Saturday, September 13, 2008

The Simplistic Genious of the Bison Tube

Micros, either you love them, hate them or love to hate them. They are small and usually just big enough to hold some small log sheets and that is about it. Caches in the micro size range from small bags, 35mm containers and bison tubes.

Bison tubes are very popular and can be used in a multitude of ways. They are small, water proof and designed to drive the average cacher completely out of their minds.

They come in every color of the rainbow but the most common colors are silver, black and green.

A bison tube is made of three main components:

  • A small ring attached to the bison tube top
  • The bison tube top itself
  • The tube base which screws to the top

The bison tube ring is very useful for hanging the bison tube cache just about anywhere. You can find bison tubes attached to trees branches, on string, fishing line or chains. This allows the cache to be hidden in very creative places not easy to spot. Want to drive a cacher crazy? Hide a bison tube in a heavy grape vine. I get the heeby-jeeby's just thinking about it.

The bison tube top is smaller on the inside than the tube base. This is important to know because if you want to put the log book back correctly it has to fit in the top section first before you can put everything back together. - a helpful hint from HHH


If you would like to print off your own bison tube log sheets, you can go here: http://www.techblazer.com/geocaching-log-sheets for a variety of log sheet choices.


Ideas for ingenious places to hide a bison tube:

- In the top of small bendable trees

- On a chain or string in a fence post

- Any place that has many hiding areas in the search area (grape vine)

- Inside a piece of wood or log (drill hole and insert)

- Covered with pine cone components

So as you can see a bison tube can be a real bugger in the hands of a real ingenious cache hider. They can go anywhere (with permission) and are not easily spotted. For every cacher that loves these as a challenge to find there is another who can't stand looking for them. I personally love to hate them. I will cringe every time I go after one but the puzzle of the placement always keeps me glued to the find. The choice as always is up to you, have fun!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

More on the bison tube. One of the toughest caches I’ve ever found was hidden in a parking garage. You had to go to the top floor/roof to get the GPS position, but then you had to go down through each floor and look in that vicinity for the cache. I spent hours looking on each floor and when I finally found it, it was a bison tube hanging up in a crack via a long string. I was there after dark and was using a headlamp so that made discovering the tube in the crack easier. The next part of the task was to go back up through the floors looking for where the string had been tied off to so that you could pull it back up and sign the log.

Anonymous said...

Nice blog! I've added it to my blogroll:
http://emcofnorthrige.wordpress.com
Got an e-mail subscription option?

Adam said...

argg! too small for my eyes! :)
i am new at geocaching and i'm interested to meet fellow geocachers, please visit my site at http://mygeocachenation.com