Winter Geocaching… What Can You Do?

Image by Klearchos Kapoutsis via Flickr

When I think of winter I don’t necessarily think of geocaching.  In our climate here in the Pacific Northwest, there is just something about the thought of trudging through inches, if not feet of snow looking for a hidden container that is not real appealing to me.

I am actually envious of those that are in warmer climates.  They don’t have this added challenge that we have in trying to find or even hide caches.

For those brave souls that do venture out, and I know there are quite a few of you,  I have a couple of questions:

    How do you disguise your tracks to protect a cache from getting muggled?   I would think in an urban area this could be a particularly challenging problem.
    Since searching for things that seem “out of place” or “obvious” seems to go by the wayside with the snow, how do you manage to locate a cache given the relative accuracy of GPS units these days?

I’ve always said that geocaching for me is more about the journey than the find and perhaps this winter I may actually strap on the snowshoes and head out to a cache location.

For those of you that hide caches I would encourage you to give some thought to using the attributes available on your listing sites to indicate if a cache is available in the winter.   On geocaching.com you can open your hides and select the Edit Attributes option.   Scroll down until you see the Available in Winter attribute and make the appropriate selection.

I would also love to hear your recommendations of how to make a cache available during winter?   Typical hiding spots seem to get buried in snow.  I’m getting antsy to create a new cache and I want it winter accessible regardless of the snow that we get.   What should I be looking for?