Post by auntym on Nov 1, 2011 13:05:49 GMT -6
www.fox5vegas.com/story/15902301/rachel-nevada-cashing-in-on-geocaching
Nevada UFO town cashes in on 'geocaching' game.......... SEE VIDEO
Posted: Oct 28, 2011 6:58 PM EDT Updated: Nov 01, 2011 11:07 AM EDT
Posted By Doug Johnson
Rachel, NV (FOX5) -
About two hours north of Las Vegas is State Highway 375, also known as the Extraterrestrial Highway.
The only town on the road is Rachel, Nevada.
For the past twenty years Pat Travis and now her daughter Connie West have been running the only business there, the Little A'Le'Inn.
"The UFO activity started within the first year that we were here," Travis told FOX5.
As popular culture's interest in UFOs faded so did visitors to the area.
But now a different type of visitor is coming.
"There not coming out here because of UFOs or Area 51 or the Little A'Le'Inn," said West.
Instead tourists have returned to Rachel to probe for something else, which has them looking at the ground, not the sky.
"Geocaching is our primary venture, what we came out here to do," said Scott Fee, a geocacher from Alabama.
Geocaching is a type of online scavenger hunt, where participants use GPS devices to find containers called "caches".
"Inside the film can is the log sheet showing everyone's been here, someone even had an alien stamp on that one," said Fee.
Every cache in the world is listed on the Geocaching web site, and geocachers, as they're called, can log every find they make.
With about 1500 caches up and down Highway 375, this stretch of road has the most caches per mile in the world.
"This has become what some call the power trial of the gods!" said Fee.
When it first started in spring of 2010, the geocaching community flocked to Rachel
Many visitors came who otherwise may not have.
"I never knew Rachel, Nevada existed except for geocaching," Steven O'Gara, a geocacher from Los Angeles, told FOX5.
Business for the Little A'Le'Inn had never been better.
"From that moment on our rooms were booked, business is great!" said West.
"I had more rooms rented in the month of November than I've ever had in twenty four years," said Travis.
Visitors came from all over the country and the world.
"You're getting tons of people from Czechoslovakia region, from Germany, we had some people from Switzerland, Sweden," said O'Gara.
"Idaho, there's New Hampshire, Florida, California, Washington," West said reading out of her registry.
But in February, the Nevada Department of Transportation changed everything.
"I had some people from Ireland that had actually come out here to do the cache and they informed me that there were only 25 caches left on the highway," West said.
NDOT removed the caches, saying they caused safety concerns.
"But what was worse is they were being put in blind spots... so what we did is the ones that were in our right of way we pulled them out, whenever we saw them and they were in our way and in our work we pulled them out," said NDOT spokesperson Michelle Booth.
Then the Geocaching web site pulled the GPS coordinates off its site.
Business at the Little A'Le'Inn came to a standstill.
TO SEE VIDEO & CONTINUE READING: www.fox5vegas.com/story/15902301/rachel-nevada-cashing-in-on-geocaching
Nevada UFO town cashes in on 'geocaching' game.......... SEE VIDEO
Posted: Oct 28, 2011 6:58 PM EDT Updated: Nov 01, 2011 11:07 AM EDT
Posted By Doug Johnson
Rachel, NV (FOX5) -
About two hours north of Las Vegas is State Highway 375, also known as the Extraterrestrial Highway.
The only town on the road is Rachel, Nevada.
For the past twenty years Pat Travis and now her daughter Connie West have been running the only business there, the Little A'Le'Inn.
"The UFO activity started within the first year that we were here," Travis told FOX5.
As popular culture's interest in UFOs faded so did visitors to the area.
But now a different type of visitor is coming.
"There not coming out here because of UFOs or Area 51 or the Little A'Le'Inn," said West.
Instead tourists have returned to Rachel to probe for something else, which has them looking at the ground, not the sky.
"Geocaching is our primary venture, what we came out here to do," said Scott Fee, a geocacher from Alabama.
Geocaching is a type of online scavenger hunt, where participants use GPS devices to find containers called "caches".
"Inside the film can is the log sheet showing everyone's been here, someone even had an alien stamp on that one," said Fee.
Every cache in the world is listed on the Geocaching web site, and geocachers, as they're called, can log every find they make.
With about 1500 caches up and down Highway 375, this stretch of road has the most caches per mile in the world.
"This has become what some call the power trial of the gods!" said Fee.
When it first started in spring of 2010, the geocaching community flocked to Rachel
Many visitors came who otherwise may not have.
"I never knew Rachel, Nevada existed except for geocaching," Steven O'Gara, a geocacher from Los Angeles, told FOX5.
Business for the Little A'Le'Inn had never been better.
"From that moment on our rooms were booked, business is great!" said West.
"I had more rooms rented in the month of November than I've ever had in twenty four years," said Travis.
Visitors came from all over the country and the world.
"You're getting tons of people from Czechoslovakia region, from Germany, we had some people from Switzerland, Sweden," said O'Gara.
"Idaho, there's New Hampshire, Florida, California, Washington," West said reading out of her registry.
But in February, the Nevada Department of Transportation changed everything.
"I had some people from Ireland that had actually come out here to do the cache and they informed me that there were only 25 caches left on the highway," West said.
NDOT removed the caches, saying they caused safety concerns.
"But what was worse is they were being put in blind spots... so what we did is the ones that were in our right of way we pulled them out, whenever we saw them and they were in our way and in our work we pulled them out," said NDOT spokesperson Michelle Booth.
Then the Geocaching web site pulled the GPS coordinates off its site.
Business at the Little A'Le'Inn came to a standstill.
TO SEE VIDEO & CONTINUE READING: www.fox5vegas.com/story/15902301/rachel-nevada-cashing-in-on-geocaching