Monday, December 27, 2010

The Nevada Alien ET Series Trip :)

I found out about this series of Geocaches in Nevada about a week ago. Hopped a flight from West Virginia and hit the trail on Christmas Day 2010.

(the journey across the country)



My husband and 5 year old were to be the drivers (and company) on what I thought would take me the rest of my life to complete. The day began and we soon figured out how to get into the groove. Getting close to the post for the jump out and learning what the caches would look like in advance of the jump soon became routine all to well known by all three of us.



Mike swung in and I opened the door and thru the right leg out on the ground and carrying in my hand the container with our names already signed and ink pen in mouth I ran for it and the most important part, bent over to pick it up, thats the part that makes my legs so super sore now....the bending over to pick it up....lol....then we/I jumped back into the rented cachemobile and took off to the next one signing the log for that one and replacing it into the container in the thirty some seconds you had before the .10 of a mile was up and you were already looking to locate the next cache. Occasionally getting behind in order to throw a banana or cookie into your mouth and swallow a drink of water. Sometimes the view around you would be so beautiful that you would have to just stop and soak it up for a moment before saying...Okay I must move on if I am to finish this !!!





At this point...I must confess that I am a new cacher with only 360 finds under my belt before attempting this run...there are quiet a few things I do not know..... So I am not totally up to date with how the gps works ! With that said, I'd tell you that I flew from WV without any of the ET Series Caches actually loaded into my gps !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *embarrassed

So finding the caches would be an additional degree of difficult. I didnt even have a gps now on a gps based game ! Geosense would be very important now. I could find other caches locally when in Rachel and Tonopah and Vegas with what was loaded onto  my gps from before I left home but I didnt have any of the series I had came to get loaded inside. I didnt even have the heart to tell my husband that I had not brought the cache information along with us. When darkness fell it would be next to impossible to find them. Once we got a system together we figured out that we could press the button down on the jeep and reset the odometer at the cache we were on and go about .10 and start looking randomly until it was found. Luckily the snow had fallen and the rains had came the week before and it left tire marks in the dirt along side the road at most caches that we could use as a way to get more information on where they would be found.




The first day the weather was beautiful. We couldnt believe how much work that RXWRANGLERS (the guy who signed in before us )had put into replacing each and every container. The trail had been laid out for us the previous day perfectly. Thank you RXWRANGLERS. I would also like to say thank you to Marcipanek who left gas cans the week before with coordinates and it was a little fun to go in search of these once we were on the ground at the airport. We passed them on when we were done with them.


I/we were totally impressed with what Clay4 and whtwolfden had done with the this lonely stretch of desert highway. Some of the most amazing land that God had ever made. Way to go guys !!!! One of the greatest adventures of my life. I turned my spot tracking device on during the trip and you can see that we made our way from Vegas to Alamo and began our search. We searched thru number 515 and it was well after dark when we said it was time to give it up for the day.




The first day we began early, as early as we could get there from Vegas, around 10:03 am we picked up the first cache. We worked non stop thru the day eating only what we carried with us and between log signs. Our gas situation was great. Had no need to use any of the spare gas that we were carrying. Driving a four wheel drive jeep 4cyl. We ended the day around 7:30 atleast three hours into the dark at cache number 514. Headed on in to Tonopah. That took another hour and a half or so when driving a desert highway dodging cows !

I must confess that there were alot of interesting things along the way on the trail to keep us laughing and after a few hundred caches we had it going along smoothly except for a few times that we got messed up and had to do a u turn and fix mistakes.



We Spent the night in the hotel in Tonopah and there was no thought of snow when we went to sleep at the end of the long day. I had brought with me a muscle relaxer because I had been told that it was hard to walk after this pushing day....it was and I was soooo thankful to have it when I finally got out of the jeep to find that the hour plus drive on in to Tonopah was just long enough for my legs to realize what they had done that day !  The hotel wasnt horrible but it certainly was not what I would call Clean ! ooowie !


We Began the second day by waking up and looking out to see that the 6400 elevation in Tonopah had been covered in snow during the night. Defeated. I felt so Defeated. I cried. We came all this way. We ate and discussed our plans and my husband made the suggestion that we give it a try. We set out to drive the icy, snow covered highway very slowly to number 515 and start back in the direction of Tonopah again.... Thinking with the elevation change that we would get out of the snow at some point.



