[pct-l] water cache sabotage?

[Sean 'Miner' Nordeen]

As there is no evidence that any hiker is doing this, I suggest we drop the speculation.  If a hiker was doing it, they wouldn't be using an ice pick since that serves no purpose on the trail.  Instead, they'd use their knife (which makes a slit rather then a hole) or toss the bottle high in the air until it lands on a rock smashing the bottle.

Most water caches are located next to a road and anyone who has done much hiking in SoCal can attest that near road acces points, there can be trash, grafitti, vandalism and theft that has little to do with the hiking community at large.  Now I do remember reading an eye witness report from a few years ago of a mountain biker using water in a cache to bath/cool off by dumping a gallon on themselves.  But thats been about it.

The trailjournal entry in question was at Pioneer Mall Picnic Area where there is a horse trough with dirty water that many hikers have used to refill in the past.  There is sometimes several of gallons of clean water cached behind it that a local maintains.  As its next to a road and a picnic day use area, blaming any group seems pointless.  Any water cached here is only a convience in that you don't have to purify whats in the horse trough and no ones life should be theatened if its missing or empty.

To be honest, I can't rember one time last year that I was a water cache away from death and this years much wetter.  There were a few times that I avoided a natural dirty source since it was a bit of a walk off trail and used a water cache instead, but I never felt that I would die if it was empty.

-Miner



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Check my 2009 PCT Journal out at www.postholer.com/Miner