I had read some literature in my room about Cathedral Gorge being 15 miles north of Caliente. It is a fee state park and I am just too cheap to pay if I plan on only being there a few minutes. 

However, just a couple of more miles up the road was Millers Viewpoint.

It was free, just like me! :)

Pretty amazing to see fields and then all of a sudden this gorge right in the middle of them.

I sometimes wonder how many people drive by these awesome spots because they just don't have a minute.

While I was there, the only thing this guy took a picture of was the gazebo looking thing. He did take a lot of them too.

I didn't see any place in Caliente that I wanted to have breakfast so I headed to Pioche.

It is an old mining town with a lot of history. Mostly silver, but no longer any active mines.

So everything gets turned into antique stores or tourist traps and they just try to hang on.

I had a good breakfast here, but even this cafe is for sale.

Low carb! :)

I'm heading towards the Great Basin NP, but it is still 100 miles away.

If I were a crow, it would only be 35 miles away.

After I was inside the park, I took the scenic drive to the top. 

Maybe not the top, but well over 10,000'

Pretty early still as some varieties of tree haven't started to leaf out.

They still have a beauty all their own.

Nevada is mostly an arid desert. Up here the trees are stunted. In Alaska I expect to see the same thing but not due to the same reasons.

There were still a lot of snow patches, this one was at the 10,000' level.

It is called Wheelers Peak and it was hard to get a clear shot of it.

The clouds made it hard to see.

so you know I didn't make it up.

They had several nice viewing platforms to see the clouds from.

It started raining pretty hard so I took a tour of Lehman Cave

When it was privately owned you had to be able to crawl through that opening if you wanted to tour the cave.

When the national parks took over, they made a new entrance.

If you look near the top of this picture you can see a little light shining through the original natural entrance of the cave.

This cave has just about every conceivable formations that are found in caves. 

The pictures look better when I turned off the flash.

The cave has a lot of large rooms.

If you look at the bottom you can see it was broken off. When it was privately owned their motto was if you can break it, you can take it. One of the draws to get people into the place.

Bristlecone Pine Tree, Native to only here,.

This slab was cut from a living tree in 1964. It was 4900 years old and still living when they cut it down.