First things first. If you are going to try to speak the language and be credible, you may as well learn to pronounce the words. The word cache is pronounced "cash." Here are the three tenses of the word; cache, caching, and cached. That was not hard, was it? That being done, let's get on with it.
Caching is simply a secret "hoard of stores." Caching is usually done for extended periods in locations that will be of an advantage to the person caching the supplies for later use. The articles of interest to the survivalist are guns, ammunition, precious metals, and food. Anything else regarded as contraband, now or in the future, should be cached. As long as there are the Charles Schumer types in government, (a staunch anti-gun idiot), you must consider caching guns.
Guns, ammunition, spare parts, magazines, and cleaning supplies were my first choice of things to cache. They are destined to extinction as the globalists attempt to disarm America. One should cache a backpack system and/or LBE gear for possible escape and evasion from your home to a safe house, or rallying point, or whatever. Certain types of food, clothing and tools should be stored for future use in the coming troubled times. Gold and silver should be cached with your pack, should the present form of currency fail. If the economy stays intact with the paper dollar as its basis, you should have plenty of paper money to effect your passage from a dangerous area to a safe area.
Caching makes sense for more reasons that government confiscation. Burglary, floods, fire and tornadoes are all possible events that could wipe out your supplies if left in your house or out buildings. In my view, the ground is the only good place to cache. There have been entire books written about the art of caching, but I am going to share with you one of my tried and tested ways.
The main criterion of caching is that the goods cached be clean, dry and not rusty or corroded. Other considerations are, location of the cache site, accessibility in times of emergency, and ease of retrieval. If you live in a four-season climate, you will have a problem with frozen ground, snow and ice; buy a mattock. If you are caching in a clandestine manner (I believe you should), you must have a caching spot as far away from your dwelling as possible, because people ferreting out your stash will probe around close to your house; they know that most people are too lazy and will not cache their stash too far away.
Caching is expensive, but losing your supplies, could be fatal in a time of need. I bought a sheet and a half of pressure treated, half-inch plywood for $30 (it should have been 5/8- or 3/4-inch) from the lumber yard, a 55-gallon blue barrel with a screw-on cover with a good gasket, from NITRO-PAK Preparedness Center for about $80 with shipping, a big blue plastic tarp for under $10, desiccant, and lots of masking tape, wax paper, black waterproof marker, oils, and heavy duty Zip-Loc type bags of various sizes. NITRO-PAK has a package deal of three packages of desiccant dryer bags to a pack. I bought twelve bags. The bags were of sufficient size to easily handle the volume of air in the ammo cans to keep them dry. The ammo cans were purchased from a variety of places.
The first step was to decide what I wanted to cache. I chose guns, ammo, magazines, cleaning supplies, some food, documents and some silver. I chose to cache an AR-15, its spare parts, six magazines, a Browning HP, magazines and ammo. A complete LBE system with pistol holster, a heavy-duty knife, some MRE's, documents, and a couple hundred dollars worth of U.S. junk silver were squirreled away.
The arms were thoroughly cleaned and dried. They were then disassembled and coated with oil to keep rust at bay. The parts were wrapped in wax paper in groups of parts, taped up with masking tape, marked with a black waterproof marker, and placed in resealable plastic bags. The leather sheath for the knife was treated with saddle soap and wrapped in wax paper and taped up with masking tape. After oiling the blade, it was wrapped in wax paper and taped with copious amounts of masking tape to form its own sheath. Proper labeling of all parts is extremely important.
The Storage Container - I had a couple of ideas about the storage container. I chose the plastic barrel because it was really big, had a screw-on lid with a very good gasket, was rustproof, and watertight. I chose to build a box to put in the ground, and then put the barrel in the box. This served two purposes. First, it keeps the earth off the barrel, making for clean deposits and withdrawals. Secondly, in the future I may want to pull the loaded barrel out of the ground and load it on a pickup truck or other suitable vehicle. Getting the barrel out of the tightly packed ground would be very difficult, if not impossible. A tripod and small winching device would be used to pull it up to the surface. As it worked out, half inch plywood was not quite heavy enough, as the compacted earth bowed the box inward and the barrel is in there rather tightly, but it's still retrievable.
