Field Reports/Feb 2020
· Latchford, ON
The Third Culvert, Latchford
Recovered
A cache we found, a cache we did not, and the discovery that the interesting one is always the second.
Two containers were logged in this corridor. We recovered one.
The first sat in a hollow beneath the third culvert on the old rail grade, roughly where the 1948 survey put a siding that no longer exists. Log dry, container intact, contents unremarkable — a handful of swaps, a pencil stub, and a laminated card thanking us for our interest. Jill signed it. We replaced the desiccant because somebody should.
The second container is the reason this report exists. We did not find it.
Coordinates put it within twelve metres of the first. We spent four hours in that radius across two visits. The ground is frost-heaved shale under a metre of blowdown and there is no version of this search that is not simply moving deadfall by hand. On the second visit Scott put a boot through what turned out to be a collapsed beaver run and the search ended on medical grounds.
What we take from it: the published coordinates for the second container were derived from a phone fix, not a survey, and phone fixes under canopy in that valley are reliably eighty metres optimistic. We have started logging our own fixes twice, an hour apart, and averaging them. This has already changed one search.
A copy of Knots, Splices and Rope Work (1917) came out of the first container and is catalogued as No. 0091. It is the only book in the collection that was, in a real sense, found rather than acquired.