and don't mean, but I mean it.

When you travel with someone else, even someone you love, there's always a negotiation happening.

Where to go next, when to eat.

Whether that view is worth the extra mile when you're alone, all of that disappears.

You move at exactly your own pace.

You stop when something is worth stopping for, and you keep going when it isn't.

Nobody is waiting on you, and you're not waiting on anybody.

But it's more than just logistics.

There's a quality of attention that only seems to show up when I'm by myself.

Outdoors, I notice more, I think more clearly the kind of thinking that feels impossible to do in front of a screen or in a conversation the slow, unhurried kind.

When you're not performing your thoughts for anyone else, it just happens automatically.

Out here.

You daydream, you solve things without trying.

You just exist in a place for a while, which sounds simple and is somehow very hard to do in regular life.

I don't know if it's the quiet, are the altitude or the fact that there's genuinely nothing to do after dark but look up, but probably all three Great Basin National Park is an international dark sky preserve.

There aren't a lot of these in America, but the ones that you will find her usually in pretty remote places.

In order to be categorized as one of these, you have to be devoid of almost all light pollution.

So parks like this one also Canyonlands in Utah and some others are international dark sky reserves.

This one actually has a night sky viewing area near the Lehman Cave Visitor Center.

But up here at this campground, it's also a fantastic place to watch the stars.

It's an incredibly clear night.

There's just a little bit of a sliver of a moon out there, so I'm really excited for full darkness to come so that we can be amazed by the Twilight Sparkle of the galaxy.

Once the sun goes down here, you'll understand why Great Basin became an international dark sky park back in 2016.

There's no light pollution here for miles in any direction.

They even run a whole astronomy festival up here every September with rangers running telescopes, which tells you people take this sky seriously.

I got out of my tent around 2 a.m.

when I knew the skies would be dark, and I was shocked by the sheer number of stars in the sky.

It might just be one of the best displays of stars I've seen anywhere.

And that's saying something.

Good morning everybody.

I am back out exploring this morning, starting at the same trailhead that I ended on yesterday, but branching in a different direction to take you out to the bristlecone Pine grove.

This is where some of the oldest trees on Earth live, and I'm really excited to go walk among.

The Bristlecone trail branches off from the same trailhead as the Alpine Lakes Loop, but it climbs in a different direction, gaining about 600ft over roughly two and a half miles one way.

In the first section, the trail moves through familiar subalpine forests, the same species I slept under the night before.

Then gradually the trees change the spruce and further now and are replaced by something older, looking more weathered, with a completely different relationship to the landscape.

Bristlecone pines don't grow in stands the way other conifers do.

They grow individually, spaced out across exposed ridgelines and rocky slopes, each one in its own negotiation with wind, frost and thin soil.

As they've come up on the hillside here with great views of Wheeler Peak, we are now seeing a lot of this bristlecone pine grove.

Now, these trees said to be some of the oldest in the world.

And you can tell the difference between the bristlecone pine and a lot of other pine trees, because honestly, they look almost dead.

Kind of think like, if Nosferatu was real, what he would look like as a human if he was 4000 years old now, bristlecone pines said to be somewhere between 3700 and 4200 years old, predating written history of humankind.

And they grow in really inhospitable areas.

Point being this very rocky and inhospitable area, in this gully here, there's almost no soil.

It's just giant rocks.

So you wouldn't think that any trees could survive here.

But the bristlecones grow incredibly slowly.

So they are very hardy.

They're very resistant to climate change, to drought, to fire, and they're pretty incredible species.

So these are a form of non-clonal tree which means that they grow from one root one seed.

And when that tree dies there's no hope in it being regrown.

Now there's another form of tree called the clonal tree.

And I'm going to tell you a little bit more about those too.

Clonal trees like aspens have massive underground root systems that can support not just one tree but hundreds or thousands.

So unless you eliminate the entire root system, these trees can spring back to life.

If you cut down nine out of ten trees.

Now, one of the largest groves on the planet of aspens has actually located not too far from here in neighboring Utah.

That grove is called Pando, and it covers more than 100 acres made up of roughly 40,000 individual trunks, all connected by a single root system, underground by total mass, and maybe the largest living organism on Earth.

And every single trunk is a perfect genetic clone of the same original tree.

One organism, 40,000 copies surviving through repetition.

It's a remarkable strategy for outlasting time.

