Today is the day we meet Baad Daata and do the Siberian Matrix or at least try and do it. There is over 200 caches here and if one does them all then they will have filled their DT chart.
There was also something else that had us wondering as there were still 22 caches without a First to Find. Most caches were published in April of this year yet they only had 6 finds or less? Is this telling us something or are we in for a real challenge?
There are also many Challenge caches in this series as well.
Now this isn’t like any other power series where one moves the cache from one cache to another as almost all are unique to the where they are placed.
I have to say getting into this series from I-40 westbound has it’s problems. You have to use one of the many U-Turns along the Freeway. They can be rough to use.
We arrived slightly earlier than Baada Daata so we grabbed a few caches waiting for her.
It doesn’t take long before we come across our first miss of the day which we replaced. You see some of these caches are in PVC sleeves in the ground and it was empty.
These caches are not park and grab for the most part. Some require hiking over hill over dale for some of them. They range from Nevada Nano’s to ammo cans to mico’s. I would say the ratings for the most are true. I can understand why some have gone not found.
One of the early caches we walked to down a wash we came across this tree I have never seen in bloom before. This tree is full of thorns and it was amzing to see the desert come into bloom just after a rain.
purple flowers
There was another cache that Rumrunner1 and I headed for and low and behold there is a tarantula walking across the desert floor. It wasn’t more than two minutes later we came to the cache and Rumrunner1 lifts the rock and wouldn’t you know it the cache was a spider.
Tarantula by the shadow of the elbow.
Rumrunner1 with the cache
From here we continued down the road trying to catch up to the group.
There goes Baada Daata where we won’t go with our rental
As the day went along Rumrunner1 had his Oregon 550 power off suddenly. He powered back on and the GPS had done a full reset. He spent a very long time trying to get things back in working order. During the reset all his caches and finds were lost.
It has not been a very good this trip on our Garmin GPS’s. We have had 3 of 4 so far go south on us. This was Rumrunner1’s second go around as well.
The other problem we all had was after finding about 50 caches each of our GPS units powered off and we turned it back on to find that the last cache showed not found when in fact it was. This has become a very annoying bug for us.
We are headed down here
Damn that is a long road
The road gets very steep in places. That is 45 degrees down.
During one of our many stops Baada Daata was coming down the side of a hill and lost her footing and landed on her butt then slid down the hill and right under her Toyota FJ. Damn she was lucky. It was also good that we had a proper First Aid kit with us as well. While she was sore for a few days she has made a great recovery.
There I go down the 45 while my photo is taken.
I leave Rumrunner1 behind…
Baada Daata now coming down. Doesn’t look bad from this distance.
Rumrunner1 has all the luck finding the critters…
We get to the last cache called About a Head Scratcher Puzzle which was more than a tad bit interesting. We arrived at the top to open the container to find a another container in it and you had to find a 7 letter animal that you would enter turning the dials to spell that animal that would then allow you to open the cache.
Everyone took their turn at this one giving animals but nothing worked then I had my go and came upon something and said it starts with this. Some blurts out the animal and sure enough that was the answer. It turns out we had come across one of these a few days ago and it was riding as a good luck charm in the Jeep in the back. I am not sure how one has this kind of luck but to have this in your jeep is truly amazing.
There were several caches we didn’t even sign or attempt because they were challenges for 111, 222, 333, 444 caching days in a row. I don’t think any of us figure we will even get near those.
Rumrunner1, Philatsea, sweet-marie, Wifey, Baada Daata
I can’t begin to thank Baada Daata for coming along and taking us places I would have not taken our rental.
As you may notice above the shadows are long and sunset is on the way. One should be out of the desert before dark if you are not familiar or equipped to deal with the dark. We headed out and got back onto pavement just slightly after dark. I know many would say lots of caching to do at this point but I would rather be safe than sorry.
It was a long drive back to Laughlin tonight because we were all tired. Baada Daata was headed to Las Vegas and even longer drive.
Tonight we ate at the Buffet at Harrah’s and I have to say it was nothing like the first night. The food was dried out and looked old. We finally had enough and talked to the Manager and he summoned the Sous Chef who we had a talk to. He admitted that things were slow and it was tough to keep fresh food going. I suggested smaller portions and refresh more often.
We retired back to the room for a few Glasses of wine before bed.