beta:

When one is caching in delicate environs such as the High Desert, or any arid climate where life clings precariously in a balance that is easily upset, one should take special precaution not to disturb animal habitats.  In the high deserts, many animals lay eggs just below a very thin layer of dirt/sand.  Muggles and cachers riding into desert areas off roads will unknowingly be running over many such nests, killing what offspring are growing there.  Most people who do things here such as “driving to the cache” in a 4×4 or on a motorcycle have no clue that they have done this. Cachers taking the slower, better approach, parking on road-sides and hiking in to the cache will at least have the chance at least of noticing the signs of places where animals may be hiding or nests are located before blazing a trail over them. “Only for the numbers types” are going to have a problem with this. Doing the right thing isn’t necessarily always doing the convenient and expedient thing.

Even if you aren’t environmentally conscious, there are two other problems with “driving to the cache”, the worst of which is that it gets caches muggled. There have been many caches in desert areas (the CLUE series comes to mind particularly) where trails blazed across sand and left for muggles to find led to countless caches being muggled.   It should be standard practice in this sport, nomatter what kind of environment you are in, to leave no trace behind for muggles to pick up on that might let them know you were there or worse: lead them straight to the cache!  Similarly, how fun is it to find a cache, if a trail of footprints from the last cache-mob rampaging through the area leads you straight to it??? We’ve all seen this, and it takes the fun out of the find for the next person… (maybe that’s why some people are so FTF-crazy?  They don’t have to deal with the potentially muggled or trail-blazed easiness ruining their fun finding the cache?)

So please remember, when caching in areas like the High Desert, take your Jeep, take your 4×4 pickup–drive whatever you like, but if you are doing non-urban caching, as a courtesy to the other cachers that follow in your footsteps so to speak and to the critters who live here and call it their home, please drive responsibly on existing paths and take the time to walk in, hike in, and enjoy the scenery so that both the animals and caches present can all continue to exist for the enjoyment of all, unmolested.  If you left any tracks around the cache, please take the time to also take a loose branch or what have you to erase your tracks closest to the cache or create other trails to places where the cache isn’t so that it isn’t A. Obvious to the next cacher exactly where to look without needing a GPS and B. Similarly easy for curious muggles to find who may just want to take the cache and keep it.

-KG6EAR

PS: We probably need to add a piece about honesty in finding, and a piece about getting permissions and when its a good idea, how do deal with conflicts with other cachers, and ????