BushWhacking

[gerboa]

New to bushwhacking as some noobies have set some vicious (great) caches, I find that my stick for probing and grabbing for a lift up,my parang, my secateurs which I have to use to free the others are always in the wrong hand. Too much stuff already draped around my neck.....any tips please. recent rate of progress..50 metres/hour..and DNF (twice)..but it's great!

[+badlands]

Long sleeves and safety glasses cut down on the pain but I don't know of a good way to get through some of the thick stuff other than to go around.

[+El Diablo]

Sometimes following the arrow of the GPS is not the easiest way. A lot of us start to bushwhack way before we should.

 

El Diablo

[gerboa]

Sometimes following the arrow of the GPS is not the easiest way. A lot of us start to bushwhack way before we should.

 

El Diablo

 

That's something I'm learning FAST, but thanks a lot for the reinforcement

[gerboa]

Long sleeves and safety glasses cut down on the pain but I don't know of a good way to get through some of the thick stuff other than to go around.

 

Yes I thought of how elephants do it and have bulldozed with a heavy jacket and glasses..they fog up so quick. The worse thing is the string thin vines which wrap around the boots.

 

Theres NO going around on these, although somehow the hiders just followed easiest they could until they could not go any further then hid the cache.

Of course I have no idea where they started from.

 

Coming down it seems I can slide on my a**, new shorts every time, and go underneath the worst. Could not walk down anyway even at an angle to the slope

 

btw a local (Thai) is one of the newbies, I'm told he goes in flip flops and T-shirt. Now you know how the VC did it at Dien Bien Phu..are we softies or what?

[+Torry]

Long sleeves and safety glasses cut down on the pain but I don't know of a good way to get through some of the thick stuff other than to go around.

 

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btw a local (Thai) is one of the newbies, I'm told he goes in flip flops and T-shirt. Now you know how the VC did it at Dien Bien Phu..are we softies or what?

 

Go caching with him and learn how it's done.

[+cimawr]

Long sleeves and safety glasses cut down on the pain but I don't know of a good way to get through some of the thick stuff other than to go around.

 

Have you ever gone through a barb-wire fence? Same principle works when negotiating vines & briars; you step ON what's at waist-to-knee height or lower and hold it down, then duck UNDER what's at shoulder-to-waist height. And you don't do it at speed.

Also, no offense, but unless the obstructions are over a marked trail, IMO it's not particularly good practice to be cutting them willy-nilly... when you step & duck, you don't do much damage to the foliage, and you leave much less of a trail.

 

WRT the Thai guy who goes out in flip-flops and a T-shirt.... I lived in rural PA from age 6 to age 14, and I could do that, except that I didn't bother with shoes at all. I had a "secret fort" in the middle of a briar-patch that I used to go to barefoot and in shorts.

Then again, I went barefoot from late March until well into October, unless I was in school, at church, or going shopping. And I hiked barefoot well into my 30's. Still do go barefoot whenever I can (witness my avatar photo ), but my days of hiking that way are past, alas.... I don't have the time to harden off my feet in the spring any longer.

[The EAM Team]

Hey fellow barefooter.

 

I was just thinking the other day how great it would be to hike barefoot.

[+sbell111]

Sometimes I don't have enough hands to catch the sticks and brambles as I bushwack. I've found that I can catch some with my face if I have to.

[+Isonzo Karst]

I can catch some with my face if I have to.

 

excellent technique!

[+GreyingJay]

I think the thing to remember is that most geocachers, when they go to hide caches, don't like to bushwhack for very long either. Very likely there is a better trail that they took. If you find yourself having to bushwhack a lot, then you're probably not seeing the right trail.

 

There was one I did recently with a friend where we followed what we thought was a geotrail (it may well have been) that followed a game trail. It was only 200 meters or so but it took us about 30 minutes (not even that bad by the OP's standards). We were getting scratched up and bloodied, and eaten alive by mosquitos. Worse, we knew we would have to come back OUT after we found the cache.

 

After we found the cache we did a little bit of exploring and discovered the trail, which was wide enough to drive a car on, and brought you to within 50 meters of the cache. It did a big circle around before it popped out into the clearing, literally a full soccer field length away from where we entered the brush (we were in some woods beside a soccer field).

 

In my find log I highly recommended that people do some exploring BEFORE entering the treeline, and hinted that they should look for metal posts (which marked the trailhead). The next few finders were grateful. After my find log popped off the bottom of the page, I started seeing "Wow! Brutal bushwhack!" logs again...