Night
We gazed for a good 20 minutes until a park cop roused us from our reverie, nudging us out of the picnic area as official hours ended. However, we found a nearby vantage point just outside the park, a gravel lot where astronomy buffs and nightside shutterbugs often set up telescopes and cameras that look achingly fragile, complex and expensive. But we had the area to ourselves; no car domelights or cell phone screens to poke holes in this inky, gathering scrim. We’d never been so excited to see the somethingness of so much nothing. There was a dare in it; we were giddy to see just how dark it would get. The starlight emerges with a sense of aggression. Yes, we all mentally supply the word “twinkle” when it comes to stars, but there’s no temptation (or reason) to use that here. The stars flare in varying intensities, giving you a sense of space’s ferocious depths. Never mind constellations. There are so many stars that the constellations get crowded out of the visual field as laughable human constructs, quaint organizational schemes. But what’s with that errant smear of fog muddying the view? It’s a mistlike ribbon that neatly spans the whole sky like a stripe on a beach ball. That’s the Milky Way.
Day
I’ll get off the sky in a minute, but first let me point out how the clouds at Great Basin have this juicy, tufted quality like someone spooned dollops of cream on a painting. That’s what we saw on the drive into the park to hike the Alpine Loops trail. This moderate hike takes you through a forest of Ponderosas creaking in the breeze and elm trees — which, at this time, were starting to drop soft, leathery yellow leaves that look like gold coins. (And some of the plush glens with their meandering, stonechoked streams are so mythically green that you half-expect a leprechaun to startle you on the path.) The trail connects with a few small brook-fed lakes: Stella, a murmuring gray-green lake bordered by chocolatebrown boulders, lined with Ponderosas that look like they’ve stopped in mid-march to the edge of the water. Not far is Lake Teresa, a gravelly bowl fed by a crooked stream, where we saw two mule deer shyly step down for a drink.
66 | Desert
Companion | OCTOBER 2012
People
On the way back, we ran into a park ranger on the trail, who stopped to offer advice on the area’s best photo ops. The park rangers are worth mentioning because they’re avatars of eerie near-perfection, looking like catalog models in their trim beige and green outfits, tucked and tailored, complete with the trademark broad-brimmed hat. They’re unflappably cheerful and indulgent as saints when being asked dumb questions. Some, in their more casual moments, talk about flora and fauna like surf bums, riffing on where to find “gorgeous b-cones” — that is, bristlecones — the noble and twisted ogrekings that live quiet and mighty at the higher elevations. If you play your cards right, you might score an invitation to a park ranger’s house. In this world, their fancy telescopes have the equivalent cachet and appeal of a great wine cellar. Great Basin National Park Superintendent Andy Ferguson says, “This is how national parks used to be. You feel like you have it to yourself. You’re not a number. You’re not crowded.” With only 90,000 people visiting a year, it can afford such boutique charms.
Night II
At night, townies often gather at the bar at the Border Inn, a nearby motel. There, you’ll find young hikers, old bikers, ranchers and water activists sipping wine and plotting the latest countermoves against Pat Mulroy’s pipeline plan, which aims to draw