[pct-l] Resupply

[Edward Anderson]

Carl, 
I have cached in many different places during my ride. Once in a barrel in a 
barn ( with the permission of the owner) near the school that you pass just 
before crossing the Mojave on the way to Cottonwood.  Once (with permission) in 
someones garage. Once in the storage room of the Ranger Station at Harts Pass in 
Washington. Once in an abandoned log cabin near Windy Pass also in Washington.  
I have learned to always store cached food in OpSaks to prevent rodents and 
bears from smelling it.

But most often I bury my caches - usually about 200' or more from road crossings 
or trail heads. I have become an expert at camouflage.  I carefully peel back 
the ground cover so I can reuse it. I dig a long shallow hole and bury my OpSaks 
along with exactly 10 mothballs if I am in bear country. (the bears dislike the 
smell of mothballs - they do not smell like something that a bear would want to 
eat) Then I carefully cover the cache, using the original ground cover and often 
branches and leaves found on the ground nearby. My criteria is that if a person 
were to walk by that spot, my cache would not be noticed.  When I am back to 
recover it, days or even weeks later, I have sometimes had  great difficulty in 
finding it myself. That is because, when deciding where to cache, I will have 
considered several possible spots. Then, since I camouflage so well, it is hard 
to remember where I cached. For my 2011 ride I will always take a picture of the 
cache location.

When I return to recover my food I do everything in reverse - remove branches, 
peel back ground cover, recover food bags and all 10 mothballs (for reuse) and 
return the ground cover and camouflage again so that there is no sign that that 
spot was ever used for a cache. 


Sorry I had to go to so much detail to explain, but I feel that it is very 
important that  "leave no trace" be a priority. It takes time to do a proper job 
of returning the spot to look as it did originally.

MendoRider/Ed Anderson






 



________________________________
From: Carl Siechert <carlito at gmail.com>
To: Edward Anderson <mendoridered at yahoo.com>
Cc: pct-l at backcountry.net
Sent: Thu, November 18, 2010 6:16:01 PM
Subject: Re: [pct-l] Resupply


Hi Ed:

I've often wondered: How do you cache your food? Bury, hang, or ??? And how, 
exactly, do you do it in a way that protects your food from bears, rodents, 
insects, marauding thru hikers, moisture, etc.? Assuming the cache is hidden, 
how do you find it weeks later?

Thanks,
Carl


On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 12:05 PM, Edward Anderson <mendoridered at yahoo.com> 
wrote:

locations and will either cache or send my food and processed horse feed via
>Priority Mail to each of them:  Priority Mail to T. Meadows, Muir Trail Ranch,
>and Ceder Grove.  I will drop off a resupply bucket at Agnew Meadows. I will
>cache and also camp when I pick up resupplies at Donner Pass, at a lake
>near Echo Summit, and at Sonora Pass. I will be caching as I trailer my horse
>north from Agua Dulce to Sierra City.  Then I leave him there in good care
>