Great Basin National Park - the middle of...

NOWHERE! Don't get me wrong, it was fabulous, but when even Andy says he wouldn't live there, you know it's in BFE. Andy says it reminds him a lot of the Ruby Mountains...evidently there's a lot of nothing in Nevada, except for in the mountains. The colors were gorgeous, for you leaf peepers, we were flying low up and down the road into our camp and didn't get the red, but I'm including some yellow. All the leaves had pretty much dropped off the aspens by the time we left Monday morning.

We had some great hikes, one up from our camp to an old tungsten mining town with a lake at about 10,700. We will go back sometime and climb up and over the ridge to another lake, but we don't think we can take Sarah on that one.











Sarah was happy though, that we found snow - her favorite thing.









We also hiked up to Lexington Arch, which was a shorter (but steeper) ascent, and that's where these other shots were taken. It was REALLY windy at the arch, but the canyon up there was amazing!












The glacier is on Wheeler Peak (13,000) feet roughly...it's in the middle of the park. Looks like a good hike - in the SUMMER! It was so cold up there that they'd already closed the campground. We also practiced our "professional" photography... so there were LOTS of pictures taken in 4 days, but we won't share them all.






We celebrated our anniversary (Andy cooks a mean steak, and Dee sent sangria!), and then the next day was Sarah's birthday. She got bacon - that was a SERIOUS treat. She NEVER gets people food from us.

Here's the damage report: 1) the pump mechanism on the duel fuel lantern has finally gone caput, 2) there's a major leak in the air mattress - the good one, but at least it waited until Sunday night to appear, 3) very sore calves for a couple of days (mostly the downhill), and 4) the Coleman chairs officially went in the garbage when we came home (mechanical failure). Other than that...awesome trip. Back to school was a reality check on Tuesday (for me, we came home Monday morning for Andy's Bio class), but now that the week's over, I'm not sure where it went.