WashoeZephyr

Being a desert rat my entire life. Once it gets over 100, it's just sucky....and that 80 degrees occurs at about 5am just before the sun comes up and lasts for maybe 5 minutes. It's not uncommon for it to be 100+ at 1am. It just shouldn't be that hot after dark...ever! Thankfully in the north, the temperature generally drops 20 degrees as soon as the sun goes down. The majority of the problem is cachers coming from other areas have a limited time frame, so they do it when convenient. My guess is 99% of these people are number ho's (not that there is anything wrong with that), as my guess is 99% of them came out to primarily do the ET trail, not the Alien Head, the Alien Head is an after thought/added bonus. Which someday, I will get to do...at night...on foot.

You do realize the ET trail is about 200 miles away from Carson City? If we were going to be in town, I'd meet you for some it. It's in the remaining counties I need to finish the state!

OMG Right??

But you have a decoy child to take with you to the playground . It's way creepy when an adult is alone searching a playground. IMHO.

I can see the advertisement now: "You don't visit Chuck Norris State Park" "Chuck Norris State Park Visits You..." "At night..." "And Beats You Up..." "Then steals your girlfriend"

Hey! I resemble... uh... I mean, "resent" that remark! Picture of police car in question...he had no clue! (funny how officers just don't like their pictures taken) Funnier part is we are looking at this sign...no we had nothing to do with the vandalism...but there was a cache there! Wish I had a picture of the screaming motorcycle cop, we were waiting for the vein in his forehead to explode.

Really is such a thing, cool - I like Charles Bronson. Chuck Norris State Park would be even cooler That aside, I've never had a bad experience with LE...ever. (Ok, there was that one time, we'll come back to that) Everytime we have run into LE geocaching they have been very friendly. The only one I've come across that wasn't geo-aware was in Wheatland CA, while GWVI was going on. He appeared to be about 24 years old and dumber than a sack of hammers. I mean no disrespect, but the boy was pretty dense. I'm sorry but an event that more than doubled the population of your city, you'd think you'd have been informed. Later that day we came across a Yuba County Sherriff that was sitting in his car doing paperwork. We were on foot and he completely knew what we were up to, stood and had a nice chat for a while with him. Last weekend we were questioned by University Police, he was also geo-aware as he'd worked on the bomb squad when they blew up Hoofocker. The only bad LE experience I'd ever had was when Air Force One landed in Reno a few years back (Bush years, when we was a swing state). We have an industrial park on the backside of our airport and decided to take my neighbor and his 4 year old to go watch the plane land. We parked behind a warehouse with a good view of the runway. There were no signs, no nothing stating that we couldn't park there. We had a motorcycle cop, show up and off the bat started screaming at us, yes screaming, that we needed to leave. Of course this made the 4 year old hysterical. We questioned why we were supposed to leave as there were no signs stating other wise. He continued to scream at us that we were a national security threat and at that moment we could be charged with a fedral offense. This wasn't a last minute decision for AF1 to land, we'd known about it for days. They should have put signs up or at least notified people on the news/radio, etc..Maybe set up a LEO at the entrance of the industrial park telling them not to enter for a while? There are many resources that don't cost a lot of money they could have used. Regardless my neighbor called RPD with the gentleman's badge number explaining that you try to instill in your children that police are "good" and then something like this happens. The LEO was an a**, there really was no reason to scream especially at a small child.

Just getting over about a year and a half burnout. Between making 1000 for GWVI and the McCarran Donut Hole Challenge. I'd had enough of caching in my area. Sadly at that time, I couldn't afford to go anywhere else... Ultimate goal is to cache somewhere else besides North America. Hopefully we will be in Ireland next year. Oh and to stay away from angsty forum threads.

I thought it was addressed by the NDOT punting the caches into someone else's jurisdiction. The often cited tourist dollars don't amount to much and they are not the BLM's concern anyway. Nope, the CO worked directly with NDOT and now have thier blessing. Their blessing to move the caches out of the NDOT right of way is not quite the same as their blessing. Anyway, I'm sure their blessing is actually documented somewhere, rather than just rumor. Right? Here's another article about it...from a news agency http://www.fox5vegas.com/story/15902301/rachel-nevada-cashing-in-on-geocaching "After five months on hiatus a compromise was reached. "So we've worked with them and we've gone over safety policies where to put them where not to put them what we recommend and what we don't recommend," Booth said. The caches were moved well off the highway and re-activated on the web site in August, and geocachers again flocked to Rachel. "It's probably the best thing that ever happened, other than the alien technology that we have been blessed with," said Travis. Now even more caches have been added, two different groups making the shape of a spaceship and an alien head when you log them on your map. The Little A'Le'Inn now has anywhere from 50 to 500 visitors a day, the majority of whom are geocachers." Realisticly they probably don't get 50-500 a day...but that's Fox News for ya.

