The craft of a cache worth finding

The part that happens before the container

The instinct when placing a first cache is to think about the box: what to use, how to hide it, how to make it hard to spot.

The people whose caches get remembered start somewhere else. They start with the place, and specifically with a question that is easy to state and uncomfortable to answer honestly: is there a reason to bring somebody here?

Sometimes the answer is a view. Sometimes it is a piece of local history that is invisible unless somebody points at it. Sometimes it is simply a corner of a familiar town that people have walked past for twenty years without looking up.

When that answer exists, quite ordinary containers produce memorable caches. When it does not, no amount of craft rescues the hide.

What these pages cover

The four pages below take the practical side in order: the container and whether it survives, the puzzle if there is one, the placement decisions, and the home-made end of the hobby.

They are written from the owner’s side, but they are worth reading as a finder too. A lot of what makes a cache frustrating to find is legible once you know which decision produced it, and a finder who understands that writes more useful logs.

Reading a cache backwards

There is a useful habit that makes both halves of this section easier, and it costs nothing: when you find a cache, spend ten seconds working out which decisions produced it.

Why this container and not a larger one, is the spot genuinely too small, or was it convenience? Why here rather than thirty metres along, where the view is better? Is the concealment doing work, or is it just making the search longer? Has the owner been back recently, and how can you tell?

Doing this turns every find into a small lesson in the craft, and it changes the logs you write. A log that says the seal has gone on the lid, the log sheet was damp at the edges is worth more to an owner than a compliment, and it is the kind of observation you only make once you have started reading caches as objects somebody designed.

The commitment nobody mentions at the start

The pages here are about decisions made once. The part that is not a decision is what follows.

A cache is a promise to return. Containers crack, seals harden, logbooks fill, undergrowth swallows things between June and December, and finders replace containers with varying care. None of that is failure. It is what happens to an object left outdoors in a place people visit.

Before placing anything, the honest question is whether you will still make that journey in three years. If the spot is two hours away and you were there on holiday, the answer is probably no, and a cache nobody maintains does not stay a cache. It becomes litter with coordinates attached, and the community that has to live with it is the same one whose goodwill lets everybody else keep placing things in public places.

A cache with a maintenance plan lasts years, and an unmaintained one eventually becomes the problem the safety pages describe. The plan does not need to be elaborate: a rough interval for checking, a spare log sheet kept somewhere you will find it, and a habit of reading your own logs rather than only collecting them. Owners who go out after two DNFs in a row almost never end up with an archived cache. Owners who wait to be told go out to find nothing left to fix.

The ratings are a promise, not a boast

Every cache carries two numbers: difficulty, for how hard it is to find once you are there, and terrain, for how hard it is to get there at all. Both run from one to five in half steps, and both are set by the owner.

They are the most frequently misused pair of numbers in the hobby, and the misuse runs in one direction. Difficulty gets inflated, because a high number sounds like a compliment to the hide. Terrain gets understated, because the owner knows the route and has stopped noticing the climb.

Read as a promise rather than a rating, both become easy to set honestly. Terrain five means a finder needs specialist equipment (a boat, a rope, a tree climb) and anyone who arrives without it has been told something untrue. Terrain one means a wheelchair user can reach it, which is a specific claim about a specific surface, not a general impression that the walk was easy. A parent planning a morning with small children and a cacher planning a day with a rope are both making real decisions from these numbers.

Difficulty deserves the same discipline. If the container is in the only hollow tree in a clearing, it is a two however pleased you are with it. If it takes an experienced cacher three visits, it is not a three. Setting the pair accurately is the least visible part of the craft and the part that most reliably decides whether people finish the day having enjoyed it.