(bright music) - [Male Narrator] Support for wild Nevada memories is provided by the William Pennington foundation.

(bright music) - [Female Narrator] Millie Hopper and Millard Reed.

- [Male Narrator] Gail and John Sande.

- [Female Narrator] Margaret and Charles Burback.

- [Male Narrator] And by individual members.

(bright music) - [Male Narrator] It's been 20 years since Wild Nevada first appeared on public television.

Over the years, many people have asked what's it like to travel around and make the show.

So let's celebrate the 20th anniversary by reliving one of our favorite adventures and sharing some Wild Nevada memories.

(bright music) - Hi, welcome to Wild Nevada, I'm Chris Orr.

- And I'm Dave Santina, and we're joined by ranger Rob Ewing, Great Basin National Park, he's gonna take us on a cultural and geologic walk through time.

Rob, where are we gonna go today?

- We're gonna start at the top of Mount Washington.

We're gonna walk along the Highland Ridge.

One of the highest points of the park.

- It was a two day trip and it was from 9,500 feet to 11,500 feet.

And I think this one was the most physically challenging episode we did.

- This is my favorite spot in the whole park of all the places this is where I love to go.

This is my favorite.

- So how long a hike are we looking at total?

- It's approximately nine miles.

We're gonna descend about 4,600 feet in elevation.

So it's gonna be a tough one.

- It was gonna be a fairly extreme trip, because anything you did with Rob Ewing was, it was an adventure and it was pretty extreme.

(bright music) - We're gonna turn, that's Kirkby ranch.

It's kind of a neat landmark, because a lot of people, I mean, I can't prove it, but a lot of people say that the guy has his mailbox built on a bristlecone pine tree stump.

You know, he probably got it 70, 50 years ago whatever, but it's kind of the landmark for knowing when to turn.

- This was a hairy drive going up the side of this mountain.

If you have never been on a switchback like this before like I had not, it was pretty intense.

- [Dave] Not long before Rob stops and show us a relic of the areas of old mining days.

- We're gonna stop right here and we'll walk back over there.

And these are really interesting log cabins because if you'll look, when we get up here, how they cut these logs, they didn't use any saw.

It was all done with an ax.

- An ax cut.

- These some gnarly people, I can't believe it.

- [Dave] You can see that, the sharp edges where they were cut, the points.

- Yeah.

Another neat thing that's a feature about these cabins is they have a stoves back in them here.

And these fireplace halved in stores.

- Had we known what was ahead of us that day, and on that hike, I think we would have just jumped into the hike and not wasted any time.

Even as cool as the cabins were.

I think in retrospect, we probably would have just jumped in and tried to maximize every second, and every minute we could have on the trail.

(Chris chuckles) - You couldn't slip a knife between the edge of that.

- [Dave] That joint right there.

- The hard process would be to put a piece of paper in between those two, really.

- And that's probably why this cabin is still standing here.

They really knew what they were doing.

I can't imagine myself trying to do this with an ax.

I mean plans, blueprints.

(Dave and Rob laughing) - [Chris] David this is about?

- Turn of the century, right around 1900.

- They were thinking about trying to build one of this.

- 1890 to 1900.

I tried it when I was a kid growing up on the farm we had.

And just back in the woods that we had on a property there and I couldn't do it.

I mean, my joints would slip out.

My logs would roll off.

Just trying to get them off in a place was terrible.

(Dave laughs) - Never even would have considered trying to build a log cabin ever.

But that was Rob.

He was interesting guy, wish we still had him around.

- [Chris] We're really getting some elevation now.

Looking down at where we started gives us a sense of how far straight up we traveled.

- Yeah, that was a sincerely vertical drive.

So many switchbacks.

You don't even see it here.

- They believe the Great Basin just pulled apart and it stretched out, and these valleys fell down and these mountains remained.

And you can see that this is the earth or the ground and the rock and the strata that was deep, deep inside the earth, down in the plutonic zone.

Where's really, if you look at this limestone, it has all kinds of other minerals and stuff, that's combined in it through pressure and heat being down so deep.

But this is truly an examination of the geology of great basins.

You can see the basins and the range, so upfront, so personal here.

(bright upbeat music) And see the types of plants that have lived here for tens, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years.

(bright upbeat music) - [Dave] We reached the staging point for our hike.

Rob uses the topographical map to show us where we're going.

- We're going to be starting.

- I'm sitting and watching this, remembering that hat, I loved that hat.

I don't know where that hat is.

(Chris laughing) Like my little green camping hat, where's that hat?

- We're gonna drop down, go through these saddles, and that's the small one here.

Then we're gonna climb this really big one.

This is the biggest one.

This is a pyramid peak, 11,775.

