Great Basin National Park

Near the treeline of Wheeler Peak grow some of the oldest living things on Earth. Great Basin bristlecone pines, twisted and polished by wind, survive for thousands of years on the thin limestone soils of the South Snake Range, and one tree cut here in 1964, later known as Prometheus, was nearly 5,000 years old. The park rises from sagebrush flats to the 13,063-foot (3,982 m) summit of Wheeler Peak, whose cirque shelters the small Wheeler Peak Glacier. Its remote setting near the Utah border also gives it some of the darkest night skies in the contiguous United States.

The park's core began as Lehman Caves National Monument, proclaimed in 1922 to protect a marble cave richly decorated with stalactites and more than 300 rare shield formations. Congress expanded the monument into a 121-square-mile (312 km²) national park on October 27, 1986. It sits within the Great Basin, the vast region of interior drainage between the Sierra Nevada and the Wasatch Range, where rivers never reach the sea. The nearest town is tiny Baker, Nevada, and the park draws far fewer visitors than better-known western parks.

• Nevada
  The Silver State, the driest in the nation located in
• The Great Basin
  The vast interior where no rivers reach the sea located in
• Utah
  The Beehive State, red rock and the Great Salt Lake near
• The Basin and Range
  The stretched crust of parallel desert ranges and valleys part of