2023-10-14 40 -116

Location

Just south of Battle Mountain, Nevada.

Participants

Expedition

After the debacle at 2023-10-13 40 -111, I got some coffee in Heber City, found I-80 in Parkdale, stopped for a short run in Salt Lake City, stopped again for a short bike ride at Knolls in the Great Salt Flat, and refueled myself and the vehicle at nightfall in Wendover, at the Nevada-Utah state line.

From there, I continued for an hour or two until I got to Elko, where I found a dark residential street, put down the seat back, got out my blanket, and slept a couple of hours in the car. Waking at 2 a.m., I felt pretty alert, so I drove another hour to Battle Mountain and then a few miles south to the entry point for the hashpoint. I parked at the side of the country road, and then got another two or three hours of sleep.

At sunrise, I grabbed my eclipse-watchin' glasses and hiked the 1.5 km in to the hashpoint, which was another of the semi-desert landscapes that I've been exploring a lot on this trip. I was about a half-hour early for the eclipse, so I got in touch with nature by getting out my phone and playing Wordle, Waffle, Worldle, and so on.

Despite the desert landscape, it was a pretty cloudy morning and actually rained for a while. But, by the time the full eclipse came along, there were enough intermittent cloud breaks that I got a pretty good view of the action, sometimes through the filter glasses and sometimes through the clouds. By the way, although the photos make it look like an orange fire in a black sky, but that's just the filter talking. It turns out that daylight is pretty much daylight in a full annular eclipse. The light is... a bit dimmed, and kind of weird-looking, but if you were busy with something else it would be entirely possible to go through it without ever noticing that anything unusual was happening.