Soon into the journey we ran into what apeared to be tracks at the caches on the Tonopah end. We picked up Maybe twenty before we caught up with the cacher in front of us. We were so happy to see someone else caching and making tracks for us to follow. Especially since we were gps-less ! HeHe. The stranger in front of us was signing logs as "DM" and after a while we could not stand the suspense and skipped up two caches to catch and meet him. What a wonderfully nice man. We traded swag. Discovered each other. Talked some Geo=junk and got a plan and hit the series again working together. We worked with him thru cache number 515 going in the "cross the road path" backwards thru the series. This route is a little more difficult but it was working for us because we didnt know how far we would get in the snow.



Thank you "DM" for a fun filled day. I wont tell the story of our meeting the ET Alien....I will just say his name was Curtis and I dont think I like him !

I didnt want to post this part on the series as to avoid any trouble from the locals for future cachers but we were asked...no...told....about half the way in that we were destroying public property and that we were not allowed to be pulling off the higway and that we were not allowed to stop on the road. Curtis was a very unfriendly local who we believe is not a geocacher. We told Curtis that we had came from WV to do this series and spent loads of money and time in order to make the journey and that it was a very sad thing that in a stretch of highway where there were probably no more than 10 cars in two days (two of which were ours) that anyone would have a problem with our stopping along the right of way on the road. He told us that we would need a permit to continue...blah blah...in the end we did continue our journey without to much of a bother and some reasoning by "DM" who was far calmer in the situation than Mike & I were.

As we were standing at the final cache for our day and the completion of the series late that evening after dark another man drove by and stopped to see if we were okay. He was going to start the series the next day. (nice guy) We warned him about Curtis. I stole the log and container for the last one for me and drove up to the next one just to double check that it was where I had ended the journey the first day. Success !!!!!!! With the caches I picked up along the way and over the trip I had in my hand 1035 caches and would go home to WV with my goal of ranking someplace in top 100 in the state.
I can not express how much my family enjoyed this series. I think we made geocachers out of my husband and 5 year old who both signed the logs and now have a pretty good amount of caches to start their journeys as geocachers.



We thank everyone, the people who went before us, the men who set these out, even the alien Curtis, who I do NOT like, and to "DaMuggler" who made the second day much easier for us working as a team.



Gas situation the second day was that we put five gallons in from the tanks that we had picked up from Marcipanek and the coords that he left from his trip a few days ago on the logs. That took us on in to Rachel where we filled up and ate and made the trip back to Vegas. The other gas can was given to "DM" for his trip on in and the last one was left at the spot where we filled up our jeep so that the next person could run up on a tank of gas if needed.

There were lots of adventures along the way and I will put those in on the logs after we are back home from Vegas at the end of the week. Logging in three people for 1200 caches will not be nearly as fun as getting them ! ( I did drop three or four pathtags along the way for the next to find )


The photos are uploading sideways so I put pics up on my open viewing facebook profile so if you click this link you can see the pics even if you dont facebook and then I will put them on here when I get time to set down :) just click on the photos tab and the file for the Nevada trip.




While out there we did play a bit of the slot machines. I put in a total of 160.00 and brung home around 468 bucks that I won from that and played every night a few minutes on the original money spent.

Mikeys favorite part had to be the Circus Circus Spongebob adventure. We saw a 4-D movie there and he loved it but boy was it real. He cried at one spot in the movie because Spongebob wrecked the bike we were riding with him and a board came up and hit us in the face (lol) Scared him to death !!! hehe

We also took the time to drive out to see The Hoover Dam which I thought was super beautiful. The new bridge will take your breath away when you stand under it. It was amazing :)




(the trip back home)


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Wendy, Mike and Mike!

It's been a whirlwind since I got back from the ET Trail but what a great trip it was! Glad to see you all made it back to WV with your brains. You never know about those locals, I mean, they could be Aliens... right? ;)

Thanks for sharing the pics. I didn't get more than half a dozen images, mostly from the second day but the ones you shared will help me remember the trip.

Keep on caching!

Bob aka Da_Muggle