Snow caching today on ET Highway

The title is a dumb pun.  We left a little earlier today because we are anticipating a long drive to our 1st cache, #506 on ET Highway.  We drove through Rachael and headed up the long incline toward the mountains and then we saw it.  SNOW.  About 2" of it, although we did not actually measure.  We were only at 5,290 feet and had to go over the pass which is over 6,000 feet.  Already there was so much snow on the ground you could not see a geocache if you tried.  Not only that, the clouds were shrouding the peaks of all the high hills and it looked very ominous.

Abandoning the ET project, we turned around and headed back toward Rachael where there was no snow and the the temperature was a little warmer, about 36 degrees.  Just west of Rachael, we headed South on a dirt trail to pick up a string of caches that cut over to Lincoln Estates.  After lunch we headed North along a pretty nice dirt road to pursue a long string of geocaches that just went on and on into the desert.  By the time we go to the end of the string it was 4:30 and we were 20 miles from the highway.  

There were mountain peaks on both sides of us and you could see that it was storming to the right and to the left.  All afternoon, the storms persisted on both sides of us, ranging from 5 to 10 miles away on each side.  We were in a neutral zone right in the middle.  It was partly cloudy where we were with occasional sun but still sort of cool.  It was strange seeing storms all around while we were safe in the middle.  No snow.

We ended up 75 miles from the Camp.  On the way back, we drove through more snow that was not there this morning.  So that storm to the East of us we packing a punch.

We found an old abandoned wind mill today.  It still spins but does not pump water.