Annular Eclipse Trip

 12 Oct 2023

Packing up my scope in the 109,

I left my house heading to the Sierras where my friend lives in Mountain Ranch. Once across the Central Valley and up into the mountains to her house, we put our gear out and packed what we needed into her 2002 Range Rover. Early the next morning at O dark thirty we headed East to Nevada.

    We had originally intended to head to Winnemucca, except the weather forecast wasn't so good so we searched GoogleEarth and found a place NE of Eureka up NV Hwy 892, just past the end of pavement.

13 Oct 2023

 It was a long drive across the Loneliest Highway in America, 50. We fueled up in Eureka before heading East and then North on 892.

   As always the scenery was spectacular and having learned so much more about the geology made it more interesting as Alane read from the Roadside Geology of Nevada book.

Here is a screenshot of the round trip;

Some of the terrain along the way;

We figured that we would be the only ones around such a remote place. Shortly after we got there I shot this video;

When perhaps a hour after we got there a caravan of Jeeps turned off and headed down a road I hadn't seen on GE. Mostly Gladiators none stopped to say hi. That night shortly after dark we saw a light bobbing our direction along the road we came in on, It passed us by and kept heading down the road. I figure it was some local who had been to the next ranch over and visited his girlfriend. Weird though.

After dinner we spent a little time checking out the stars with my telescope, Jupiter was up and we could see 4 moons lined up. As it was cold we got in the sleeping bags around 9 and went to sleep.

During the night I had set my trail cam up at the end of the Rover an we did have a visitor.

 https://youtu.be/lhn-K6s0L98

14 Oct 2023

     After a solid nights sleep I woke up around 0630 and got up. My Dobsonian telescope was set up and ready to view the eclipse.

The eclipse started early around 0804 and I oscillated between the scope and eclipse glasses. Here are some of the pics I took holding my point n shoot up to the telescopes lens.

  The sky darkened somewhat and didn't get as cold as we expected.

As the moon centered itself and the limbs closed around it I caught a brief view of the mountains on the Moon, Sadly I could not get a pic of that. 

And then it was annularity!  I figure we got around 4 min of annularity,

It was not so dark, the breeze had died down and it got COLD! We guessed that at around 40% coverage we began to feel warmth in the rays and shortly after that the breeze began to resume.

After the eclipse was over I ran my metal detector over the ground a bit and besides trash I found this hitch pin,

Packing up;

After packing up the Jeep convoy came out and 1 of them stopped to talk, they were from SoCal, We headed back to Hwy 50 and fueled up in Austin prior to turning off on 722 and there we headed down to Hwy 21 at that turnoff we had lunch,

We drove down the Reese River Valley and searched for the road over to Grantsville, an abandoned mining town.

  Not soon after we went to Berlin Ghost town. This is the 30 stamp mill.

    As it was almost sunset when we left we headed to Hawthorne and some din-din at Port o Subs, the only other place open was Mickey D's.

I finished up the day driving to Hwy 395 and then Alane took over driving us via Hwy 4(won't do that again) and back to her home. There we both hit the hay. It had been a Loooong 894miles.

15 Oct 2023

After breakfast since she lives in gold country we couldn't not metal detect some of her property. We found metal cans and a tent pole and a grommet and a few nails, no gold.......

The eclipse was very cool, if you ever get the chance GO! I've now seen 2 totals and 1 annular and a few partials.

After detecting I hopped back in my 109 and headed home. Traffic was good until I hit Manteca then things got brutal, an accident kept me in stop n go for around 45 min in the sweltering sun, At one point I measured 113°F on my chest! Passing the accident things got better until hitting Livermore when I missed my turnoff and had to sit in stop n go again.........

But I made it home to tell the tale.