And we're gonna drop down, and we're gonna climb back up to this next one, which is 11,772 feet.

So we're gonna gain back everything we just lost.

So this is gonna be hard on our knees, this is gonna be hard on our lungs.

And then we'll be there.

- This is hard, I'm worried about it.

(Rob laughs) - It's gonna be tough, but it's gonna be worth.

All along this route we're gonna be looking down.

We're gonna be on the basically the backbone of this entire mountain range.

We're gonna be looking down on our left and our right and all these beautiful watersheds.

And the Panorama is up here.

They're an unsurpassable, you can't touch them, this is great.

- We had no idea what we were getting into.

What you don't see is we're up there with Rob's wife, Sherry who we talked into coming with us the night before.

There's Sherry in the back, see her, there she is.

- Now I'll just be that much lighter now.

- What it feels like to gain 40 pounds in an instant.

(violin music) - So the night before we're all having a good time at the bar.

We're all saying, come on, it'll be fun, join us tomorrow.

And she says, I don't think so.

And we kind of worked on her over the course of the night and had a few more drinks, and by the end of the night, she was ready to go.

And she never told us she was afraid of heights.

That was a problem.

- We're gonna hike through a bunch of really neat bristlecone groves, which is one of the great features about this hike.

That are really ancient bristlecone, 4,000 year old trees.

- The bristlecone, you think, you look at old pine trees and you think, is that a bristlecone?

Is that a bristlecone?

But when you actually visit and see a bristlecone you have no doubt that's what it is you're looking at.

- Another neat thing about up here is you'll see a lot of these plants up here, on top of this mount Washington, there is a specific plant that grows nowhere else on the planet earth, except up here.

And it's called Holmgren's Buckwheat.

If we see some I'll point it out.

(violin music) No mining atic are right up here, where they used to do mining.

Hey, wow!

That's the big horn ram.

- [Dave] Oh, look at that.

- He's an old guy, he's been up here for years.

This is such a rare opportunity to see one in person and even get this close to one.

- [Chris] The ram doesn't let us get too close.

As soon as we start in his direction and he catches our scene on the wind, he leaves the area.

We marvel at the agility and ease with which it handles the ridge top.

(violin music) - [Dave] Our initial climb brings us to the peak of Mount Washington and we get a good look at the route we're gonna follow.

- We're about four miles from Baker Lake, about three miles from Johnson Lake.

We're gonna have to follow this ridge, this ridge is like the spine of a bat.

The backbone or spine of a snake, all the way from the north to the south.

We'll follow this ridge, where it's gonna bushwhack it.

Then we pick up the trail again, (indistinct), you can see it down here, it goes along top.

- You're never gonna be at that kind of elevation in Nevada and not have wind in your microphone.

(Chris laughs) Listening to that wind in the show going, there was no way we were not gonna get wind in the microphone.

- Will be at Johnson Lake.

- [Dave] This is a beautiful spot.

- Yeah, it got tougher after that.

This was a hard, hard climb down, and all this slippery shale.

Ethan is trying to navigate this, sick with a cold and having to keep Sherry near him slowly moving, we could not make any time on this day.

It was really, really tough.

(bright upbeat music) - [Chris] It's a slow and careful descend from the top of Mount Washington.

Out here, you have to provide for yourself.

So it's important not only to remember the essentials like food, drinking water, and sunscreen, but to think about what you might need.

Like moleskin for blisters and dry socks.

(bright upbeat music) - Unfortunately, we haven't gone that far.

We are right here.

It was right there, we came all the way down and we're right here.

We're gonna go up over this one, down a little bit, and we're gonna climb the big one.

- We had no way, there was no way we were gonna do this.

We thought we could do it, we were ambitious (bright upbeat music) - [Dave] Everywhere you look from up here you see another breathtaking view.

We have a second brush with wildlife as a buck appears in front of us on the path.

(bright upbeat music) - [Chris] Our next climb is a tough one, up loose rock.

This is a challenge for everyone and requires a deliberate pace to find sure footing.

(bright upbeat music) - Well, I think this is a good spot to pull our map out.

- [Dave] See where we may be.

- It's definitely wild Nevada.

(all laughing) - I remember even before we pulled up the map at this point, I was just watching those shadows thinking, oh man the day, (Chris chuckles) the day is turning on us.

- This peak right here, I just remember, it's a 11,775 feet.

I think that's what we're on.

That's Williams Canyon, Dry Canyon.

We are at the peak, right about in front of us along this ridge, the island ridge here, is Pyramid Peak.

That ridge line right there, is this one right here.

We drop over that ridge, we're at Johnson Lake.

And you see over here this big little Canyon.

- [Chris] Yeah.

