The Shield

The Plan for Friday was to go with two fellow geocachers and attack a series of geocaches titled The Shield. The Shield is a series of caches in the Nevada desert dedicated to the Oakland Raiders glory days. 113 caches make up the Raider Emblem. Above is a geocaching satellite image of the area with the caches superimposed over it.

Early Friday morning I awoke and joined Gomez2335 and Quadventure to start the epic journey. We left around 5:30 AM heading toward Nevada. Our first stop was at the Donner Party memorial to pick up a cache.

Our next stop before attacking The Shield was a cache next to a small farm with horses and a donkey. Upon arrival the donkey darted towards the house and let out a couple of heehaws. The home owner quickly made it over to us to discuss geocaching and her cache that we were finding.

Then it was off to the desert and traversing this wild landscape. Glad I bought some gaiters, they allowed me to walk much faster through the brush.

There was a 300 or so foot rise in elevation along the shield path. It kicked my butt, my feet and my eyes.

Taking a minute to regroup.

 

I grabbed some great pics on this crazy day and in the end we grabbed the 113, then headed up the hill to get the challenge cache.

Then we went down.

Only to go back up even higher to find another cache, not related to the shield.

We did a few more caches in the general area of the shield. This one I drew the short straw and they are way off there in the truck grabbing another cache. I went up another couple 100 feet to grab this amazing view and cache.

Here is another in the desert by a series of radio towers.

I typically don't post caches but this was a hilarious end to the day in the desert as we stroll into the brush to find this faucet with a cache attachment. We grabbed quite a few more caches during the evening. My camera was running out of batteries it was also dark and raining.

In the end the shield looked like this with the happy smiley faces that show found caches. It truly was a great adventure.