One of the things we wanted to do on this summer’s holiday was to try the massive ET Highway series in the Nevada desert.
We decided to do it at the start of the holiday so stayed overnight near LAX after arriving from the UK and caught the red-eye to Las Vegas very early the next morning. Once we’d picked up the hire car, we did a few warm up caches around Vegas before driving north for just over an hour to our hotel in Alamo.
Once we’d settled in, we could not resist making a start on this HUGE series. We started off at #001 and got as far as #101 before the jetlag started to take it’s toll and we needed to get back to the hotel for some food and more importantly some sleep.
The next day we woke nice and early and after a hearty breakfast at the hotel, set off to try and get 300+ caches in the day. We started where we left off last night at #102 and ended up carrying on all the way to #753, picking up a few non series caches along the way.
The caches are all very close together and quite a few at the miniumum 528ft required for listing on GC.com. We were expecting them to be all the same container (they were – 35mm film cans) and the same hide – they were not – there was some variety:
- at the base of the marker posts that are along the side of the road
- under piles of rocks (known as un-natural rock piles in these parts)
- in the top of marker posts
- in the top of these plastic tubes that had been banged into the sand
- probably a few more that don’t spring to mind
All were pretty easy finds but the rock pile ones took slightly longer to find than others. During the day we topped out at about 60 finds per hour but most hours it was more like 50 finds or so (still very good by normal standards).
Day 3 dawned and we had another hearty breakfast before starting out to do #754 to #1022 and then tackle the 51 Alien Head caches. These were great fun as they are arranged in the shape of an alien’s head off-road in the desert – it looks really good when you view them in Google Earth.
All too soon (well, actually a good few hours) we had come to #1022 and finished the ET Series. It was a bit surreal seeing no caches on the TomTom ahead after two and a bit days of never ending cache symbols stretching out before us.
We drove the 50 or so miles back to near the centre of the ET Series and set off around the Alien’s Head series. Isaac was set the task of navigating and after a fun few hours we had all the caches found.
On the way back to our hotel in Alamo we stopped to find a few stand alone caches around town. I’m not sure of the exact number of finds each day but it was something like:
- Day 1: 122
- Day 2: 658
- Day 3: 322

The whole area is an open range so you have to watch out for wandering cows as you drive along / get the caches
A really fun few days in a very different place for a vacation. We absolutely loved where we were staying – the Windmill Ridge in Alamo – as it had individual log cabins with great views all around. If anyone is going to do this series, you’d do a lot worse than stay here.
That’s a lot of caches!!!! Great job on the big #s!
Thanks. Seems a bit odd only going out and getting 20 finds after those few hectic days!
Fun to read your log on the ET Series and Alien Head. Great to see some Brits doing the marathon series. Congrats on your numbers, it takes some doing to keep up the pace!! My caching group hope to do the caches when it gets a little cooler!!
Wow! I’ve been comtemplating going to the US for a power trail one day, infact I’ve been eying up this exact one so it was great to read your entry and see pics. That’s some extreme caching you did for sure! Congrats on all your finds š Im going to have to take some time to read through your previous blog entries. All look very interesting š