#2: [02-Nov-14]

#1: [05-Jun-01]

08-Jul-2014 -- This would be the fourth of seven confluences traveling west along 41N. We were coming from 41N 107W.

We were continuing west along the dirt Highway 129 paralleling the Little Snake River and just south of the Wyoming/Colorado border (in the middle of nowhere) when we passed a very impressive looking ranch. It was the Three Forks Ranch and it was a very impressive sight from the road with large sweeping rock staircases at either end and what appeared to be immaculate lawn. This is actually a super high end resort and spa. Just for fun take a look at the room rates – you should plan on spending a *few thousand* dollars for every day that you stay there!!! The imagery doesn’t show a heliport on the property but for those prices you would think it would be included in the price! Wow!

From Highway 129 we continued west on Highway 70 then at Baggs, went south on Highway 789/13 to County Road 4 until we crossed the Little Snake River and turned north onto County Road 21N here. This was another fairly decent dirt road and we stayed to the right here. Passing the oil pumps we continued east along a road less traveled until we came to a fenceline and then went north until we parked at the edge of the butte just before it dropped down into the West Fork of the Cherokee Creek valley.

The confluence was just over 700 meters away from where we had parked and I set off down an animal trail that led me down to the dry Cherokee Creek. I followed along in the wash and then proceeded directly to the confluence across relatively flat terrain with lots of low scrub. It was fairly easy to zero out and I started logging positions on my Trimble GPS and sent a Spot message announcing my successful visit to those that were following my adventure. The terrain was above me in almost all directions. To the east was a rocky outcropping about 25 degrees in elevation above me. The longest view was to the south down towards the Little Snake River. After I took my pictures I made the hike back finding a better path up the steep slope to our Tahoe.

TerraSync post processing of the GPS data reveals the actual confluence location was 5 meters east of where I had found all zeroes with a horizontal precision of 2.3 meters.

Total round trip time off County Road 4 was 1:35 with 31 km of driving. Within that time was 0:51 on my 1.8 km roundtrip hike.

Onward to 41N 109W!