#4: [05-Jul-14]

#2: [23-Aug-03]

#3: [11-May-14] (incomplete)

01-Apr-2000 -- It had been an especially stressful week at work for my wife Joyce, and I had an itch to do another confluence. So, we bailed out Friday after work and dinner to get away from it all for a day or so. Since the confluence I was most curious about is 80 miles NNW of our home in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, and 40 miles SW of Hot Springs, South Dakota, we spent the evening driving to Hot Springs and spent the night.

Saturday morning was beautiful, with lots of blue sky and puffy clouds. Picture #2 shows the view south of Hot Springs, leaving the southern Black Hills, and looks into the plains of South Dakota and Nebraska on Highway 71. We soon dropped out of the hills and rolled onto the plains where the roads are mostly well maintained dirt. I had the GPS all warmed up and plugged into the laptop for moving map display, so I only made one wrong turn all day. That was because I didn't have the map zoomed up enough to know that two converging roads didn't actually come together. After about 10 miles of backtracking, we went into it from a different direction.

As the pictures show, the final obstacle was a steel gate with chain, lock, and Private Property-No Trespassing sign on it. The chain wasn't actually locked, but we respect private property around here, and that's as far as I was going. There were no dwellings within miles, or I could have tried to get permission. Maybe some day, the opportunity will present itself to fullfill this one. Until then, I've got at least three more in my area to try for!

More pictures and text available at www.actcom.net/~mcduffie (links at the bottom of the page).