Ammo boxes versus Lock ‘n’ Locks revisted
A few months ago, I wrote about how ammo boxes should not be used as geocache containers. One of the reasons is that they’re opaque and that authorities responding to bomb scares can’t see in them and thus will tend to blow them up. Groundspeak, home of geocaching.com, is now selling 3-piece geocache container sets with geocache labels that look suspiciously like Lock ‘n’ Locks with stickers on them. The description of them includes the phrase “…see-through (for safety)…”. So, it would seem that Groundspeak thinks opaque containers are a bad idea, too.
AKA Keeper of Maps, I'm a geocacher who lives in Ottawa, Canada.
What makes things even worse is the fact that cachers do not paint over the military marking, as depicted above. I generally carry a can of spray paint in my caching pack and paint over the markings and slap a large geocaching sticker on the newly painted ammo cans. I have photocopied the sticker and laminated it, then affix it with gun tape, I also have a geocaching stencil that we use sometimes. If cachers would only take the time to paint and prepare the ammo can this would become less of an issue…..I think anyway.
Cheers,
Yeah, that’s a definite pet peeve of mine. I like your solution, though even then the box still looks “ominous”. You would think that the military would have to paint over the markings before disposing of the boxes so they wouldn’t be confused with UXO.
I guess it depends were you hide it, if it was in the forrest it would not be such a big deal, but some were urban it would cause a stir.
There have been a couple of innocuous caches in the Ottawa area that had ammo cans that were removed. Fortunately, the bomb squad wasn’t involved, I don’t think, but the police or conservation officers were. So, just because it’s not an urban environment doesn’t mean they won’t attract attention.