- Circ, bottom of that is Baker Lake.

- Our original destination, which I think was Baker Lake.

We realized that it was such a difficult route, filming traveling up and down the hilltops that it reached the point where it was gonna be dark soon and we had to get off that mountain.

So we sent Chris down to get to the campsite that we were gonna stay at.

Chris had to go ahead in the dark with a headlamp down a trail to get to Johnson Lake and then point up to hill so we could see her and then make our way down.

- And the path down to the Lake is one I'll never forget because they send me ahead.

And so I'm now bushwhacking by myself and all I can think about is them and worrying about them.

And then also about trying to find a decent place in the dark by the lake to set up camp and make sure it's a camp we can all use.

- And it was treacherous going down this mountain and it was in the dark.

We had flashlights on.

Sort of stumbling down and that was challenging.

When we finally got to the camp we were all exhausted, totally exhausted.

(bright music) - It turned out actually to be a beautiful place to spend the night.

And it made, for kind of a fun morning when we all woke up and actually got to see where we slept for the first time.

(bright music) - So we're ready to start day number two of our adventure.

The camp stowed back in our packs.

We're ready to put those packs on our backs and get going again.

After a challenging hike like yesterday it was really nice to wake up to a beautiful lake like this.

- Oh, yeah, we didn't quite make it to Baker Lake, which was our original destination.

This is Johnson Lake, and this has quite a history of itself.

Ranger Rob's gonna tell us about the Johnson Lake.

Mining district shows a little bit in this area.

And then we're hitting the trail back to a trail head three miles down the road.

(bright upbeat music) - The idea of walking another three miles that day did not sit well with me.

I was beat.

(bright upbeat music) - They were chasing tungsten.

(bright upbeat music) What's the history of this area.

- This area back in 1910 Alford Johnson started mining up there.

You can see the mineshaft is still there.

- [Chris] Oh, yeah, way up there.

- And the tailings coming down.

- [Dave] Okay.

- He had a cable car that he delivered the ore out of the mine shaft with down over to, over here by the Lake.

And then they would transport the ore by car or vehicle cart down this road, which is now a trail, all the way back down to the valley floor.

There's some cabins that are still standing there, leftover from the 1930s and 1910 when they were here that they built.

Really interesting look and designs.

The neat thing about these, it's fascinating to me is when you look at these cabins they were all done with an ax.

They were built with an ax, and these joints are so tight, so good.

- Rob was very focused on the joints of these cabins.

That's twice now he's talked about it in two different cabin site.

- Now, have you guys already worked at stabilizing this one.

- A little bit.

And this one still has the roof on it.

You could probably stay in here in the wintertime if you ever had to.

I don't know, I don't think I'd want to.

This one has been stabilized.

A lot of debris still in there leftover from the miners.

This was their storage room.

You notice it's this thin line to keep the critters out.

- So food, a lot of food in there.

- Yeah.

That's where they kept their food.

I think this was a cookhouse.

It's another interesting thing back here too, as you can see this is how they kept the cold out.

You never throw them old rags away.

(all laughing) It's kind of neat.

- [Dave] Staffed rags in the cracks.

- Keep those drafts there on.

- [Dave] Yeah.

Well, I guess that's what you have to do.

(Rob laughs) - [Chris] Like right here, here's a 99.

This was when they would have replaced this beam.

- Yeah, fixing the doorframe there and try to replace that and stabilize the cabin.

And this is a good example of what I was talking about here.

You can see this log completely cut by the ax.

- Right?

- This is a big log.

That'd be an all day for me.

(Dave and Rob chuckle) - And these logs, these were cut with the saw.

And same thing with these logs hanging out on this side too.

So it's interesting.

It's a little different design, lot bigger cabin.

When we get down the hill to these others, there's a two-story cabin down there.

That's the only two-story cabin I've ever seen in my life.

(Dave and Chris laughing) I mean, that's pretty big one.

(bright upbeat music) - At this point in the hike, when we would stop and pause, I didn't even wanna put my pack off because the pain of putting it back on.

(Chris laughs) I've since felt that on through hikes you get to that point where it's just leave the pack on because once you take it off you don't necessarily wanna put it back on.

(Chris laughs) - [Chris] We will be hiking about three and a half miles and dropping 1500 feet in elevation.

It makes for a nice change of pace after yesterday's trail.

But the constant downhill slope puts a strain on our already sore legs and feet.

We dress in layers as we begin, knowing that we'll kill a few as we warm up in the lower elevations.

(bright upbeat music) - And here we are at the mill site, the Johnson mill site, about a half mile down below from where we were.

- From this road, we hiked down, is this a trail?

Or what was this?

