Mark Maynard (Artist-in-Residence, 2022)

Mark sits outside the Lehman Caves Visitor Center collecting stories.

Great Basin National Park Foundation

Mark Maynard served as a 2022 Artist-in-Residence sponsored by the Great Basin National Park Foundation and the University of Nevada, Reno. Mark is a writer and literary professor and came to the park to share stories and written pieces created during his time here.

Mark Maynard's work has appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Baobab Press’s This Side of the Divide, Tahoe Blues (Bona Fide Books), and The Films of Clint Eastwood (University of New Mexico Press) as well as articles in Nevada Magazine. His 2012 collection of short stories Grind (Torrey House Press) was selected as the 2016-17 Nevada Reads Book by the Nevada State Library. In 2015, Mark was awarded the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame Silver Pen Award.

His film Piconland: The Quest for the Picon Punch, a documentary short about the unofficial state cocktail of Nevada, was awarded Best Nevada Film at the 2023 Dam Short Film Festival and appeared on PBS Reno in October, 2024.

He was the 2022 Great Basin National Park Foundation Artist-In-Residence, and was also the Black Rock Desert Artist-in-Residence that same summer. He was awarded a 2024 Nevada Arts Council Literary Arts Fellowship, and was the recipient of the 2024 Nevada System of Higher Education Regents’ Award for Creative Activities.

Mark teaches English, journalism, and creative writing at Truckee Meadows Community College (TMCC) in Reno, NV. He has taught college-level writing for over 20 years at TMCC, the University of Nevada, Reno, and Sierra Nevada University.

In addition to teaching, he has worked as a journalist, and a marketing writer for a major video game publisher.

Mark earned his B.A. in English from the University of San Diego, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles, and a Masters of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno.

You can learn more about Mark and his work by going to his website https://www.markmaynard.info/ or by following his instagram @mwmaynard or @gbair22

 

Read Mark's piece "Island" in several parts below

Island Living

Stay in a national park for more than two weeks, and you’ll feel like you live on a tourist island – the kind with planes arriving and departing hourly. The closer you get to any visitor’s center, the stronger this feeling will be. As I sit, posted under two massive poplars overlooking the parking lot, there’s a steady flow of cars arriving and departing such that no one ever has to wait for a spot.

Cars pull up and people unload, mostly older couples or families with children. Up here on the stone patio near my perch under the trees is the Rhodes Cabin, a remnant of the commercial tourist operation here that predates the park by over 50 years. Add in a short interpretive loop and of course a small concessionaire (the giant Sysco reefer truck arrives on cue to resupply the small lunch counter) and not one, but two gift shops! One for the concessionaire that specializes in t-shirts, homemade soaps, and more board games for sale than any person could play in a lifetime.

The other is the official gift shop: stickers, magnets, and the WPA-style park posters my wife and I have a particular affinity for.

But the main draw here is the Lehman Caves – two-plus miles of stunning, flowing labyrinths that corkscrew into the mountainside here just behind the visitor’s center. Like any fine establishment these days, reservations are required. Tours depart every half hour or so, offered in two flavors: a brief half-hour pop in to the big-vaulted-room tour, and the hour-and-a-half, mile-and-a-half underground tour winding through tight passages linking grand caverns. The tours are limited by space and as with some of the nearby campgrounds, must be booked weeks in advance online.

The internet has tightened its grasp on our wild spaces now too, reaching deep under the limestone hills of eastern Nevada, though everyone will freely admit that the WiFi here is still deeply disappointing.

There is a larger, more traditional visitor’s center a few miles below in the town of Baker, where there are more exhibits, giant topographic relief maps, and looping movies of things people won’t have to actually traverse into the park to experience in person. But the caves are here, at the upper visitor’s center, as well as a handful of other attractions. These activities create a limited series of circuits I can easily observe repeated dozens of times.

