Day 19 - ET Highway

Sinclair Garage

The plan today was to find some of the ET Highway mega trail caches.  There are cachers who have done 24 hour midnight to midnight marathons finding several hundred caches in one day. For that sort of caching it would be essential to carry extra cans of petrol. We were not planning such a marathon exercise and although we pondered over buying a spare fuel can at the garage, it would have been something else we would have to leave behind so we decided to just  head back to the Sinclair garage and top up with petrol again. This might sound neurotic but the jeep had a stupidly small petrol tank and when we reached the garage had actually driven about eighty miles since filling up the evening before. We also bought some bread and muffins etc to keep us going through the day.

Our leisurely start meant that by the time we were ready to start the power trail, the Alien Research Center was open for a visit! Not quite as alarming as it sounds, it’s actually a wacky museum/gift shop for all things Area 51 and UFO related.

Finally we made a start with the caches….
Coming to the ET Highway was Mark’s idea so it only seemed fair that he should do all the work.  I did the driving while he jumped out to find the caches. 😀 Doing the driving is not necessarily the easy option. It is pretty boring driving 0.1 of a mile and stopping again being sure to pull right off the road to avoid any traffic. The ET Highway is far from busy but the vehicles really do storm along here, and being wiped out by a 60 ton truck driving at 70 mph is not something we’d planned for. There’s no phone signal here and it’s fair to say that any sort of traffic accident probably wouldn’t end well…

Another oddity about these caches is the way cachers are allowed to shuffle the caches along. Normally, when you go to find a cache, you open it there and then, sign the log and replace as found. With these caches, you are allowed/encouraged to pick up the first cache and replace it with your own container with a new log. You then sign the log of the container you picked up while making your way to the next cache and swap containers again.

Some teams even have a third person in the car doing the log signing to speed things up even more. This is widely know as the ‘three cache monty‘ method.

After 10 miles/100 caches we decided to take a break and drive down to the Area 51 back gates.

Area 51 back gate

Area 51 is a top secret airbase where conspiracy theorists believe the US government keep alien space ships etc. Whether or not that is true, who knows, but the place is remote from an already remote location. The back gate is reached down an incredibly dusty nine-mile long track and when you get there there’s not much to see apart from security cameras, confrontational signs … and a sinister looking pickup truck parked on an overlooking high point.

O..K… lets just turn around and head back.

The owner at the A’Le’Inn had mentioned the night before that a couple of UFO enthusiasts were planning to get married at the Area 51 back gate at the weekend!

Back on the highway we decided it was time for a cuppa and a ‘comfort break’ so we headed back to our accommodation for a breather. Suitably refreshed, we continued with the series but resumed at number 300 as it seemed a good place to re-start. We then carried on until 431 after which there is a large gap in the series due to bends in the road. It was getting dark by then so we decided that was enough. Although we didn’t find the fabled thousand in a day, we can at least say we’ve done part of the legendary ET Highway series and we also set a new personal most-in-a-day.

Riley