The box has to be carefully planned to get away with a mere sheet and a half. I used 1 x 2-inch cleats cut from surplus treated 2 x 6-inch material I had around. I first nailed the box together minimally with finishing nails, then used decking screws to really cinch it up tight. Remember to drill pilot holes first or the wood will split. After the box was constructed and the barrel fitted, I covered over the nail heads and screws with a plasticised tar-based gook used for chimney flashing, roof repairs etc. Be careful - the gook is very sticky and never dries. I also coated all the joints on the outside to help keep moisture out of it.
I found a great location with sandy soil, well protected by pine trees, which give shielding from possible onlookers all year around. The spot is easy for me to get to unobserved, day or night. A very important feature of the spot is the fact that it is well away from any natural lines of drift. A natural line of drift, according to Maj. John L. Plaster, USAR (Ret), is a line of travel that man or beast would or do travel, because of the ease of traverse. Valleys, creek beds, deer trails, clearings, the edge of a wood line, etc. are natural lines of drift.
Next we (my trusted cohort and I), scouted out the location to make sure there were no interlopers about. With military entrenching tools (the U.S.-made trifold shovels), tarp and a camo poncho in hand, we set to work digging the hole. We put it about six to eight feet away from the biggest pine tree to, hopefully, avoid roots. The dirt from the hole was carefully piled on the tarp. The pine needles were meticulously brushed from the area of the hole and set aside fore replacement.
Speaking of a seeing sky - I suppose if you want to carry this operation to an exacting science, you must consider the timing of overpass and orbit of the KH spy satellites.
Surprisingly enough, plotting the path of these birds is not a very difficult task. An easily available and easy-to-use computer program for Amateur Radio satellite tracking, and some flight data from a specialized BBS will show you where they are. Perhaps this will make a good article at a later date.
With the winged intruder safely away from our hide, we proceeded to finish up the operation. Back-filling is a critical part of the process. We used a large diameter stick to tamp the sand down around the box. You certainly do not want it to settle later because it could create a slight depression around the edge of the cover, thus revealing the site. Naturally, the volume of the box displaces quite a bit of sand which has to be moved from the site. We had a wheelbarrow, so we wheeled off the excess to a nearby sandy site. It was a bit of a risk because damp sand, freshly dug, is darker than top sand. We knew that the sun would dry out the freshly dug sand in two or three days and it would safely be blended in with the surrounding sand.
Never having cached anything before, I was a bit reluctant to bury expensive hardware without first seeing for myself the integrity of the barrel and box combination. We buried the box and barrel in the spring and waited through a very rainy summer. We opened the tomb in the late autumn, with the hours of daylight shorter, giving us cover of dusk at an earlier hour. The wooden cover came off a bit hard (that's OK), due to warpage. We screwed off the massive plastic cover and much to my relief, the inside of the barrel was dry as a bone. I was almost certain we were going to find a small pool of water in the bottom with rivulets of water on the sides of the barrel, caused by condensation in the empty barrel.
Satisfied, we started the laborious process of lugging all the supplies to the caching site, always being vigilant of prying eyes. The ammo cans went first. Three 50 cal. Cans fit side by side, and a single 30 cal. Can in front of the fifties. The next layer was three more 50 cal. cans opposite the ones on the bottom. Next the 30 cal., then a case of MRE's. The now stripped and packaged AR-15 upper receiver assembly was placed vertically between the wall of the barrel and the ammo cans. I am not eager to share with you the number of rounds I was able to store, but suffice it to say, it was a very considerable amount.
Covering up the cache is an extremely important part of the operation. The pine needles were sprinkled over the area of the hole, just as they appeared when we came. Scuff marks from the edges of our boots were smoothed out and the floor of pine needles restored to a natural state. Our tools were all picked up and accounted for, and a quick but critical survey of the site was made. Satisfied that all looked natural, we exited the area.
I have violated a couple of times one of the cardinal rules of caching: do not go back to the site unless absolutely necessary. Do to a lack of self control, I felt it necessary, after nine months of almost peaceful rest, to open it up to see if it was still dry and intact. It has been a year now, and I don't plan to dig it up again, unless I decide to put a few more things in the barrel.
