[pct-l] Fw: Re (pct-1) caching - how to do it

[Edward Anderson]

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: Edward Anderson <mendoridered at yahoo.com>
To: austinwilliams123 at gmail.com; mike at deepdesert.com; brooklynkayak at gmail.com; pct-1 at backcountry.net
Sent: Fri, February 12, 2010 7:29:17 PM
Subject: Re (pct-1) caching - how to do it

Hi Austin, Mike, Steve,
I rode my horse solo and mostly unsupported from border to border. Got to Monument 78 Canadian border on September 9th 2009. Caching was my primary way of resupplying. In Southern Cal. my wife met me at trailheads three times and I also cached my food and processed feed for my horse (6 pounds/day to supplement his graze) at several locations. A solo rider does not have the option of hitching into town to resupply. In Northern California, Oregon, and Washington. I cached at road crossings and trailheads. The way I did this was to drive my rig ahead (having left Primo in good care) and cached as I moved it north. The longest I went, for example, was from Seiad Valley in N.C. to McKenzie Pass on Oregon. This is about 350 miles and I cached at four locations where the PCT crosses roads.

There is a lot of red tape to get a horse into Canada so I only went as far as the Monument at the border and then went south to Mazama, where I had last parked my rig. I had cached at a spot just south of Highway 20 and also at the Ranger station at Harts Pass.

CACHING: Here is my approach. I bury my caches well away from the trail or road crossing. . Not very deep - usually only 3 or 4 inches covering the food bags. Very well camouflaged - I reused the original ground cover and also leaves and sticks - whatever it would take so that If someone walked by it could not be detected. This was sometimes a problem for me to find my own cache location, sometimes a week or two later, because I would often have considered several spots before deciding. After digging up a cache I always refilled the hole and re-camouflaged the spot so there would be no trace that there had ever been a hole there.

HOW TO KEEP ANIMALS FROM DISTURBING YOUR CACHE: Steve is right. Mothballs.That smell is repulsive to bears. I buried them along with my food bags and then recovered them for reuse when I dug up the cache. In parts of the Yukon and Alaska they use mothballs in cotton tobacco sacks to keep bears away. They call them "bear charms". BUT, I have discovered that rodents are not deterred by the smell of mothballs. (This discovery was at my cache at Beldon Town in N. California where rodents got all of my horse's feed, which was sealed in Food-Saver bags but did not touch my food which was in an OpSak. And they were buried together under a thick bed of leaves. From then on I stored ALL food, mine and his, in OpSaks). The answer is to use OpSaks to hold your food. They are 100% odor proof,  and, of course, also prevent bears from smelling your food. Also use them in camp and use bear charms as`a bear repellant. I store my bear charms in an OpSak when I am
on the trail. You can buy OpSaks from REI or on line. They are manufactured by LocSak. When I used this approach I had no bear or rodent problems either at caches or in my camps. 

MendoRider