The Costs of Being Cheap

We headed out of town about 8 a.m. with our route heading us north and west. We stopped for a bit at Hoover Dam to fulfill the requirement for a virtual cache with an interesting story. The story was more interesting that the immediate location of the cache, but I always like walking across the dam and thinking of the times we've launch on river trips below the dam.

We spent our first night at the RV campground at Lake Mead for the all important hookups. The AC ran all night, but we expect that this time of year.

We headed out of Vegas on Highway 95, stopping along the way for views, caches, and exploration. I didn't see any information posted, but it looks to me like the town of Goldfield must have been planning a subway.

Being a cheapskate and now at a higher elevation for cooler temperatures, I planned to stay at the rest stop in Luning our second night out.

The rest stop is built on the old railroad right of way. We carefully picked a spot next to a pile of gravel thinking it would reduce the number of people parked right next to us, but understanding it could well be an 'earplug night.'

At 4 a.m. I finally had to see what was creating all the racket. A refer rig was parked immediately behind us. :-(

By 5:30, it was light enough to try a picture out the side window. The pile of gravel worked - at least that direction!

Looks like the place to park for a night's sleep is to the north of the rest area!

It wasn't all bad. There were two caches within easy walking distance, one of which featured rust and history.

Our route took us through Yerington where we stopped to visit this old school building. I considered parking behind the local, but decided it really didn't look appropriate.

The highlight of our short time in Yerington was doing a Wherigo cache developed by Ranger Fox. While I've never met Ranger Fox, I have used tools he developed to create some Wherigo caches of my own. The really fun part was to see how small the world is - the folks who were the last finders before us, are the ones that gave me the cache containers mentioned in a previous blog post.

I've Got Gas

One of the things we learned in Death Valley was that it's BIG. While the truck has a big tank, it's always easier to burn off the top half when you don't know where you're going. We paid $2.20 in Bullhead City on our way to Death Valley, and $4.25 in Baker, California figuring gas would be more expensive in the park.

There was a gas station at Furnace Creek posted at $5.05 but we ignored it.

We went to Beatty, in part for fuel, but also because of some ghost towns around the area. Gas in Beatty was posted at $3.25 but it cost more than that because there was a candy store in the station...

Another day, we drove out to the west side of the park, where we could see the snow covered peak of Mt. Whitney in the distance. Apparently there are places in the park where on a clear day you can see both the highest and the lowest points in the continental U.S.

Coming back towards Stovepipe Wells, we made a note of the gas price in Panamint Springs but did not partake. Instead, we fueled at Stovepipe Wells ($3.58/gallon) before hooking up the trailer for our southbound departure.

We stopped in Shoshone at the famous Crowbar Cafe and Saloon for lunch with friends who have been volunteering at a nearby wildlife area. Good food and good conversation!

The gas pump next door to the cafe said 44 cents but it was dry. The pump across the street said $5.05, but we didn't partake.

We continued south from Baker through the Mohave Nature Preserve to check out the restored railroad depot in Kelso. It is now used as the visitor center for the Preserve but was closed due to the shutdown. We found a boondock (thanks, Campendium!) with a view before we got to the intersection with I-40 which made a nice overnight stop.

We had plenty of fuel to reach Parker, Arizona where we took on 24 gallons at $2.19. It pays to shop around!

Back Roads - Part Way

Our second full day at Stovepipe Wells had us heading to Nevada, not only in the hopes of cheaper gas and the start of a one-way back road,

but I wanted to check out a place with a geocache called Geocacher's Heaven. When we spotted this outfit that deals in used ammo cans, we could understand the name.

The other planned stop before we started our back road jaunt was a visit to Rhyolite. The site is now managed by BLM and has a paved road,

but that hasn't stopped vandals over the years.

Rhyolite was a going concern for a few years in the early 1900's but was totally deserted within 15 years or so. Portions of several large buildings remain but many of the smaller ones were moved to Beatty years ago.

Immediately adjacent to Rhyolite is a small piece of private land that hosts a museum and several pieces of large art

including "The Last Supper" by Polish-Belgian artist Albert Szukalski.

On our way out of town we stopped to visit the cemetery. Some graves are still obvious, but many of the wooden markers are long gone and the wood ones that remain are unreadable.

After our visit to Rhyolite, we headed out on the 27 mile road to Leadfield and Titus Canyon. Turns out, this is Death Valley National Park's most popular back road trip. We saw a few other vehicles, but often had the place to ourselves. The road was steep in places and occasionally had large potholes that required high clearance or avoidance.

I discovered that rough roads are great for conning the Fitbit that I was actually working. The road was such that if you wanted to consider the view, it was essential to stop first. We spotted this small mine shortly before we reached Leadfield.

Leadfield was created in the 1920s. According to Wikipedia, "The product of extensive and fraudulent advertising by the Western Lead Mine Company and C.C. Julian, the town boomed in 1925. His advertising posters showed steamboats navigating the Amargosa River to Leadfield, ignoring the fact that the Amargosa River is dry much of the time and does not run within 20 miles of Leadfield."