I thought it was addressed by the NDOT punting the caches into someone else's jurisdiction. The often cited tourist dollars don't amount to much and they are not the BLM's concern anyway. Nope, the CO worked directly with NDOT and now have thier blessing.

Worse thing was condoms, still in the package. I left them, who knows, somebody might really be that desperate. We have a local cacher that likes to leave the religous million $ bills in caches. The only time I personally extracted one from a cache was when it compromised the cache container (cache container was bulging and would have broke if anymore people would have opened/closed it). On the downside of that, we came across an ammo can in the desert that had the same cachers million $ bills in it. Sadly the person before us felt the need to take them out and throw them on the ground. We picked up that mess and threw it away.

According to the rumor mill, there's another rural Nevada powertrail in the works.

deleted crummy link.

Anybody on thier hands and knees in a playground is kind of creepy in my book! Humor aside, yeah, playground hides rank right up there with cememtary hides, I generally don't do either. I suppose if I had children with me at the playground, it wouldn't seem so weird.

Thank you for a rational explaination of the series. Nice to hear from someone that has actually been there and has valid knowledge of the area.

I respect your skepticism, but I would have hoped something similar about the buried caches misconception w.r.t. the NPS. I'm not saying it *will* happen - and I definitely hope that it doesn't - but yeah, it's something I think about. I think there's gonna be more vegetation damaged here, frankly. In the long run you're probably right. But as of right now there is no evidence of people driving where they should be walking and the number of visitors is pretty low. Alien head sometimes sees more visitors in a day than most of these caches received since they were placed. Power trails encourage searchers to follow the same path and over time there will likely be visible damage if they are off road. One bad idea doesn't justify the existence of another bad idea though. It was just used as an example as Clan Riffster had this particular series in his bookmarked lists. It's more pointing out that his stance "is the only stance" apparently, as he has a knack of twisting the thread to see only what he wants to see (re: his personal, unvalidated slams towards me that I'm an evironment hater). Yes, this trail sees a lot less travel, however, if it were possible to drive a vehicle to them...people would. I also find it interesting on the Yin/Yang trail there are no marked trails to the majority of the caches which would lead me to believe that you must bushwhack to get to each cache. Hrmm, seems like more environmental damage than the alien head, even on foot. (There is no bushwacking involved on the alien head) I'm not condoning driving off a marked trail, nor have I ever condoned it in this thread. I was simply making the point that BLM public land is FAR different than the NPS. To put it in perspective of the east coasters. Over 8 entire states of NJ would fit in the NV BLM land alone. A huge mountain is being made out of a very small mole hill...all 7 pages of it.

Riffster, you can't be serious!!! Yeah there really is a need for a sarcasm font. You need to let it go man. So basically you can honestly say that there are no lazies in the whole state of Florida that given the above example were wide enough to get a vehicle in there, wouldn't? Of course I'm not familiar at all with that portion of Florida. This could be clearly marked that no vehicles are allowed. Let's just say for the sake of argument this was public land and no signs are posted and the trails were large enough to get a vehicle through. Do you honestly think no one would drive it? Puleeze!

I respect your skepticism, but I would have hoped something similar about the buried caches misconception w.r.t. the NPS. I'm not saying it *will* happen - and I definitely hope that it doesn't - but yeah, it's something I think about. I think there's gonna be more vegetation damaged here, frankly. +1 Too bad you can't see the bushwack trails through the trees. If the vegetation wasn't so thick, you know people would be trying to drive to them too. Pfft.

Since this whole thread just seems to be going in circles... From the first, I totally agree that it should be done on foot as the CO requests, however you will always have the lazy who will drive from cache to cache, it would be ignorant to say that this doesn't happen everywhere. I've cached in a lot of different environments. Trails are made from people bushwacking on foot. I've been to quite few where if it weren't for the trees, they too, would be clearly visible from space. It's just humorous to me when some east coast tree huggers think there's this huge impact on a desert flat that is on public land. The land in question is on open range and has seen more radiation than probably anywhere else on earth with maybe the exception of Japan and Chernobyl. A few squashed sagebrush is really not a valid reason to believe that geocaching is "threatened" across the US because of this particular trail.

