William Wilcox of Rhode Island hikes near Wheeler Peak in Great Basin National Park on Wednesday morning. Though Great Basin is the only national park located wholly in Nevada, it is not the state's only parkland. It isn't even the largest piece. That title belongs to Death Valley National Park, which covers about 2 million acres in California and another 105,000 acres just inside Nevada near Beatty. Photo by John Locher. National Park Service Ranger Jenny Hamilton gives a tour of the Lehman Caves at Great Basin National Park. The caves are one of the park's main attractions. Located in the Snake Range of eastern White Pine County, the park is about 250 miles from Las Vegas. Photo by John Locher. Click image for enlargement. Graphic by Mike Johnson.

BAKER -- As William Wilcox marches uphill toward Nevada's second-tallest peak, his boots crunch over icy snow from a week-old storm. Cold wind swirls through limber pine and naked aspen. A black and white woodpecker flits from tree to tree, scolding the 70-year-old hiker with its one-note song.

At about 10,000 feet above sea level, the man pauses to take in the snow-capped half-dome of Mount Wheeler and the rocky cirque beneath it.

If not for the reporter and photographer who have followed Wilcox up the trail this morning, there would be no one around for miles to hear him say, "That's quite a view."

Such solitude is never hard to come by at Great Basin National Park, especially on a chilly Wednesday in late October.

Here in one of America's least-visited parks, not even a milestone like a 20th anniversary is enough to draw a crowd.

"It's just as far away from anywhere as it's always been," said Jo Anne Garrett, who has lived along the park boundary since before it was created on Oct. 27, 1986. "This is like the end of the Earth."

The National Park Service marked Great Basin's 20th year of existence Friday with birthday cake and an open house at the park's new visitor center.

"It's hard to believe it's been that long," said U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, who sponsored legislation that created the park back when he was a Democratic congressman from a far less influential Nevada. "For Nevada, it's been a wonder."

But even after two decades, it remains a wonder that relatively few people see.

Tucked away in the Snake Range of eastern White Pine County, about 250 miles from Las Vegas and Salt Lake City, Nevada's only national park attracts 80,000 to 90,000 people a year.

Outside of Alaska, only three of the nation's 58 parks draw fewer visitors, and two of those can only be reached by boat or seaplane.

Great Basin Superintendent Cindy Nielsen said the park's visitation increased rapidly the first few years after it was established, but visitor volume has remained essentially unchanged since 1993.

"For a national park we are low, but I would ask you, is that a bad thing? I can let you read the visitor comments. Time after time, people talk about the solitude and the openness and the quiet," Nielsen said.

Ken and Joanne Young seemed to be enjoying their stay Tuesday night in a mostly empty campground along Lehman Creek.

During their stopover on the way to Montana for a hunting trip, the California couple dined on brook trout they caught a few steps from where they pitched their tent.

"It's nice up here. There's not a lot of traffic," Joanne said.

And as an added bonus, the public restrooms are clean and free of vandalism, unlike the parks they are used to seeing in California, she said.

According to Nielsen, Great Basin "could easily accommodate 100,000 visitors" a year, but after that the existing facilities would start to be overwhelmed.

"At some point, growing isn't always a good thing," she said.

Reid sees low visitation as a selling point. "You go to some of the parks in the West and the East, and you have to get a reservation. Literally, you need a reservation."

But some longtime critics of the park argue that the area could stand to be less quiet, especially in the gateway town of Baker, which is home to about 90 people and a handful of park-dependent businesses.

Terry Steadman and his wife, Debbie, have owned and operated T & D's Country Store, Restaurant and Bar near the main road into the park for the past 17 years.

He said fewer people visit the area now than before the park was created and "77,000 acres of prime hunting land was taken out of circulation."

Fishing still is allowed in the park but has significantly declined in quality because the streams are no longer stocked.

Hunting and fishing once represented "a significant portion of our economic base here," Steadman said, and the Park Service hasn't come up with anything comparable to replace it.

He criticized administrators for developing only one small portion of the park, and for generally failing to communicate and cooperate with local businesses.

"We were better off when this was nothing more than a national monument," he said.

Not everyone in Baker shares Steadman's view.

Terry Marasco opened the Silver Jack Motel, across the street from T & D's, in December 2004. The following year, he added an upscale cafe aimed squarely at park visitors.

"I wouldn't have bought (the business) without the park," Marasco said. "Except for ranching, there's no reason to be here commercially without the park."

Even that isn't always enough during the lean winter months, he said.

The bulk of park visitors come between Memorial Day and Labor Day, so during the coldest parts of the year Baker is "almost dead," Marasco said. "You might not see but one or two cars a day, and that's the local ranching traffic. But I knew when I moved here I wasn't moving to the front gate at Yellowstone."

Rancher Dean Baker, whose family settled in the area more than 50 years ago, has had a prickly relationship with the Park Service from the beginning. His main gripe concerns cattle.

Baker said legislation that created Great Basin mandated that grazing be allowed to continue in the park's forests and meadows, but that "was a farce."

Instead, he said, the Park Service would set impossible rules requiring herds to be relocated as many as seven times in a season or harangue his ranch hands with requests to "come up and sweep the manure off the road."

"There was no question that they wanted us gone. They were driving us off one way or another," Baker said.

Within 13 years of the park designation, all the grazing allotments had been bought out and the law changed so that cattle no longer were welcome in Great Basin.

Nielsen acknowledged some trouble with the Park Service's relationship with the surrounding community, but she insists the park has done plenty for the local economy as a whole. As proof, she cites recent Park Service estimates that show Great Basin creating 144 jobs and more than $5.8 million in annual revenue for Baker and Ely.

Nielsen said efforts are continually being made to improve the park experience, which should entice more visitors to come and stay longer. By next summer, for example, the first of new exhibits costing about $1 million will open at the visitor center, she said.

The exhibits will focus on the park's main attractions, including 13,063-foot Wheeler Peak, Lehman Caves, and the Snake Range's population of bristlecone pine trees, some of which date back almost 5,000 years and are considered the oldest living things on Earth.

All of those features are meant to serve as a thumbnail for the entire Great Basin, a 200,000-square-mile area without a single river or stream that reaches the ocean.

The basin stretches from the Wasatch Front to the Sierra Nevada and from the Snake River to the Mojave Desert. It is marked by vast north-south valleys and isolated mountain ranges known as "sky islands" for their tendency to support their own, unique species of plants and animals.

Nielsen said the Great Basin National Park has plenty of such species, as well as "the darkest, clearest night skies of any national park except for Denali."

Jo Anne Garrett can vouch for that. From the windows of her house built of Snake Mountain stone and timber from the old Nevada Northern Railroad, virtually all Garrett can see is sky, trees and snow-covered mountains.

And all she can think about are plans by water managers in Las Vegas to tap groundwater in the valleys bracketing the Snake Range.

"It's hard to justify all this open space, but taking care of it in this day and age sure seems important. It's a great privilege to get to live out here."