2019 Hume and Hovell Track

Food caching
Cache container before painting
Cache container before painting
Cache container after painting as well as a drop box
Cache container after painting as well as a drop box

Today was food caching day and we drove in the direction of the Hume and Hovell Track to play hide and seek with our food. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term it’s the practice of dropping off food and/or water against a future need. If we are being precise what we did was a combination of practices:

  • A food drop at a place we will be staying; and
  • A food cache where we hid a sealed plastic container, essentially in the middle of nowhere, at a location where we estimate we will need to pick up food. The most important part is to ensure we can find it again.

This requires some careful planning because a miscalculation will have impacts. Drop too early or too often and you run the risk of wasting food or having too much weight to carry. Drop too late and you run the risk being short of food. A day or two without food is manageable, if unpleasant. More than that can be a real issue potentially ruining your hike and becoming dangerous if you’ve really miscalculated badly and you are in a remote area.

One thing that amazed me today was we visited interesting parts of rural/remote NSW we have driven past many times but never visited. This has really whet our appetite for the hike ahead!

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Today was food caching day and we drove in the direction of the Hume and Hovell Track to play hide and seek with our food. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term it’s the practice of dropping off food and/or water against a future need. If we are being precise what we […]