Nevada State Route 488
state highway in White Pine County, Nevada, United States
State Route 488 (SR 488) is an east–west state highway in White Pine County, Nevada. The route covers Lehman Caves Road connecting the town of Baker to Great Basin National Park. The route existed as State Route 74 prior to 1976. SR 488 has been designated a Nevada Scenic Byway.
Route description
SR 488 begins at a cattle guard on Lehman Caves Road, 0.707 miles (1.138 km) east of the Lehman Caves Visitor Center and main roadway entrance to the developed areas of Great Basin National Park. From there, the route travels easterly through desert terrain, roughly paralleling the course of Lehman Creek as it travels down towards the town of Baker. The highway ends at an intersection with Baker Road (SR 487) in Baker.
History
An unimproved road connecting Lehman Caves to the state highway system first appears on official Nevada state highway maps as far back as 1937, although this road traveled more northeasterly than the current alignment of Lehman Caves Road and connected to Baker Road north of the town. This early iteration of State Route 74 was shown on some maps. However, the state's tourist maps did not show the existence of State Route 74 until 1942—by then, the highway route had been changed to its present-day alignment, meeting then-SR 73 at Baker.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Nevada State Route 488” is state highway in White Pine County, Nevada, United States. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Nevada, State and Route, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “state highway in White Pine County, Nevada, United States” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 28, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q887534. Authority coordinates are 39.018, -114.169. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1976, 1937 and 1942.
Architectural summaries often privilege surviving fabric and can understate demolished phases, contested use or displaced communities. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Nevada State Route 488” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.