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ET highway


CherryPi

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Hi guys

 

 

I'm considering trying to do the ET highway cache trail in the summer - would be great to do this as a small group to share costs and experiences etc. Would anyone out there be interested In this?

 

Drop me an email/ reply to discuss further

 

Claire

 

Ps I'm from the uk and am looking early August

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Hi guys

 

 

I'm considering trying to do the ET highway cache trail in the summer - would be great to do this as a small group to share costs and experiences etc. Would anyone out there be interested In this?

 

Drop me an email/ reply to discuss further

 

Claire

 

Ps I'm from the uk and am looking early August

 

Being from the UK myself I second The Fat Cats advise, it would be very hot then!! Congrats on your first cache which I just happen to have on my 'watch' list!

If you do come over, San Diego can be very nice in August and we have a great variety of caches here! Still too hot to do strenuous hikes though!

 

Jane

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I concur with the others - it will be hot!

 

I started it solo in June of last year and it was 111 degrees. I did 132 of them before I called it quits. lol

 

Just a few things to keep in mind if you decide to try it. Food and drinks - bring some with you! You are not going to see places to eat for a long period of time. And fuel. It is a long way from gas stations. Be prepared to leave the trail to go find gas.

 

Good luck if you do it!

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Some helpful coords, from Vegas to Tonopah:

Iron Skillet restaurant/gas station - 36 16.762 115 01.547

Loves/Subway at I-15 and Hwy 93 - 36 22.976 114 53.722

Sinclair Gas Station in Alamo - 37 21.902 115 09.589

Shell Gas Station in Ash Springs (open 24 hours) - 37 27.803 115 11.643

Little A'Le'Inn - 37 38.801 115 44.760

Shell Gas Station in Tonopah - 38 03.915 117 13.650

It's a long, long way in between gas stations out here...153 miles from Ash Springs to Tonopah! Normally that wouldn't be that far, but if you're running your A/C and stopping/going all the time, you'll use your gas much faster than normal. Bring extra gas!

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Man, having this cache on your watchlist really bogs you down with emails! And with 347 people watching ET 001, that's ALOT!

 

Haha

 

After talking with my ETPT partner (we were shooting for the first week of April), we had generated some ideas/alternatives:

 

Why not move the series out of Nye and into Lincoln county? Lincoln seems to love all the business.

 

Have other cachers place the physical container, make the write up on geocaching.com, and then ultimately, have Clay adopt it. If not, that's fine too, because these are 'immortal' caches - everyone is maintaining them!

 

Petition to the sheriff and DOT offices- there are many people that already have reservations and travel arrangements, so this should be really focused on.

 

Time spent on pointing fingers is wasted time; let's work out the kinks and evolve this into a more robust series!

Edited by gohangasalami
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Man, having this cache on your watchlist really bogs you down with emails! And with 347 people watching ET 001, that's ALOT!

 

Haha

 

After talking with my ETPT partner (we were shooting for the first week of April), we had generated some ideas/alternatives:

 

Why not move the series out of Nye and into Lincoln county? Lincoln seems to love all the business.

 

Have other cachers place the physical container, make the write up on geocaching.com, and then ultimately, have Clay adopt it. If not, that's fine too, because these are 'immortal' caches - everyone is maintaining them!

 

Petition to the sheriff and DOT offices- there are many people that already have reservations and travel arrangements, so this should be really focused on.

 

Time spent on pointing fingers is wasted time; let's work out the kinks and evolve this into a more robust series!

 

They should really stop posting notes about it on the cache page cause on the over haul on the page could cause a warning to shut it down. That would be a sad day if it happens.