Circuit I
Gift shop – Nature trail – Cabin – Caves

This is the most popular for older retired couples. You can find them in any national park. White-haired the both of them, husbands often with a neatly trimmed beard and as often as not, an expensive camera over their shoulder. The wives often don’t look dressed for hiking or exploring nature in the slightest, opting instead for sensible floral blouses and ¾ length leggings. One or both have at least one lower limb bandaged, wrapped, or otherwise favored, usually from a bunion, a failed scramble, or a bad sciatica aggravated at one of the previously visited parks in the previous few days.

Circuit II
Gift shop – Caves – Cabin (and possibly, though not likely, Nature trail)

This is the family circuit. Mom, dad, and usually four children, evenly spaced in age with girls outnumbering boys on average by three-to-two. Dad is dressed for a backcountry hike or overseas combat – “tactical” is the male outdoor couture. Mom’s hair is braided and somehow, despite the presence of dirt, mud, soft-serve ice cream, BBQ sauce, and melting chocolate from the concessionaire, her button-down outdoor retailer blouse and technical hiking pants are unblemished. The kids clearly choose their own kit and are often in nothing but t-shirts, thin cotton shorts, and slip on shoes. I suspect the plan is for one or more of the children to freeze to death in the cave so that the parents can emerge from underground childless, and make better use of their technical outdoor gear by getting deep into the backcountry like they did before children. Becoming parents was something they did so they could teach another generation to love nature, and in so doing, gave up on 18 good years of enjoying it themselves while in their hiking and camping prime.

At the start of this circuit, the kids want to do Cabin – Nature trail – Gift shop – Concession – Gift shop – Caves, but they usually arrive within five minutes of their departing tour time and dad, who had to drive 30 miles from their last camp three days ago to find WiFi so he could make cave reservations on his phone before they sold out, insists that they can see the cabin and the trail and the bugs and the rocks and the nature after the tour, if they have time.

There is another type on this circuit as well. This is the grandparents with grandchildren. The grandmother’s main mission is to spend time with the children, while grandpa wishes to mold them into mini-Baden Powells. While Grandma goes next store to shop for board games, Grandpa insists the kids proceed to the park gift shop so they can all apply to be “Junior Rangers,” something that sounds as if the kids will be dropped several miles into the backcountry with compass, map, canteen, and a pocket knife and told they can have a badge if they make it back to the visitor’s center by nightfall. It really means they fill out a small workbook with bug bingo and a word find of the names of animals they’ll probably not see during their short stay in the park.

Grandparents traveling with grandchildren are heavily medicated as evidenced by the patience they have with loud, whiny children constantly scrambling off trail, grabbing things they’re not supposed to, and throwing pinecones at their siblings.

Circuit III
Gift shop – Cabin – Parking Lot

These are the people that think they can just waltz into a national park in the middle of summer and enjoy that park’s most touted attraction at a moment’s notice. These are often young couples, or groups of younger people enjoying a road trip across the vast American Southwest. These groups send a scout ahead into the gift shop. That scout may glance at the sandwich boards at the front of the visitor’s center listing all of the day’s cave tours with “SOLD OUT” scrawled across them in red dry-erase marker. Regardless, the scout will whisk past the line of people checking in for the last tour of the day, and loudly inquire of the ranger behind the counter how much five tickets will cost them for the cave.

The rest of the group will still be stumbling out of a packed rental car shaking off the detritus of that day’s road snacks and will stare at the scout in disbelief when he, she, or they announce that the tours are all sold out.

Undeterred, the group will head into the gift shop to individually verify the lack of ticket availability and will then purchase stickers of the Lehman Caves for their oversized water bottles so they too can claim they’ve been on the tour. They will then take a half-assed walk to the cabin so they can post pictures of them in front of something in the national park so they can post it to Instagram and Tik Tok. These groups are key to ensuring there are always open spaces in the parking lot for groups that will be partaking of the other circuits.

If Great Basin National Park is truly an island (and it is) then the twin visitor’s centers are cruise-ship ports where visitors disembark, quickly run through a guided excursion of a natural wonder, shop for something with that port’s name on it, and then re-embark, ready for the next port-of-call and feeling like they’ve “been” somewhere.