Oh, the BLM has their hand in tourism, you should see how much they make off of Burning Man....over a million

*Edited because Toz already covered what I had to say (I got kind of riled up on page 6) , but I'll reapeat this part; The original ET power trail was archived at NDOT's request as some of the placements were too near the flow of traffic and on blind corners. The CO worked it out with NDOT and have since received thier blessing. Yes, their BLESSING. Clan Riffster, for you to say that I hate the environment is rediculous. Yes, it pisses me off when people dump thier crap in the desert. I've picked enough of it up. A few tire trails in less than a square mile, next to a highway? You're right. It doesn't really bother me. The hunters alone in this state cause more off road tracks than any geocacher ever will. In regards to the photo I commented on in an earlier post, the one regarding the tire tracks. It just looked to me like a heavily traveled trail rather than a fresh one. (Of course now you're going to reply that, "See, it's a heavily traveled trail") I'm sorry I'm not the pro and shouldn't have made that assumption. Apparently you are the professional on desert tracks...my apologies. And if you really feel the urge to take on the BLM, be my guest. It seems your itchin' to do just that anyways.

Nice!!!

Gambling and prostitution would still be legal. It has already been shown that as far as Rachel is concerned, geocaching and power trails also have an economic benefit, and I would guess that far fewer people would object to some off-road tracks in the desert than object to gambling and prostitution. One thing that some people miss are the reasons why agencies like the BLM ask people to stay on existing roads, tracks, and washes. It isn't out of concern of a few tracks here and there that have run over vegetation. One of the bigger concerns is erosion. In some areas the tracks can act as channels causing rain water to wash away soils leaving ravines and other barriers that some animals may have difficulty crossing. This is probably not a major concern in this area. Another issue are off-roaders who don't just make new tracks but crisscross entire areas leaving the area vulnerable to wind erosion creating dust storms and blowing away top soil so the area can never recover. I believe what Snoogans is saying is correct. Geocachers may have created some tracks in the area by driving from cache to cache. However the extent of the "damage" is not one the BLM is likely to be concerned about. Cattle grazing and other activities that the BLM allows on lands they manage have a much bigger impact on the land than Geocaching. The BLM may be watching the ET trail and other caches placed on BLM land. If they see geocaching impacts they don't like they may very well change their policy. I doubt however that they will end up banning geocaching or even power trails. They may begin by echoing the cache owners and asking cachers to not create new tracks. If that doesn't work they might decide to restrict geocaches to areas within a certain distance of existing trails. That might put an end to the practice of arranging caches to make a design in the desert but it won't end power trails. I believe that the issue is being blown out of proportion by geocachers who have a prejudice against power trails or against caching from vehicles. Sure, it would be nice for geocachers to adhere to leave no trace practices and to respect a cache owner's wishes that people walk these caches. But geocachers are really no different than any other group that uses these lands. It's not clear that any laws or BLM regulations have been violated. (((swoon )))I'm a horrible debater (as seen in past posts)thank you for writing out what was going on in my head! Snoogans & Toz - 2012

Here's an example of an event that was approved by the BLM, many of those caches are still there. Kind of an off road power trail. I'm sure it too can be seen from space.

Those on the other side of the country have a dog in this fight because what happens on one side of the country can affect all of us. The NPS wide ban on geocaching started with one buried cache. I'm curious as to why you think an email sent to the Ely BLM office could result in a geocaching ban. If this is all hunky dory with them as you and others here have indicated, then an email should make no difference. They'd just repeat what you've been saying, that it's only desert and not a sensitive area. NPS is one thing. How much BLM land is there in New Jersey? Seriously, if you would like to send the BLM a letter, be my guest. The BLM folks I've dealt with in the field don't have a problem with it, in fact we have gotten their blessing in the past to have Geocaching 4X4 rally's on their land. The rally's were along trails, some new, some old, but you had to get out and find caches along the way. People walking to and from the caches also create trails. As far as being shut down...I was speaking theoretically as there is always that one person with a little bit of power that likes to ruin it for everybody (ahem! ) If the BLM is totally fine with what is going in there would be no possibility of them shutting down caching so I wonder why you would even bring it up. Or perhaps you aren't so positive that they are OK with it after all? I highlighted it for you.