As a fan of history, rust, and ghost towns, I was looking forward to Leadfield. Turns out, the best part of the trip was the drive out of town through Titus Canyon. The rock, and the road were twisted!

It's times like these I wish I'd taken a geology class somewhere along the line.

I understand now why the park operates this as a one way road!

While Rhyolite and Leadfield were interesting, the drive was the highlight of the day!

Where to Now?

The weather has been super hot, limiting any interest in local hiking. Once again, I put together plans for an overnight trip, looping up through Searchlight, Nevada and then over to Barstow, California before heading home.

As is typical when I'm traveling solo, it was an early morning departure, but the GPS in the car was loaded with the route,

and cachetur.no made creating a list of caches an easy task. I was going to concentrate on some earth caches and a handful of other caches that looked interesting.

One of the nice things about Cachetur is that the new app updates an estimated schedule based on actual arrival times. By adding a waypoint at the beginning for home, I was able to start the list with an accurate departure time - 3:39 a.m.

Cachetur estimated the trip to be 871 miles with a completion time (including time for the 25 planned caches) of 23 hours, 14 minutes, and 59 seconds. I'll admit to being crazy, but I'm not going to do a 24 hour trip without some rest so I decided I'd get a hotel in Barstow before starting back.

I took lots of pictures on day one (on the phone) and managed to lose every one of them when downloading them to the computer the first evening. This one is from the next day and the previous ones are from my old Canon camera which takes terrible pictures thanks to all its river abuse.

The best stop of the day was in Baker, California which bills itself as the Gateway to Death Valley. The thermometer stands 134 feet high to commemorate the highest temperature recorded here. It was 108 degrees when I was there, slightly cooler than the high in Phoenix that day.

This picture isn't mine - it was taken several years ago and is used in accordance with the Creative Commons license.

I got into Barstow about 2 hours ahead of schedule. A hotel room with a working air conditioner gave me a place to log the various caches I'd completed. An early start tomorrow for the trip back including a section of Route 66.

Where to Next?

Regular readers long ago figured out that the blog tends to trail real time by weeks. Sometimes, I'll have several already written & scheduled for future publication. Other times, it's just a title and some notes.

This one sat in the Blogger editor for weeks with the title and some cryptic notes, "Working our way north - jasper - Vancouver Island."

We had plans to depart May 15th, wander our way north, cross paths with our son & his family in Jasper for Memorial Day weekend, and then head for Vancouver Island for a few weeks. Key word is "had."

Instead, we're still at home, traveling twice a week to Physical Therapy appointments for BJ. Her back is slowly getting better, but we're not committing to thousands of miles of travel this summer.

I'm hoping that we'll get out together for some short trips later in the summer.

Meanwhile, we've invested in something that BJ's wanted for years.  We're both really impressed with how well this ILIFE V3s Robotic Vacuum does. I finally gave up trying to get a good picture of it in action and decided to use this fuzzy one instead.

Looks like I'll be spending some time creating more 'interesting' caches in the shop this summer.

Oregon to Utah

Back to our regular programming...

We left Sutherlin early, heading up the North Umpqua River. It's one of those roads that doesn't show on most highway maps, and it's not fast, but it is beautiful. We've seen lots of columnar basalt in our Northwest travels, but this was the first time we've seen the 'ends' exposed. Very different!

We cut across the north side of Crater Lake National Park, looking for a spot to slip our drive from Oregon to the mountains east of Salt Lake into four more or less equal days. We wanted as much elevation as we could get for our first night since the temps were unseasonably warm. We ended up in a great spot less than an mile up FR3715 at the Quartz Mountain SnoPark on Highway 140.

The next morning we visited a cache less than 1/2 mile from our camp and then continued our our way south and east. We passed some folks along the way that I thought were geocaching. We stopped at the Oregon/Nevada border for a cache and they caught up to us. Not every day you run across other geocachers in the wild.

Thanks to geocaching, we tripped into a very interesting memorial park in Winnemucca. They had armament on display representing several major wars, but nothing newer than Viet Nam. Home for the night was the New Frontier RV Park in Winnemucca. Power for the A/C was a priority, and an adjacent restaurant eliminated the need to do dishes.

I'd really  wanted to boondock on the Salt Flats but the temps were too high so we ended up staying at the KOA in West Wendover. They know they're the only option and price it accordingly.

I didn't anticipate the WWII history in Wendover, Utah and West Wendover, Nevada. Apparently, the air base here played a key role in the preparation of the Enola Gay crew.

On the last day of our transit, we spent more than a couple hours crossing the Salt Flats. They say it's interesting at night as you can see the curvature of the earth made notable by watching the oncoming headlights rise out of the horizon.

While most of the flats were dry by early July, some areas were still flooded, making for some interesting reflections but nowhere to pull off to take pictures.

We finally got to where we were headed and found a site at the Lake Canyon Rec Area. With about 9500' elevation we were finally high enough that windows and fans were enough to keep the temps reasonable. It's boondocking but with designated sites and no services.