Conceal a cache by making the site look undisturbed, by making the places a searcher would look first not worth searching, and by keeping the knowledge of where it is in very few heads. No single method works alone, because a cache that is invisible on the ground but known to many people is no longer hidden.
Part of Hidden Food Caches
Cache concealment techniques are the ways of keeping a food store from being found: restoring the site, misleading searchers, reducing scent and controlling who knows.
A Cache Is Found By Sight, By Search Or By Being Told
There are three ways a cache is found, and each calls for its own technique.
- By sight and walking over it. Disturbed earth, bare patches, a different plant cover or a hollow where fill settled. The answer is Natural Camouflage and careful backfill; see Buried Caches.
- By deliberate search. A person or animal who suspects there is something to find goes through the obvious places. The answer is Misdirection, so that the obvious places are decoys and the real cache is somewhere unlikely.
- By scent. Food has odour even through plastic, as the parent article notes, and dogs and rodents follow it. The parent suggests masking with strong-smelling natural materials; Scent Masking looks at what that can and cannot do.
The fourth way, which no digging technique helps with, is by being told. A cache known to everyone in the household or village is only as hidden as the least discreet of them. Decide who knows, and write down nothing that leads a stranger to it; the tension between that and being able to find it yourself is the subject of Location Selection.
What You Need
- A careful site restoration kit — a tarp, a trowel, the saved sod, leaf litter
- A decoy plan — what a searcher will find first
- Clean, sealed containers that give off little smell
- A short list of who knows
Method: Disturb Nothing, Decoy Something, Tell Few
Step 1: Leave the site as you found it. Put back what you removed, in the same pattern, and carry away what you did not.
Step 2: Put the cache where a searcher would not think to look, and not beside the most obvious feature on the site. See Location Selection.
Step 3: Give a searcher something else to find if you judge that worthwhile; see Misdirection.
Step 4: Keep scent low. Wash and dry the container, keep it sealed, and see Cache Pest Prevention.
Step 5: Decide who knows, and teach the location to those people in person, not on paper.
Step 6: Visit seldom, and from different directions. A worn path to an unmarked spot is itself a marker, as the parent article warns.
Common Mistakes
- Marking the spot so you can find it. Stakes, cairns and paint mark it for everyone else.
- Over-complicating the hiding and under-planning retrieval. A cache you cannot find is a cache you do not have.
- Telling too many people. Each person is another way for the location to leak.
- Concealing the cache and not the visits. A person seen going out at the same hour with a shovel is watched.
Safety
Never protect a cache with a trap
Never use a trap or a booby-trapped decoy to protect a cache: a device does not know the difference between a thief, a child and a neighbour, and the people most likely to meet it are the household’s own. Concealment protects by not being found, not by hurting whoever finds it. Hidden digging, ruins and rock gaps carry the risks set out in Above-Ground Concealment.
What’s Next
- Learn next: Natural Camouflage — making a disturbed patch look like the ground around it
- Combine with: Cache Network Planning — how many caches, and how far apart