Overnighting in a park is a significantly better way to understand why it was chosen as a park in the first place. Besides, you can’t begin to say you’ve been anywhere, especially in the outdoors, if you haven’t been there long enough to see the light lengthen and then obliterate the wall of a canyon, clouds obscure a bare peak and then assault it with lightning, or watch The Big Dipper materialize over your campground. The popular motto here – an internationally recognized dark sky park, is “half the park after dark.” And even if you can’t overnight, there are ways to escape further into the park and still make your next destination on time. There are places just a few minutes’ walk from every parking lot, trailhead, and campground in the park where you can get to know Great Basin even if you don’t have a week to spend here.

Acquisition vs. Inquisition

The 21st Century experience of national parks, and of many activities, is based on acquisition. It’s a mindset of checking off a box that we’ve visited any given park until we hit a certain goal or even complete the entire collection. I met a couple from Texas, married for 40 years, that had the goal to visit all 59 parks by their 50th anniversary. The husband emerged dejected from the visitor’s center after finding out there are now 63. The revelation troubled him. I don’t think he found it helpful when I asked what they’d do if another park was added before they reached their goal.

For the record, I find park-completion a far more laudable goal than if they’d booked a honeymoon suite at an overpriced resort and had rose petals strewn across the duvet. But I’ve come across the complete-the-set, bucket-list, get-every-stamp-on-the-passport mentality toward visiting national parks frequently in my stay here. Because of its remoteness and size, Great Basin is particularly susceptible to the drive-by-visitor making their way from the red stone meccas of Utah to the granite-cathedrals of the Sierra Nevada across the basin.

If you don’t think bagging national parks is a new version of philately, walk into the gift shop of any national park. There are beautifully designed stickers, posters, patches, coins, replica benchmarks, water bottles, t-shirts, bandanas, and sticks of lip gloss. The sameness of the designs is no accident. It’s the corporatization of the park-visiting-experience driven by the desire to collect, display, and brag. “I’ve got the sticker – I was THERE!”

Let me instead recommend that on your national park visits, even if you’re limited on time, that you skip the gift shop and collect something meaningful and unique to every park: a granite-abraded scab from Yosemite, a genuine Everglades mosquito-bite, and a 5-minute sunburn on that place you forget to smear sunscreen while hiking above 10,000 feet at Great Basin National Park.

Here's how you do it. Find somewhere other than the visitor’s center, or, if you must, go to the gift shop and support capitalism. Buy a topographic map of the park, or a guide to its plants,
animals, and rocks. Buy any book they’ll sell you. Books are the least evil thing you can buy in any gift shop.

Once you have a map and books in hand, get the hell away from the visitor’s center. Unfold the map immediately (unless you’re driving) and find a short trail somewhere on the map. Anything under a mile or two will do. Look for anything called a “loop”, or even connecting to one or more campgrounds. This is your goal. Souvenirs in hand (“yes I’ve been to Great Basin National Park, here’s my map and a guide to birds!”) head to one of the short trails, grab a bottle of water (fill it up if you must at the visitor’s center, but DO NOT buy any of the plastic-bottle-corporate-environmental-blight-land-mines) and get out of the damn car. Walk to a trailhead, check out the map, and chose a destination. At least one thing that you will remember about this trip for the rest of your life is just ahead. Go and find it. Instead of setting the end of a given trail as your destination (usually a summit, pass, geological feature, lake, overlook, or other point of interest pre-determined by somebody who decides where trails should end) tell yourself that you will walk to an inviting spot tucked into the trees along a creek, a meadow full of wildflowers, or just a rather handsome log. These places are much easier to find if your phone is tucked securely in your pocket and any cameras hanging flaccidly from a neck strap are not pointed at anyone or anything.

