Sixty-Four Years to Make a Park
Near Great Basin Np, Nevada
The idea of a Great Basin National Park was first proposed in the nineteen twenties, not long after Lehman Caves was declared a national monument. Nevada's senior senator at the time introduced legislation. It went nowhere. Ranchers and mining interests in White Pine County did not want federal protection expanding across grazing land and mineral claims. The proposal was resurrected periodically over the following decades, and each time it was defeated or ignored by the Nevada congressional delegation.
By the nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties, the 'sagebrush rebellion,' a coordinated political movement to transfer federal lands in the West to state or private control, had made any new national park designation in the region politically difficult. Nevada politicians who wanted to survive elections were cautious about being seen as expanding federal authority over land their constituents grazed and mined.
The man who finally threaded that needle was Harry Reid, then a congressman from Nevada running for the United States Senate in nineteen eighty-six. Reid sponsored the Nevada Wilderness Protection Act and attached the Great Basin park designation to it. He negotiated with senior Nevada senators Paul Laxalt and Chic Hecht, who initially opposed the park. What Reid achieved was a park roughly seventy-seven thousand acres, smaller than early proposals, with explicit protections for existing grazing rights and hunting access within its boundaries. The compromise was a smaller park that could pass, rather than a larger park that could not.
President Ronald Reagan signed the act on October twenty-seventh, nineteen eighty-six. The vote on Reid's Senate race was November fourth. He won.
The park that opened was the first national park established in Nevada. It was also one of the few national parks in the contiguous United States with no entrance fee, a policy that reflects both the region's economic fragility and Reid's awareness that a park opposed by local communities would struggle to survive politically.