One should use good sense in approaching the site. Always take a circuitous route; try to cover your tracks. Be mindful of bow hunters, and turkey hunters, as they are usually camouflaged and very stealthy. A good hunter could be in your area watching your "hole" operation and you won't even know it.
Some final thoughts and suggestions. If you are going to bury more than one barrel, I would give serious thought to putting them at least a hundred yards apart. Why make it easy for an adversary to find? Be certain to document your cache sight with map and compass. Can you find the cache sight if "the big old oak tree on the corner" is cut down? If you use physical landmarks make certain they are stationary. Don't be so pleased with yourself and your preparations you made and start running your mouth about how invincible you think you now are.
The three requisites of life are food, shelter and clothing and the ability to protect, maintain or procure them. At present, private ownership of the means to protect is being challenged, and at this time I feel it necessary to cache some of the firearms. Naturally, I have firearms for continued training and defense. I plan to cache a barrel of food, a barrel of clothing and a good backpackable tent, probably with the clothing. This all takes time, money and much effort. I don't want to come off as a raving "Chicken Little," the sky is falling, but I do not know how much time we have left to get our life in order and our survival supplies secured. I do know that every day we are not prepared is a day lost.
Daily, I see on the conventional news, stories about the United Nations, with their globalist agenda dictating something to the government of the United States. One of the latest news bits was the story that UN medical people were unhappy with the fact that three to five percent of children in the U.S. are taking Ritalin, a drug used to treat hyperactive children. They also say there are too many guns in the hands of citizens, and it is their aim to remedy that in time. I also saw a document that a like-minded health practitioner gave me concerning the displeasure of the UN, whining about the vitamin and food supplement sales and availability to the people! They would like it to be regulated! The United States is a charter member of the UN and it doesn't take much of an imagination to figure out how these "concerns" of today, expressed by the UN will be tomorrow's legislation! Paranoia? I think not.
Lessons Learned - In retrospect, we have learned a few things about caching. I should have chosen a more subdued color for the tarp. Brown would have been an excellent choice considering the surroundings. Arranging the ammo cans in the bottom of the barrel was quite a stretch for a short-armed person. A stout metal handle from a discarded dust mop was fashioned with a flat hook so we could hook onto the handles of the cans and move them better. I also added some non-slip material on the handle portion.
A better method of marking the ammo cans was needed as I had used strips of masking tape with a black marker. A far better way would be to use the paint pencils in automotive rebuild shops for writing on parts. White would show up nicely on the olive drab cans.
The depth of the box should have been a bit deeper. I believe 12 inches is the minimum depth. Ours was about eight inches, but we were considering possible winter retrieval. With a good mattock, the foot-deep burial would not be a problem so long as you don't bury the mattock into the cover when you get close.
There may be less expensive ways to cache large quantities of material, but I feel good about the physical integrity and security of the box and barrel combination. I view the process as a small bit of insurance for an uncertain future. After things fall apart socially, politically, and/or financially, it is not the time to start thinking about making your stores safe and out of the way. Most people probably have purchased life insurance. View your caching costs as life insurance with the term of coverage lasting 10 to 40 years. Remember the old Boy Scout motto - Be prepared!
Pressure Treated Wood - Pressure treated wood is salty. A forest critter must have decided he/she needed a food supplement and detected the presence of salt in the wood, and dug a small hole near one corner of the box. Fortunately, the cache was not exposed; something to consider. Maybe a piece of plastic sheet should go over the cover before covering it up. Pressure treated wood is treated, in part, with arsenic compounds. It is suggested by the various manufacturers that the builder wear eye protection when cutting and nailing it. Gloves are also recommended because the salts can absorb through the skin. Scrap wood should be buried and not burned, or stored where small children or animals will come into contact with it. Naturally, you would not want to store food in a treated wood container unless the food container was completely impervious to moisture. Treated plywood with a below grade rating, is supposedly, good for about forty years, so says my lumberman.
You're listening to "Gansta's Paradise"