Sheep What? Traditional Cache
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(small)
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When I started traveling the I-15 corridor in the early 1990's, Exit 172 was labeled as "US Sheep Experiment Station". I always got a kick out of this sign ... often wondering what exactly they were doing with sheep off this exit. Sometime over the past few years, they have removed the description from this exit, and instead it just says "Exit 172", which of course is even more curious to travelers.
This cache is for all of those who drove this stretch and said "Sheep What?". The cache is not at the experiment station headquarters which is East of the freeway, but instead is at a nice old sign on the Junction of "Sheep Station Road" and old highway 91, a short drive off of the exit to the West. This is a great picture opportunity.
The US Sheep Experiment Station (USSES) was established in 1915 by an Executive Order of president Woodrow Willson. The USSES is a primary agricultural research location for rangeland grazing and breeding research. It consists of over 87,000 acres of land in several ecosystems, including desert sagebrush and bunchgrasses, Alpine meadows and forests and intermediate Alpine sagebrush-grasslands. There are also a few sheep around - around 5,000 at any given time.
Significant contributions of the USSES include development of 3 major sheep breeds, and various studies on rangeland management, genetics, grazing behavior, and other topics of interest to sheep growers and researchers. It is operated today by the USDA and by the University of Idaho.
The cache is in a lok-n-lok container. It originally had as many small sheep in it as I could fit. Feel free to trade for something else if you don't have any sheep. The logbook is now a write-in-the-rain style log which is best signed with a pencil, which hopefully is still in the container. Hopefully the lok-n-lok will solve any water issues with this cache.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Jrfg raq, ybbx qbja.
Treasures
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