Once you find the “this is it” place – you’ll know it when you see it – and without blocking the trail or endangering yourself or the park itself, have a seat. Give it ten minutes to create an impression on you by taking the place in through all five of your senses. Take notes in your journal, and then grab the camera or pull out your phone and capture some of the moment for later. If you love the spot you found, tell yourself you’ll explore the rest of this trail on your next trip. If you now feel you’ve seen this part of the park, promise yourself to explore somewhere else next time. You’ll be back – you already bought a map and a bird guide.

And don’t fall into the Eiffel Tower trap. You know the one. You go to Paris (or Rome, or Yosemite) and come home with a very familiar picture of…the Eiffel Tower, the Coliseum, or Half Dome from the valley. The point is, don’t let your national park trip become your Paris. Here, the Eiffel Towers are Lehman Caves, Wheeler Peak, and the Milky Way. If you can buy a better picture of any given feature on a postcard in the gift shop (you seem so intent on going there anyway, despite my admonitions), go out and enjoy that part of the park, but don’t waste time trying to take your own picture of it.

You should definitely buy a postcard of the Milky Way. That is because I was fortunate enough to learn how difficult (and fun) getting a good picture of the Milky Way really is.

Night Fishing

While I was in the park, an astrophotographer from Tucson, Arizona named John Vermette was working, and he invited me up to hike with him one night to try and shoot the Milky Way over the summit of Wheeler Peak from the vantage point at the edge of a mirror lake at the bottom of a majestic glacial cirque. I was not asked along because I have any valuable to contribute to the field of photography, but more of a “I’m-hiking-part-way-up-a-remote-mountain-trail-in-the-dark-and-would-like-for-someone-else-to-be-there-in-case-I-tumble-off-a-switchback-on-my-way-up” arrangement. My job wasn’t to be an asset, but to reduce liabilities. An insurance hiker.

My previous experience with professional and amateur photographers is that they tend to incessantly overpack. I have an ex-brother-in-law who, if going on a similar shoot, would have hired a pair of pack mules to haul camera bodies, lenses, filters, light meters, dark meters, collapsible light-reflecting panels, inflatable light-deflecting panels, and a suitcase of uranium-ion batteries.

This time, I was the over-packer. I showed up at John’s campsite sporting a full backcountry rig swerving from my shoulders with a full three-liter hydration bladder, enough jerky and trail mix for the two of us to live off of for at least four nights, a flannel shirt, a rain jacket, and a puffy down jacket stuffed into a bivy sack. He drove us up to the Wheeler Peak trailhead where I left my hiking poles in the truck, and John was kind enough to pretend he hadn’t seen them.

As for John? He’d brought a reasonable backpack from which protruded three legs of a tripod. He wore a camera around his neck and had another in the backpack, with a couple of lenses. Apparently, starvation wasn’t much of a concern of his. Tied around his waist was a white sweatshirt that gave me great pause. I don’t trust anyone that can keep a white sweatshirt clean while camping. Other than that, John seemed a nice enough guy, and we were twelve miles up a winding road by now, and it was getting dark.

Hiking with someone you don’t know well can always be awkward conversationally, although doing so above 10,000 feet gives both parties the cover of conserving oxygen for healthy brain-functioning. As we ascended, we found our way into a comfortable pace and entered slowly into conversation.

John started astrophotography late in life. He’d first made the unfortunate decision to pour concrete for a living. In Tucson, Arizona. In the summertime. He then became slightly more sensible and became a general contractor and started into star photography in earnest after his retirement. It’s a hobby he’s quite committed to. He has a backyard observatory at his cabin in Arizona’s White Mountains and over the years has created a stunning portfolio of night skies all over the southwest.

Tonight the goal was to shoot the core of the Milky Way galaxy reflected off the surface of Stella Lake which sits at 10,400 feet below Wheeler Peak’s northern face.

Just below the lake, the forest opens onto a small meadow, and as we walked through, a herd of six deer lifted their heads from the grass and eyeballed us with trepidation. I stopped and John stopped alongside.

“What is it?”

“See the deer?” I pointed to the closest, twenty yards away.

