US Trip 2019 – Day 12 – Alpine lakes and counties

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The route this day took us from Susanville, California to Topaz Lake, Nevada, via all the counties we were missing in Nevada. Another great day on the road!

Approximate time on road/out caching:  13 hours, 50 minutes
Total miles driven: 376.4 mi / 605,8 km
Total caches found: 35
Total DNF: 1
States visited: California, Nevada
Famous places visited: Lake Tahoe
Most memorable cache: GC80AA Inspiration Point
Biggest surprise: Arriving at the hotel one and a half hour earlier than planned
Weather: Sunny, light clouds
Highest temperature: 89°F / 31,7°C
Lowest temperature: 63°F / 17,2°C

The first lake

We left the hotel early, and arrived at GC1CX0H Lake Lahontan before 7am. One of the best things about starting early, is that most other tourists are still sleeping. So we were almost alone in the big rest area.

California counties

We enjoy collecting counties, so we had to do the quick detour to find GC47WWP Not a Park…Yet, which helped us get Plumas County. We also had to stop at GC1TCZT Safe Passage 8, which was the only alternative for us in Sierra County.

Nevada counties

One of the major goals this day, was to find the remaining counties in Nevada – a total of 6 counties. The route looked a bit crazy, but that’s how it is for geocachers 😀 The first county, Washoe, was easy. The second, Storey, required just a quick detour across the river. We let the favorite points decide which cache we found in Lyon, which led us to GC23A4Y “I See Dead People!”.

The loneliest road in America

While doing the counties, we also made sure to stop at all the stamp locations for the Loneliest road in America passport, which we picked up on the other side of Highway 50 last year. Most of the locations also had caches – perfect!

The capital spider

We got the last stamp we needed in Carson City, where we also delivered the completed stamp sheet. We also made sure to visit the most favorited caches, and had a lot of fun finding GC2XHEQ Arachnophobia.

We also spotted this one, almost right next to our parking spot:

Big blue lake

The next on our list was GC8254 Logan Shoals Vista Point, and the big blue lake behind it. The view was amazing, and the weather was perfect!

Something’s going on

When we got closer to Lake Tahoe, we quickly realized that something was going on. Some kind of festival/fair, so we were a bit surprised when we found a spot to park – almost exactly where we had planned to park. We even managed to find all the caches we had planned (probably helped a lot that both of them were non-physical).

Inspiration point

After a quick stop at GC675D Lucky Baldwin Virtual Cache (we love virtuals), the next on our list was Inspiration point. Not much space left in the tiny parking lot, but we managed to find one here as well. The view was amazing, and we found all three caches we had planned to find.

The long way to the hotel

We still had a long way to drive before we got to the hotel. But since we were so much ahead of schedule, we decided to stop at a couple bonus caches, including the earthcache GC1YH3K Granite Roadcut Earthcache. It was right along the route, but we decided to not include it in the plan, since we expected to arrive after dark. We were wrong about that 😛

But even though we arrived long before our scheduled arrival, it was dark by the time we got to the hotel.

So we didn’t get to see much of Topaz Lake. The early arrival did let us get some much needed sleep, which we wouldn’t get much of anyway this night – scheduled departure the next day was 4am…

Pictures

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