This is the road they used to carry the ore down from the mine to the mill.

- This path out was different than what ranger Rob had originally planned.

And the amount of information and the stopping points that there were with these mining cabins and stuff.

He was ad-libbing a lot of this, because this wasn't gonna be our route.

It's a real testament to how much is in Great Basin National Park.

- [Chris] So this was Johnson's mill?

- [Rob] Yes, this is the mill right here.

I don't know what exactly each individual structure did here, but I know this was the mill.

The group of folks that we had that came down from Olympia that were doing the restoration have done an excellent job.

You can see here, some of the pile of wood as we saw up there, where they're trying and over there, trying to salvage actual old pieces of the log.

Another thing that they've done here, which is really remarkable, is there are certain spans and other logs that were in here that they couldn't find original logs for.

So they were able to take real logs, new logs, and stained them to make them look old.

Here's a part of the mill, that's still remaining.

This may have been something that held the ore perhaps, or not.

But that's pretty solid.

But this is really interesting to see a two-story log cabin.

You can see some of the retaining logs that have been put up here to try and hold it in place.

- [Dave] And another low entry - [Rob] And then this one here for holding the corner.

- [Chris] And they're more mill parts in here?

- Yeah, here's some of the stanchions that held some of the machinery.

I'm not sure on how the, the mill came through here and was processed, but you can see a lot of the sand and tailings out this backside.

- [Chris] Here are one of those logs like you're talking about, were they chipped down flattened.

- [Rob] Oh yeah, chipped it.

Yeah, sure enough.

Yeah, they took around log and made it square.

I could still see some of the oil that came off of the machinery and impregnated this log.

- I'm looking up here between these logs that they stuffed in like there's a bark.

Did they stuffed in there to try to fill it in?

- [Rob] Yeah, bark, some oakum looks like maybe, or some small rags I see over here.

- [Dave] Yeah.

- [Rob] Good eye.

- Rob said, good eye.

I got a compliment from Rob Ewing, that means a lot.

- I love this stuff.

So the workers had come down from the mine.

You come down here, dumped their load, and then they would be carried through sluice boxes, and troughed all the way through the mill with the assistance of water and be processed.

- [Dave] How far down?

- There's old tailings and debris all the way down this hillside, behind the building.

There were quite a ways.

- [Dave] Miles.

- Yeah.

Well, speaking of miles, we have another two and a half to go.

(Dave and Chris laughing) (bright music) This is something that's really an anomaly right here.

Two years ago, there was this incredible occurrence.

We don't know if it was either from a storm cell or some atmospheric interference.

We don't know.

What we do know is the results.

And all these trees are laid down in the same direction.

This is an area of about a mile square in area.

And it just one day it just came and blasted all these trees down.

(bright upbeat music) - [Chris] I couldn't help but notice how much the vegetation has changed from here, from where we were at the Lake.

- [Dave] It looks like a different world.

- [Rob] And that is the one thing that truly binds a person and their love affair with the Great Basin.

I mean, the biodiversity here is unlike anything I've ever seen.

- That was a mountain hike.

We see back to the top of that peak and realize we were near there, I don't know if I could pull that off today.

I may have to wheelchair out.

- And all kinds of the trees, the plant life, the rock, the travel we've gone through, limestone now we're in granite.

And it's just an incredible journey in the Great Basin, when one tries to go in the basin ranges.

You go up in these high elevations, like we work above tree line, and now we're down probably around 8,000 to, you know, 88 to 92, and a huge descent and a huge bio-diversity in between.

- [Chris] That's Beautiful.

- [Rob] You know, we're always gonna look back on this.

So this is gonna be one of them events.

- [Dave] Oh, yeah, we'll remember this forever.

- [Chris] I'll never forget some of those views.

- Ranger Rob was a 100% right about this is one of those trips that we, that I always look back on.

- Ranger Rob, can this be at last the trail head?

- We made it, man.

(Dave laughs) - I believe that's a great hike.

- Unbelievable trip.

From all the way up there to this spot down here.

We wanna say thank you, ranger Rob Ewing for taking us on such a great hike.

- Thank you guys for letting me share my favorite place with you.

We have some great hiking in this park.

As you can see nothing toxic because its great.

(Chris laughs) - Right over in my China cabinet, I keep one of my souvenir photos from this trip because this is a trip I always remember.

And one I'm proud of.

(bright music) (people laughing) (bright music) - [Male Narrator] Support for Wild Nevada memories is provided by the William Pennington Foundation.

(bright music) - [Female Narrator] Millie Hopper and Millard Reed.

- [Male Narrator] Gail and John Sande - [Female Narrator] Margaret and Charles Burback.

- [Male Narrator] And by individual members.

(bright music)