or at least, stuff in a rental storage, close to your BOL, with empty drums buried in the woods nearby, so you can transfer the food and gear to them, the first night of shtf Not that big a deal, really, given a bike with the front wheel lashed in alignment with the frame. lash the bucket of goodies to the bike and walk along side of it. It leaves tracks, so do the last 50m (to each drum) just carrying the buckets. You dont want the drums within sight of each other. Buried food, prior to shtf, is problematic, risking animals digging at it and people noticing same. It's guaranteed that they will steal it, if they do notice it. In bear country, securing them adequately is a huge pita and they have to be buried and accessed at night, etc. If they are empty, there's nothing to attract animals and no reason for anyone to care about them, either. Once shtf, some snares will deal with the animals, until they've all been killed and eaten, by dogs and people. That wont take long, a month or so dont try to go far, if shtf. Arrange for a dugout, very small, in the woods near your local water source. A sack of nails and some split 1" sticks will stop all the 4 wheeled traffic. The flattened tires will mean that you wont go far and you'll be getting shot up as you do. The piled up cars will stop all other traffic, ya see. People who know how to ambush vehicles wont set up where you can see this coming, or where anyone can just drive around the road-block. bugging in wont work. Dogs will smell your food and water, hang around, and people will notice. They'll also notice that you're not skeletal. The cities and towns will burn, due to there being no pumps working (no power) and that means no water in the pipes. Garbage will pile up, meaning diseases. 10% of the population will be dead within a month of the power's going off. Lots of dead humans being eaten by starving dog packs. They will soon consider humans as being food, and attack living people, too. It's happened before. Every "findable" building will be searched, repeatedly, by armed, desperate people. If you "think" people will watch their kids starve before killing you, you are in for a horrific shock, right before you expire.
Direct answer to your observation about digging cache holes. You aren't going to dig holes big enough for an altoids tin much less for drums of any size here on the hill. Solid rock, even the quarrymen use hoe rams just to get deep enough to drill for blasting shots. Need a better idea for this nekka da woods. Your posts #s 1 and 2 seem unrelated to caching --
And getting to the bottom of the drum is a B*&%# once buried. Very hard to do if not on your own land without being noticed. Even in a large park or on fed land. I have never cached anything I could not live without. There is no guarantee it will be there when you get there. I do however like placing a cache for resupply days ahead of time if careful. I have used rail lines. the amount of rail traffic is not what it once was and with small caches it is pretty easy to hide even a five gallon bucket of food or ammo or whatever buried down to the lid is pretty hard to spot. I have done this out in the woods as well a bucket painted and stuck up in a tree fork can't really be seen to well if you off the path and careful. I have thought of trying something like a trout line type cache in the water but have not. any thoughts would be great
Well shtf it happens all the time like hurricane Katrina most people flock together and want the government to do something for them so where I am I am good between the swamp cabbage coons armadillo crabs oysters clams Gators hogs catfish deer green bries dove possums break bass crawfish cats dogs horse cows no need shtf is a state of mind
Did a cache once in an area that I knew no one had been in or had reason to go into. Buried a 5 gallon bucket with a few things and a few canned food items. Covered it with care and I couldn't tell it was there. Checked a week later and no disturbance. A year later I went back to check on the condition of the contents and my bucket was gone. The hole was there and it was evident that it had been discovered some time ago. This area was an hour walk through heavy woods from any direction. Thus endeth my caching days.
Interesting posts stimulated by an OP based on dubious premises. Caching shouldn't be seen as a total solution for getting through a SHTF / TEOTWAWKI event. It's more a means of risk management, by spreading the risk of discovery and dispossession of a centralised resource storage in the BOL / BIL. Judicious caching may enable the ability for flight or fight, to either go to an alternative BOL, or to fight and retake the occupied BIL. The other use for caches is for travel sustainment from one place to another to keep pack weight down, particularly in seasons where hunting and foraging along the travel route may not be possible or practical.
These two quotes carry the essence of caching. If your "stuff" is undisturbed you have a mitzvah. If not, you should NOT be surprised.
If you don't mind me asking, approx. how deep was your cache buried? To my knowledge none of mine have been disturbed. I say that because some of the ones in other states I've not been back to in quite awhile. Like you, I've placed mine pretty well off the beaten track. I use a metal detector to check. If I get a strong hit, I assume its GTG. Not perfect, but I figure if one has been discovered the person(s) are not likely to fill in the hole. If I see no evidence of it being dug up and I get the hit, I leave it be. In some cases I've put as large of a rock as I could find/lift over the cache. Same thing applies, if the rock hasn't been moved and the area looks as I left it, I figure it's GTG.
In my mind, the problem with a cache is that if discovered by someone else, they will take you stuff and may stake it out to find your BOL. Planting false caches is a good idea, if you have access to the "T" posts or lengths of iron pipe to seed them with.
Mine was buried with 1' of dirt over the top. Leaf litter was returned to natural and I honestly could not tell it was there had I not planted it. Probably found by pure dumb luck by someone, but it still made me think "what if I were depending on this?".
Might as well put a note for the finder, giving the location of someone you dislike intensely or is a known villain.....more supplies may be found at xxxdegreesxxminutesN and xxxdegreesxxminutesE. It may just save the cache robbers some time staking the site out to ambush you.
not sure of the dimensions of the container....just need to have enough weight in/on it to make sure that it doesn't pop out of the ground like a cork if the water table rises. the rubber 'o' ring will help prevent spoilage due to water penetration. Caulking the lid with silicon sealant may offer additional insurance. The Vittles Vault, and similar pet food storage containers have a number of handy alternative uses.... Vittles Vault by GAMMA2
I had a look through the site that I linked to, and the sizes would make caching feasible. They would be particularly suitable for bug-out route caches. Provided that the cache doesn't have any metallic content, they would be difficult to prospect for using metal detectors....so location mapping and identification will need to be well defined and recorded.
Very much depends on the resin. Some don't hold up well in wet environments. Other than that, I don't know enough to say which ones are good and which ones are not.