[pct-l] Food Cache

[Ken Powers]

Take a digital camera with you when you cache the food. Take a picture of 
the cache with surrounding landmarks. The picture will be much more helpful 
than any GPS waypoint. (My experience on the ADT)

Ken
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bob Bankhead" <wandering_bob at comcast.net>
To: <pct-l at backcountry.net>
Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2007 1:36 PM
Subject: Re: [pct-l] Food Cache


Possible? Certainly, if you have the time and transportation.

Practical? Not in my opinion. If you're far enough from a re-supply station 
to make caching worth considering, you'd better have a good plan B if your 
cache is gone when you get there - or you just can't find it?

In going from Yosemite to Manning Park, I cached only once - we dug in a 
cache in the picnic grounds at Sonora Pass (and had a heck of a time finding 
it again). I would have also liked to do so at the Kearsarge Pass/PCT trail 
junction just to avoid the detour into Independence, but the ranger at Onion 
Valley didn't like the looks of our shovel and lightly loaded pack.

If you do cache and are travelling with others, everyone should go on every 
caching trip so everyone knows where to find any given cache. A cache does 
you no good if the one who cached it isn't with you at retrieval time. 
Especially if it's buried, it can be hard to find even with a GPS and a good 
description.

Best bet - find a friend or someone from this list who would like to have an 
all-expenses paid overnight hiking experience while humping your resupply 
into an established trail junction.

Lacking and/or supplementing that, either ship yourself a series of resupply 
boxes or plan to buy locally. The latter supports the local economy and 
enables a more favorable attitude on the part of the locals to us stinky, 
filthy hikers. Be sure to thank those who give you rides and other magic 
along the trail.

A helpful suggestion: If you know you'll be travelling with others, everyone 
should address their boxes to everyone else in the group so that if needed, 
anyone of you can retrieve everyone's boxes. It's quite helpful if you're 
trying to make a pick-up before the PO closes - you can send one person 
ahead without their pack to make the pickup for all. If someone quits, it 
also allows any of the others to either order the dropee's box returned to 
them or to pick it up and make use of whatever they need from it's contents. 
It's called "flexibility".

Wandering Bob
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