Rassa frassin' Forest Fires!

[+DragonsWest]

We have another raging fire tearing through our beautiful forests and open land. Of course a few caches will go with the trees and grasses. Some may be salvageable, others maybe not so fortunate.

 

Last week I was up the coast along the area which is burning now. It's a beautiful coast and now its going to be barren and likely off limits for caching while the land recovers.

 

Any tales of peoples caches surviving fires?

[+Isonzo Karst]

I could go on and on and on about toasted ammo cans. They survive in a fashion.

 

Locally, if your cache burns, you join the Burnt Cache Club. Hoist a brew of choice mmm beer.

[+TheMadScotsman]

That's unfortunate for geocachers in the area but forest fires are actually good for the environment. They promote new growth.

 

http://www.answers.com/topic/in-what-way-c...the-environment

[+DragonsWest]

That's unfortunate for geocachers in the area but forest fires are actually good for the environment. They promote new growth.

 

http://www.answers.com/topic/in-what-way-c...the-environment

 

That's always such a tough pill to take, though when people are displaced, wildlife is displaced or killed, and erosion generally sets in as the topsoil is actually quite thin after a fire (all the needles, bark, and other useful cache cover is now ash on the ground or carried away by the air.)

 

Here's a view from the direction of TLK's memory cache GC1ANY4, looking toward Waiting on old 54 GC1WZMY, after sunset, about 20 minutes ago. (About 20 miles from the fire)

 

[+holazola]

Yup, We have lost quite a few caches the last two years here in Santa Barbara. The Gap Fire, the Tea Fire, and the Jesusita Fire have burned a majority of the "front country" here, including hundreds of homes.

 

Depending on how hot the fire went through, some caches survive, some are toasted, and some are literally vaporized. I own an adopted one at the top of mountains that half melted: Log with Pix

 

Another Old local one "Tucker's Trove" got *really* hot, and the 50 cal ammo can blew open See pix in this log. As it turns out, I have adopted this one too! Amazingly, the log BOOK contents are 90% intact (but very fragile), and I am scanning them in and will print out & make a new logbook including them. Note the emphasis on BOOK. Not many "TFTC"s in this one! Well worth saving and sharing.

 

[+Puppy Dawg]

I once had to disable a whopping total of 41 caches when a fire came through. Fortunately only about 20 burned. But yeah, I have a survival story. There was a cache, the tree it was in burned, the cache (a pill bottle) was still intact and not melted. Most caches, as Holazola mentioned just disappear. Now I'm wondering if I should even put caches in the backcountry.