We have all heard about having caches (pronounced cash-ay-s) for bug out and other purposes, I have even written a post a year or so back about how to cache weapons in the case of…the dreaded “C” word.

Leaving weapons and ammo aside, let us talk about why you should have food caches and thing to think about where you put them.

WHY?

The main reason to have food caches, or any caches for that matter, is to have redundancies in your preps and not to have all your eggs in one basket.

If you lose your house to a fire or to a natural disaster, or to a interested government official looking for “hoarders” during a crisis, whatever the case, the question is “how would you fare if your home and all the preps inside it were lost?”  Not good I imagine if that is where ALL your preps were.

The correct and logical course of action would be to stash some preps in other places, so if worst comes to worst you don’t lose everything, and if nothing happens you can always collect them later.

Cache’ing food and supplies can be in the same manner as weapons and ammo, using pvc pipe or pre-made vaults (Like the MONOVAULT).  You can also use clean and rust proofed 55 gallon drums to stock supplies in bury them.  Just be aware that this many supplies will be quite heavy, so you will want to truck them in by vehicle or ATV, but that also means you MAY have to hike these supplies back out.

CONSIDERATIONS

• Store miles away from your home, preferably on your egress (escape/Bugout) routes to your bug out locations.  The reason for this is so that if you end up on the run in a hurry you will be able to access some of your preps along the way to keep you going until your get to your bug out location.  As I have mentioned before I would have 3 separate locations to bug out to and 3 separate routes to get there.  If possible I would have caches on each route, with the lions share along your primary routes and smaller ones on your secondary/tertiary routes.

• Location is important.  Don’t dig these in right on the side of the road where the next road crew will dig it up in the summer.  You also will not want to put them near any hiking trails or camping areas, stay off the beaten path.

• As well as keeping it out of the way, dig it deep, you don’t want some hiker or hunter to find it digging a few feet in the ground to take a dump before dinner.

• While keeping it off the beaten path and harder to find you will want to make sure that it is NOT too far out of the way where you will have to spend 2 days hiking in to get it, you also don’t want it to be so far out and heavy that you have to make multiple trips.

• Back to Location, you will want to steer clear of any utilities, as well as be aware of the local utilities companies in your area and keep updated on any future plans for “additions”, make sure it is not going to be in the area you buried them.

• Public lands are good in that they are rarely sold off or ever developed, however unlike private land they are prone to be more frequented by hikers and backpackers, heed the “dig deep” warning earlier.

• Another thing to be aware of is historical sites, don’t dig your caches in any area where historical peoples or events took place. The reason being that on occasion archaeological teams scour those areas and dig far and wide looking for artifacts.

• As I had mentioned in the weapons cache post, to fool metal detectors and other “sniffers about” you may want to scatter old cans and other metal debris in the area and dug into the ground.  This may fool metal detectors so that they give up thinking its all junk strewn about.