Nevada Counties – Day 1

Each summer of the last three years I have made motorcycle trips to log a Geocache in each county of a state.  First was Idaho, then Oregon and last summer Washington.  This year was to be Nevada.  I had been down last fall on a chukar hunt and thought I’d like to see more of the state.  As Nevada has only 17 counties it seemed like a good candidate for my first state this far from home.  My adventure was to be a seven day trip beginning Saturday, May 12^th.  All the other states I had been able to break up into more than one trip but because of the distance from home I decided to attempt this in one haul.  This journey was truly “to hell and back”.

 

Thursday evening, May 10^th, daughter, Hallie, arrived by bus for a Mothers’ Day weekend visit.  We had a good visit and Friday I made a 40 mile bicycle ride since I would not be on the pedal bike for a week.  It was cool the next morning so I waited until 8:00 a.m. before leaving.  It was about 50 degrees here but I knew it would be much cooler going over the higher elevation of the Camas Prairie.  That was the case, and I had planned two Geocache stops in the first 30 miles to warm up.  I made one near the bottom of the Culdesac grade and another at the top.

My plan was to spend the first night with son, Milo, in Boise.  When I made a stop for a cache in New Meadows which is about half way, I discovered my bag had fallen off the side of my motorcycle and was hanging there against the hot muffler.  I hate to admit it but it was entirely my own fault.  I’ve only used the bag twice and not since a year ago on my WA trip.  I had failed to fasten two bungee cords that were hidden in a compartment on the bottom of the bag.  The only damage done was a hole burnt through a small pocket in the back and I hadn’t lost anything.  The rest of the trip to Boise was pleasant enough and I took a little different route going through Emmett to avoid the Interstate.  I hadn’t been on that route since my Idaho trip three years ago.  I picked up a few caches along the way.

I got into Boise around 4:00 p.m. and Milo and I took a walk around the neighborhood.  When we got back I decided to log the caches I had done on the way down on the website .  That’s when I discovered that my GPSr had apparently had a hiccup and all of my Nevada caches were gone.  I had used GSAK (Geocachers’ Swiss Army Knife) software to manage the caches and they were consolidated to one file in my GPSr which is like a storage device.  The file was still there but nothing was showing when I would look where the caches were supposed to be.  Fortunately I had a printed spreadsheet with all the caches listed.  After Milo and I had a Papa Murphy’s calzone we spent about two hours manually reentering all the approximately 70 caches.  I was very worried about how the GPSr would hold up the rest of the journey.  I had a simple eTrex unit as backup but it had no mapping capabilities nor would it give me a readout of the caches.  This trip is off to a great start.   

 First picture is of my departure, second one at a cache south of White Bird and the last of Milo and me.  (To be continued) M/W