Manitoba Geocaching Association

[TurdleEggs]

I’m looking for suggestions how to hide a cache within 3m of a trail.

The area I’m looking at has fairly sparse bush composed primarily of White Poplar and Bur Oak. There’re no big Cottonwoods and Elms like in Winnipeg that often have a hole at the base big enough to hide an ammo can in. There’s the odd rock, but really just a nose sticking out of the ground and usually no crevices to hide something in.

I wanted these caches to be easy finds. I’ve got some tricky hides, but the idea behind these ones is more of a power trail to take a cacher on a nice hike where they can find lots of caches.

I like to do winter friendly hides, but a winter friendly hide that close to the trail would likely be muggled. I’m not a fan of hiding micros, so I’d rather not hide a minuscule cache in a bush just for the sake of putting it in a particular location.

The easy alternative is to hide it on the ground. Even so, that close to a trail it must be reasonably well hidden or a passing muggle may spot it. Also, one of the problems with hiding on the ground is depending how difficult the cache is to find, eventually the area may get turned over.

One idea is to have a piece of flagging tape above the cache marking its position. This is very popular on Vancouver Island and also makes the ground hide arguably winter friendly. I’m looking for suggestions on what to use as a marker. I can’t nail things to trees and flagging tape fades quickly. UV quickly destroys a lot of different materials and I’d hope the marker would last a couple of years at least.

Of course, cleverly camouflaged hides are always fun and I’ve got a few of those. They can be problematic though as often the “disguise” wears off after few cachers have handled it or the cache has spent a winter outside. I do have a couple of ideas though

Of course cache maintenance is importunate to me. The container needs to be rugged and waterproof (and somewhat cacher proof) so I know it’ll survive rain and winter and many openings without compromising the contents. I’ve got a lot of cache hides and I don’t want to be running all over replacing poor containers!

Please let me hear your ideas on hiding a cache on a trail!

[Ztirnats]

A suggestion for flagging tape is a dollar store plastic table cloth (they come in varying colours) cut into strips (whatever size you want) and tied to the tree/post. Surprisingly, the colour lasts in the outdoor summer/winter environments. Our Canadian forces often use this method for their yellow ribbon campaigns where they line boulevards with yellow ribbons (plastic table cloth material) tied around trunks of trees. We have used it in two of our caches (yellow) and after 2 years it still looks like new. As a cacher you may have not noticed this as it was more for us, the hider's purpose not the finder.

[TurdleEggs]

A table cloth you say? Thanks Turnips, that’s just the info I was looking for

[Ztirnats]

Yup! We were shocked to hear that a cheap plastic tablecloth would do the job. The idea came from the Canadian Forces when we contacted them for "yellow ribbon" to put around our boulevard trees in front of our house. We have some very close friends who were serving in Afghanistan and as a reminder of their service we wanted to tie yellow ribbon around our two trees. We were hoping to buy some from the Canadian Forces. It was then that they told us what we needed. They buy it in giant rolls wholesale but for an individual wanting just a small amount the dollar store plastic tablecloth does the job. The only problem we encountered was not all the dollar stores carried the yellow and no other colour would do for our Forces remembrance. Any colour would do for geocaching purposes.

As a bonus it cuts real slick as well. A pair of scissors slices through it like nothing, especially when we needed fairly long strips to tie around trunks of large trees.

[glacier_ice]

Cool idea. Got me thinking about my tree in the front of my yard. All hail the Turnips!