I've just reached the top of the trail and the loop trail that goes through a lot of the bristlecones here.

There's plenty of interpretive signage to help you learn more about this tree species, which grows between 9000 and 11,500ft.

Now, there's about 10,000 acres of these trees here in this park.

And these trees are just incredible.

Some of them 3, 4000 years old, because they grow in really harsh conditions.

They grow extremely slowly, sometimes only one inch every 100 years.

The Great Basin bristlecone pine, Pinus longaeva is found only in the high desert ranges of California, Utah, and Nevada.

The oldest confirmed specimens alive today are roughly 5000 years old, a number that becomes more real the closer you get.

One of the most famous bristlecone pines was a tree called Prometheus, and it came from this grove right here.

In 1964, a researcher named Donald Currie was studying climate history.

By coring trees in this exact grove, his tool broke stuck inside a tree the Forest Service had cataloged as WPN-114 the tree locals called Prometheus.

He applied to cut it down to get a full cross-section.

The Forest Service approved it the same day when Currie counted the rings.

The number was 4862, possibly more since the center of the trunk was gone.

Prometheus was the oldest individual living organism ever confirmed on Earth.

This tree so old that it was alive at the same time the wheel was being invented in Mesopotamia.

It had been alive through the rise and fall of every major civilization in recorded history.

It was standing here on this exact mountain before written language existed, and it came down because of a broken tool and a permit that took less than a day to approve.

There is no marker where Prometheus stood, but every tree around me in this grove is the exact reason one isn't needed today.

Almost all the bristlecones have these scars from their long history here on Earth, from fire, from drought, and it's pretty incredible to see them.

To touch their bark and to realize how long they've been here.

Bristlecone pines aren't the only incredible thing in this park.

There's also something even more rare.

That's Nevada's last remaining glacier.

So I'm continuing up the trail to show it to you, because this is something I think we have to see with our own eyes.

Who knows how much longer it's going to exist.

Well, here we are at Nevada's last glacier, and calling it a glacier at this point is a little generous.

It's been melting for decades.

Almost no snow remains, which is why scientists actually call this now a rock glacier.

What's easy to forget standing up here is that this mountain is not just what you can see.

Above the treeline.

You have ice, snowpack, exposed granite, a glacier that has been retreating for decades and may not survive another generation of warming.

Scientists estimate it has lost more than half its mass since the late 1800s.

What remains is mostly rock held together by ice underneath, which is why it's now technically classified as a rock glacier rather than an active one.

It is still a glacier.

It just isn't the glacier it used to be.

Below the surface, though.

The mountain tells a completely different story, underneath this same range, carved slowly over 2 to 5 million years by moisture dissolving limestone and marble from the inside out is one of the most significant cave systems in the American West.

Lehman caves, 60 known rooms, more than two miles of mapped passages, and a collection of formations so dense that early explorers reportedly described the cave walls as almost completely covered floor to ceiling with stalactites, stalagmites, and structures called cave shields found almost nowhere else on Earth.

Something pretty special lurks right behind this door, and it was something that I really was excited to show you.

It's called Lehman Caves.

It's an underground network of caverns, and it's one of the reasons Great Basin became a national park.

A farmer discovered the caverns back in the 1880s, and tours have been run here since around 1884.

If you want to experience those caverns, you can take a Ranger led tours.

Unfortunately, my timing was not great this week because they're upgrading a very ancient lighting system inside the caverns, which has been there since around the 1940s, so the caverns are currently closed.

If you are coming to the park, however, you can sign up for tours on recreation.gov.

They will be closing the caverns intermittently throughout 2026, but usually opening them on the weekend, so make sure you check the schedule, look ahead and they do reserve a couple of spots here at the visitor center as well, but it's a really amazing underground network of caverns, some really unique and endemic species that live within the caverns as well.

So if you're coming here to the park, it's an absolute must.

If you come here in the 1920s.

This is actually one of the cabins you could have stayed at when you came to visit Lehman Caves.

It only cost a dollar and, probably not up to par with where most people want to stay these days.

But back in those days, it would have been a pretty rustic and unique experience, to say the least.

This is also where I am going to say goodbye to all of you.

Thank you so much for joining me on another adventure, this time in Great Basin National Park.

You know, we slept under the stars.

We did some beautiful hikes to some incredibly unique landscapes and ecosystems, and I can't wait to be back with somebody else to explore this national park again.