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Winter Maintenance
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I MADE
my way to another park for another cache. The trees in the park were blocking the wind for me and the snow was coming straight down in fat flakes and blanketing the landscape. I found what appeared to be a parking spot, waypointed the car and began searching for the trail to the cache. The snow had obscured any paths, but the trail markers pointed me in the right direction. It was cold, but the lack of wind and the soft flakes made everything seem very peaceful and pleasant.
As I neared the cache, I realized I would need to leave the trail soon. I took one more look around to make sure I was very aware of my surroundings, and headed towards the cache. After following the arrow for a few feet, the cache area came into view—it was on a riverbank, and a fairly steep riverbank at that.
I realized there were several issues I needed to be concerned about. First of all, was the cache down near the river where the ground sloped worse? Losing my footing down there and falling towards the rocks by the riverside or worse, into the river, was a very real possibility. I finally decided that the most prudent course was to look at the hint. Thankfully, the cache placer's hint gave me enough information to safely make my way to the cache.
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What does your cache look like in the winter? Those caches that can be found easily in the summer with no hint at all could become dangerous challenges in the winter when the weather has obscured your very obvious hiding spot. Make sure you visit your hides in every season and that your rating and hint reflect the challenges that cachers are going to face.
Winter is also a good time to check on the items in your cache. Cachers will at times leave bottles of water that can freeze, expand and burst. Pens can freeze up and become useless, so make sure there are pencils in the container. Check the container itself, too. Those Gladware containers that seemed like a good and cheap idea in the summer can freeze and crack in the extremes of winter.
Even those quick urban micros that seemed so easy in warmer months can become troublesome in the winter seasons. Snowdrifts and snowplows can make locations inaccessible. Containers themselves can become frozen in their hiding spots. Pay attention to the comments in your cache logs and check on them as often as possible.
This year, my nephew and I were talking at our family Christmas dinner about going geocaching together. We happened to have a very white Christmas this year, with temperatures in the twenties. He also happened to have a new 4x4 pickup truck that he really wanted to test out in the snow. We packed up and made a day out of it, secure in our four-wheel drive fortress and managed to find quite a few caches.
The weather outside may be frightful but that's no reason to hang your GPS up until spring. They say there ain't no cure for the summertime blues, but the cure for winter cabin fever—with a little preparation and planning—might be as close as the nearest cache.
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