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Posted by CO to ET001:

 

First of all, thanks to all for the concerned posts, it is a true testament of the popularity of this trail. We have been in contact with our local reviewer and Groundspeak on the concerns with NDOT. HOWEVER, we have not had any contact with NDOT. We are currently planning on getting a resolution that makes all parties happy. Until we have spoken to all parties, we are not really going to comment on what the plans are with the trail…no one knows. From what we have received from Groundspeak, they would like us to put some extra warnings on the cache pages, it seems what we saw of the NDOT email…they are not looking to take the whole trail down, but would like some changes…whether that be moving some or all caches, or some added warnings on the caches pages. We will not know until we have talked to them. Thank you all for your patience, I know a lot of you have money invested in trips to come out to visit. We hope to try and get in contact with the necessary people this week and get some answers and make whatever changes we need to make to keep this trail alive. We will post more when we know more, but we are not going to be like the media and speculate on stuff when we don’t have all the facts. Until then, I would just like to add this… [br][p]

"Please drive very carefully while participating in this geocache series. Truck drivers and the general public have complained that vehicles are stopping on the road in blind spots and / or pulling out in front of fast moving traffic causing near misses. This is very dangerous and may result in someone getting hurt and/or this entire series of geocaches being archived."

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The good news, is that the whole surrounding area is barren desert loaded with power trails. No doubt you've seen the Route 66 series of ~800 caches, and all the surrounding mini trails. Like any great idea, it's bound to be repeated, so this whole Nye County situation isn't a total loss; I'd take it as a lesson to learn from.

 

The idea of snagging 1k caches in a day is still feasible, with the right conditions.

 

The group and I (Harrisburg, PA area) don't arrive to LV until April 2nd; two months is quite a big window for new developments, and I keep my fingers crossed in the mean time. Who knows, there could be a brave soul that decides to place a new trail of 2000 caches (!)

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Sounds like placing all those caches along a highway wasn't such a wise idea. :ph34r:

 

I don't think that placing was a bad idea, more that some thought to do 1000+ caches in one day.

The caches didn't seem to be the problem but the behavior of those cachers.

Thank's to them. :mad:

Which goes right back to my comment about the power trail being placed along a highway with cars zooming by at 70+ MPH. Trails like this need to be placed on off-highway areas or lesser traveled rural roads. Lower speeds and light traffic are key to safety with a slow moving cache machine constantly entering and exiting the roadway.

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One would wonder that maybe something should be said about the cachers going out in groups of 8 or more and leap frogging from one cache to another. This maybe the problems with the accidents or car issues. Maybe it should be mandatory for each cache container to be found by each group form the CO side, Just a thought as I could see that being a problem.

 

On a personnal note I do hope the trail stays open and they get things resolved as I do plan a trip out that way soon and was just about to purchases the airline tickets until this mess showed and now not sure.

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Sounds like placing all those caches along a highway wasn't such a wise idea. :ph34r:

 

I don't think that placing was a bad idea, more that some thought to do 1000+ caches in one day.

The caches didn't seem to be the problem but the behavior of those cachers.

Thank's to them. :mad:

Which goes right back to my comment about the power trail being placed along a highway with cars zooming by at 70+ MPH. Trails like this need to be placed on off-highway areas or lesser traveled rural roads. Lower speeds and light traffic are key to safety with a slow moving cache machine constantly entering and exiting the roadway.

We spent a day in early October on the trail, in the 7 1/2 hours we spent doing caches we had 6 or 7 vehicles pass us and 3 of them were other cachers, maybe Mondays are slow days for traffic :rolleyes: .

As to the weather it was in the mid to high 70s very nice :D

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I'll echo what vagabond has said. I did the trail last June -on opening weekend, no less- and never saw more than 2 or 3 muggle vehicles an hour. That said, I will also add that some of the geo vehicles could often be seen on the active with haz flashers switched on while the driver/runner would make the grab -although never in a blind curve or otherwise limited sight scenario. Still, it only takes one incident to ruin it for all parties concerned, present and future. Please use common sense on this and all trails.

 

As to the wx in June, it was hot -though certainly not intolerably so. Just bring PLENTY of water!! As others have noted, fuel is sparse. There is NOTHING anywhere along the route. Unless you have your own on-board 5-gal can (or two!), the only sources will be at either end, in Tono and Ash Springs.

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Thanks guys for the information. I'm restricted on holiday times due to being a teacher so I may have to leave this to next year and try to head out at Easter time. I have been in Vegas at this time the past few years so know about the heat but haven't tried anything on this scale.

 

Thanks again - lets hope it's still there by then!

 

Claire (Cherrypi)

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We just completed this series and all the caches are still there. I haven't listened to the podcast done by the cache owner, but apparently Nye County has allowed them to stay, just further from the road.