John looked vaguely toward the direction my finger pointed, but it was clear the deer weren’t registering.

“My night vision isn’t so hot,” he said, and I wondered what I’d gotten myself into, hiking up a dark mountain with an astrophotographer who couldn’t see in the dark.

We passed the deer and traversed the rock-strewn shore of Stella Lake. The vista from water’s edge is dramatic. The lake sits in the remnants of a glacial cirque formed by the scouring of millions of tons of snow and ice tugged downward in slow motion by eons of relentless gravity. The highest wall of the cirque, directly across from us on the opposite shore, is the knife edge of 13,000-foot Wheeler Peak outlined against the dark. A glob of frosting was wedged into the lower third facing us, the last remnants of winter snow.

John set up his gear as I watched bats cut and skim over the still glass of the lake as last light falls. There was nothing to do but wait for nature to cooperate. We might as well have been fishing. Instead of waiting for a cagey high-altitude trout to set a hook however, we were waiting on a stubborn motionless cloud to the south to dissipate or blow away entirely. John showed me an app on his phone that superimposes the Milky Way onto a live shot of the sky and the pesky cloud sat directly where the heart of the Milky Way would be at 9:45, the optimal time for a shot, according to John.

While he worked to try and salvage some of the evening in case the cloud didn’t move, I wandered the shoreline marveling at how alien this high alpine world, normally so technicolor vibrant, looked in the dull glow of my red headlamp.

My wandering took me back to the shoreline and I turned back toward the surface of the lake, skimming a red beam across the surface while John was taking a long-exposure photo of the lake. I already knew what I’d done when I heard a voice of gentle admonishment from the dark shore to my right.

“Don’t shine it over here, please.”

No doubt he already regretted having brought me along. He probably didn’t even realize that without me he’d likely have walked right into a grazing deer.

I extinguished my light and did my best to make a comfortable burrow in the jagged scree of the shore stone. I lay on my back and was startled by a bat that dove nearly into the ground, weaving back into the air inches from my face.
I explained to John the cause of my gasping in the dark and he told me a story of a bat landing on his friend’s face as the two of them sailed off the coast of Mexico. And just like that, we were fishing, trading tales on the shore of that lake until well past 11, when it became clear that the sky itself wouldn’t be. We’d been skunked.

Adrift in a Sea of Sagebrush

Our island in the desert is changing. While all around the globe other islands are already facing permanent rises in sea level, the brackish salination of fresh water, and ultimately the disappearance of safely habitable land, this island is drying up, desiccating, and permanently reverting to a high, waterless place.

This is the third summer in a row where campfires have been banned in the park and the spigots for potable water in the campgrounds have been shut off, their pump handles padlocked closed. How soon will the National Park Service realize campfires and drinking water will be permanently unavailable, the camping experience altered forever by global, and more importantly, local climate change?

How long until they haul out the metal fire rings and cooking grates, and tear out the useless spigots once they realize their mocking presence is a painful reminder of what camping used to be? And what choice will they have?

Already the park is flecked with dead and dying orange trees, attacked twofold by drought and opportunistic beetles.

Our island’s flanks are scarred by burns. In Strawberry Creek where the Forgotten Winchester rifle leaned on a tree for a century, the juniper have been reduced to smoke and ash. Wide burn swaths encroach along the Lexington Arch Trail, the road to the trailhead largely abandoned to more frequent and severe flash floods. The roads leading to Grey Cliffs and Baker Creek are similarly affected. Only the massive quartzite titan of Wheeler Peak seems safe from the inevitable conflagration, its snowfields and glaciers diminishing yearly, never to be replenished again.

This kind of change used to be marked by generations. Now it is noticeable by the decade, sometimes even by the year. The time is now to visit the island that is Great Basin National Park. If you’ve already been, now is the time to return – not just to buy a field guide and a map in the gift shop. Not only to plunge again into the cool Lehman Caves from a hot July afternoon. But to get out, find a spot and a moment to take with you, and to share it. Encourage others to do the same. While we all still can.