food-fuel cache air drops in the coast range?

[pete_a]

Anyone have first-hand experience with doing a ski tour or traverse in the BC coast range that involved caches of food/fuel placed by plane?

Hoping to do a multi week ski trip maybe around the Homathko icefield or Waddington or who knows where next spring and I've read trip reports that involved air drops of supplies so one does not have to sled their whole supply of food/fuel from the start, but I'm just curious how this is typically done.

Do folks generally place the caches on the flight in to the start of their tour? Is it literally and 'air-drop', where one can expect half their fuel to not survive the crash landing? any rough ideas on how much one's heli or plane flight costs increased with placing caches?

any info would be appreciated...just trying to figger out if it would be best to just look at a trip that doesn't involve any pre-placed caches.

[pc]

Check some previous post about flight services in the area. A couple of friends and I used a flight service out of Squamish to got to the base of Waddington in April '98. I forgot the name unfortunatly, the flight cost roughly $450 per person, r/t. I also know there is service out of Bella Coola the uses a helicopter. This might be a better option to do some drops on the way in.

[Dru]

get ahold of john baldwin's book he has some advice in there about how to air drop. just don't put your food and fuel in the same package or canned foods in with soft foods cause the can will tunnel through the bag of rice.

 

in the spring you are dropping into several feet of soft snow which is magically plabalicious for catching things

[pete_a]

thanks. I've been looking through Baldwin's book for trip ideas...guess I should take a closer look at it for the airdrop info.

[PaulB]

Don's Waddington Guide has a great section with tips & tricks for air drops.

[MisterMo]

I (we) air dropped on the Tellot once apon a time. We packaged the whole get-go in big metal cans (cushioned inside with burnable shit) which probably were and most assuredly are horribly non-PC. But, for the task at hand they worked like a champ. Post-retrieval we chucked them in a big crevasse above the Tiedeman...they're probably about halfway to the snout by now.

Fuel for, I think 10 people for two weeks, anyway quite a bit, we repackaged in aluminum Sigg 1 liter bottles that we were able to get a deal on. We lost, if I remember correctly, only one bottle of fuel in the drop though I've been using some pretty weirdly misshapen Sigg bottles ever since.

 

Getting the stuff to survive the drop is not too tough; your more serious issue is finding it X days or weeks later under maybe Y feet of snow.

[scott_davidson]

How about putting an avalanche tranceiver in the cache if its only going to be a couple days between when its dropped and when you are picking it up? It snows alot up there in the spring. Also, White Saddle has an airplane which would be way less $$$ than his helicopter. Their # is 250-476-1182.

"This place is so sick it needs to go to the doctor." quote from the Plummer hut logbook.

[MisterMo]

How about putting an avalanche tranceiver in the cache if its only going to be a couple days between when its dropped and when you are picking it up? It snows alot up there in the spring. Also, White Saddle has an airplane which would be way less $$$ than his helicopter. Their # is 250-476-1182.

"This place is so sick it needs to go to the doctor." quote from the Plummer hut logbook.

 

That would be a plan except for the obvious drawback that one will most likely be dropping multiple boxes which will not all land in the ten ring but only in the same general area. Come to think of it though, one of those treasure hunter metal detectors would probably work really well if you had some metal in each box...though you might seem like a silly sight, nickel-nosing in the middle of the Monarch Icecap or something