 

I also second the person who said that there isn't much traffic out there...REALLY not much traffic! lol. We still pulled off on the shoulder when we could, but most of the time you could see WAY behind you and know when someone was coming.

 

The biggest issue that we saw was people driving WAY off the road to get to the cache...making a new road next to the cache...seriously, it's only like 30 feet at MOST from the road, there is NO NEED to drive into the desert right near the cache.

 

We also found every cache, no leapfrogging for us. It took us a good 2 days with only doing the "non ET caches" that were right near the road and not the Alien Head. The weather was perfect, not too cold and not too hot, and we were exhausted. We don't like "leapfrogging" (seems a bit too much like cheating to us), but that's up to the cachers that go out there. I wish we had more time to do the other non ET caches and the Alien head, but maybe we can get back out there someday.

 

We didn't have an issue with gas at all, but we weren't running the heat or the air. We bought PBandJ for lunch and snacks, so we were ok with food too.

 

It was insane really, stopping every 500 feet. Definitely something I'll only do once and only with friends. If I was by myself I would've quit after like 50! lol

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So now that it is all said and done and the cache has been archived can someone please post an chronicle of events that led to the demise of this trail.

 

It seems that there is not enough traffic on this highway to justify a gas station in Rachel and according to other anecdotal reports of cachers they were only passed by 2 to 4 vehicles in the whole time they were doing the series. This level of traffic seems so small that the risk of injury or death to any party would be remote.

 

Also there seems to be a part of the trail that was placed in low visibility areas, however a large part of the series had visibilty on the order of miles. So why was the highly visible areas not allowed to go forward with only the low visibility caches being archived?

 

It seems rather drastic for the Nevada Department of Transportation to deem more than 100 miles of roadway, much of it with good visibility, as off limits to caching.

 

Because of these questions and more it would be nice to know the backstory so such heavy handed ban can be avoided in the future.

 

Thanks.

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So now that it is all said and done and the cache has been archived can someone please post an chronicle of events that led to the demise of this trail.

 

It seems that there is not enough traffic on this highway to justify a gas station in Rachel and according to other anecdotal reports of cachers they were only passed by 2 to 4 vehicles in the whole time they were doing the series. This level of traffic seems so small that the risk of injury or death to any party would be remote.

 

Also there seems to be a part of the trail that was placed in low visibility areas, however a large part of the series had visibilty on the order of miles. So why was the highly visible areas not allowed to go forward with only the low visibility caches being archived?

 

It seems rather drastic for the Nevada Department of Transportation to deem more than 100 miles of roadway, much of it with good visibility, as off limits to caching.

 

Because of these questions and more it would be nice to know the backstory so such heavy handed ban can be avoided in the future.

 

Thanks.

You can still find them, and log them. They are all still there, as of now...

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So now that it is all said and done and the cache has been archived can someone please post an chronicle of events that led to the demise of this trail.

 

It seems that there is not enough traffic on this highway to justify a gas station in Rachel and according to other anecdotal reports of cachers they were only passed by 2 to 4 vehicles in the whole time they were doing the series. This level of traffic seems so small that the risk of injury or death to any party would be remote.

 

Also there seems to be a part of the trail that was placed in low visibility areas, however a large part of the series had visibilty on the order of miles. So why was the highly visible areas not allowed to go forward with only the low visibility caches being archived?

 

It seems rather drastic for the Nevada Department of Transportation to deem more than 100 miles of roadway, much of it with good visibility, as off limits to caching.

 

Because of these questions and more it would be nice to know the backstory so such heavy handed ban can be avoided in the future.

 

Thanks.

In the other thread in the main forum it has been stated (this is now third degree take it with a grain of salt until it is confirmed) that Groundspeak got got a strongly worded letter from the Nevada Attorney General or a lawsuit... Something to that effect. Seems that there was an incident with a cacher almost causing an accident with a snow plow. Like I said some good info in the other thread.

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Hi guys

 

 

I'm considering trying to do the ET highway cache trail in the summer - would be great to do this as a small group to share costs and experiences etc. Would anyone out there be interested In this?

 

Drop me an email/ reply to discuss further

 

Claire

 

Ps I'm from the uk and am looking early August

 

I believe the ET Highway has been Archived by request of the State of Nevada for safety concerns. You may want to check into it..

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