Caches are discovered!

Homesteading & Country Living Forum

Help Support Homesteading & Country Living Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
The Lazy L

The Lazy L

Old Cowpoke
Neighbor
HCL Supporter
Joined
Dec 6, 2017
Messages
6,188
Location
1868
An acquaintance of mine wanted to build on a section of his back property. This section of property was forested so he hired a contractor to clear the trees, remove the stumps and grade.

Contractor found a buried cheap plastic ice chest They were curious why until they removed the lid and saw sticks of dynamite. A call to the local small town Police Department resulted in the big City Bomb Squad arrival. I understand they soaked the dynamite in diesel fuel before burning.

The next day Contractor unearthed a 20 gallon steel barrel. Steel barrel was coated with tar outside and inside. And when they pop the lid off they found more dynamite! Another call to the local PD, another run by the Bomb Squad.

Wikipedia says the first plastic ice chest appeared on the market in 1962. This ice chest didn't look that old, I'd guess maybe 5 to 10 years old? Soil is sand and drainage is excellent. The tarred barrel I did not get to see.

Wikipedia implies that in the year 1926 dynamite ownership and use was regulated by the Feds and/or States. Wiki also states now a License is required to purchase.

I'm guessing that a Licensed individual (or a thief) had acquired some dynamite that they didn't want to be found on their property or in their procession so they buried it on my acquaintance's property.

If you are the one that buried the caches, any landmarks that you planned are using to locate them are gone (trees) and so are the caches!
 
I remember when I was a kid there were posters all over telling us to stay away from blasting caps. They had pictures of what they looked like and the damage that could happen if one went off. We looked for them but never found any.:( Dynamite was available at the local hardware store. My dad bought some to remove a stump. He used to much and the stump shot up in the air about 50 feet then came right back down in the hole. That was in the 50s.
Dynamite is still found occasionally and it's always news worthy. Some was found in a garage in Tacoma, WA when the family was cleaning out after the old guy died. The police evacuated several blocks and the Army sent over their EOD team. Big news story.
 
I was raised on or near military bases. My friends and I used to hike around in the woods quite a bit and at times we found un-exploded ordinance such as practice grenades and other things we were not to touch as we discovered military practice ranges and such while on our expeditions. I have to say it was a lot of fun as a kid to run around on these locations and play soldier. Disposable m72 rocket launchers were so much fun when found! http://www.military-today.com/firearms/m72_law.htm

It is a wonder that any of us are still alive considering walking down Willie Peter laden streams and such.
 
Last edited:
When I was in the Marines, we went to Yuma Az for live-fire exercises (from our attack helicopters).

When doing the exercises at the Yuma Proving Grounds, the Nation's largest proving grounds (where they shoot over 500,000 artillery, mortar & missile round EVERY YEAR) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuma_Proving_Ground) one of our helicopters needed to do an emergency landing. I was in a support helicopter and we were to stay on the ground with the downed bird.

I've never walked so carefully and gingerly in my life. ;)
 
A current story on Colorado news is that there are something like 22 undetonated explosives in the mountains that didn't explode during avalanche mitigation this winter. My guess is that with that being on the news, someone or several someones have already planned on looking for it. The news is saying that they are probably buried by the snow currently, but as soon as the snow melts off, they will be able to find them.
 
In the late sixties you could still buy dynamite easily. My folks bought a bunch along with fuse, caps, and det. cord. We used it to blow some small ponds at our place. We just used the dynamite to set off the mixed fertilizer. We used the det. cord to tie explosions together to make a long hole rather than a round one. The federal fish and wildlife department passed out pamphlets on how to use fertilizer and dynamite to make duck ponds. I still have one of the pamphlets.
Our first try was a dud because we set the explosion off on land that was mostly floating bog. It was like a big burp and water sprayed up but the "land" just bounced up and settled down again in the same spot. It hardly did anything. After that dud we just blew holes on more solid ground where it worked great. A wind helped blow the dirt away from the hole. It was exciting for a young kid like me. My brothers shot many holes in sticks of the dynamite but they never went off.
 
I heard old dynamite sweats Nitro glycerine. Don't know if it is true or not.

I remember my oldest brother telling me that they would use det cord to march VC prisoners with in Viet Nam. First they would sit the prisoners in front of a small tree that is wrapped with det cord then set off with a trigger and the tree falls over. The det cord is then wrapped around the prisoners necks one at a time and one soldier with no weapons can march a large group of prisoners anywhere with nothing but a detonator switch.
 
JAC said:
I heard old dynamite sweats Nitro glycerine. Don't know if it is true or not.
Click to expand...
Yes it does, if it is the good stuff from the 60's.
My dad stored the stuff we had under the house where it was cool.
After watching cartoons as a kid, I was amazed that the real stuff looked like a squishy burrito cooked in too much grease, not a nice red cardboard tube.
We used electrical blasting caps to set it off. A long wire and a lantern battery was all we needed to launch stumps. Fire in tha' hole!!!
0046.gif
 
The Lazy L said:
An acquaintance of mine wanted to build on a section of his back property. This section of property was forested so he hired a contractor to clear the trees, remove the stumps and grade.

Contractor found a buried cheap plastic ice chest They were curious why until they removed the lid and saw sticks of dynamite. A call to the local small town Police Department resulted in the big City Bomb Squad arrival. I understand they soaked the dynamite in diesel fuel before burning.

The next day Contractor unearthed a 20 gallon steel barrel. Steel barrel was coated with tar outside and inside. And when they pop the lid off they found more dynamite! Another call to the local PD, another run by the Bomb Squad.

Wikipedia says the first plastic ice chest appeared on the market in 1962. This ice chest didn't look that old, I'd guess maybe 5 to 10 years old? Soil is sand and drainage is excellent. The tarred barrel I did not get to see.

Wikipedia implies that in the year 1926 dynamite ownership and use was regulated by the Feds and/or States. Wiki also states now a License is required to purchase.

I'm guessing that a Licensed individual (or a thief) had acquired some dynamite that they didn't want to be found on their property or in their procession so they buried it on my acquaintance's property.

If you are the one that buried the caches, any landmarks that you planned are using to locate them are gone (trees) and so are the caches!
Click to expand...
When I was in my mid teens a guy gave me about 6-8 sticks of dynamite with caps he told me it was starting to get old, it really wasn't all that old as the sticks were note sweating, I had heard of people that wiped the sweat and fling it to the ground, it explodes but potentially in the act of flinging the nitro, you could blow off a finger. If one finds sweaty dynamite, it does need to be burned in place as it's just too dangerous to move. If I blew up that dynamite in these days I'd have DHS and cops come around so fast it'd make my head swim. It was fun setting them off and I didn't harm anything.
 
viking said:
When I was in my mid teens a guy gave me about 6-8 sticks of dynamite with caps he told me it was starting to get old, it really wasn't all that old as the sticks were note sweating, I had heard of people that wiped the sweat and fling it to the ground, it explodes but potentially in the act of flinging the nitro, you could blow off a finger. If one finds sweaty dynamite, it does need to be burned in place as it's just too dangerous to move. If I blew up that dynamite in these days I'd have DHS and cops come around so fast it'd make my head swim. It was fun setting them off and I didn't harm anything.
Click to expand...
I'm curious, but when you set fire to dynamite, will it explode, or just flare up?
 
One year my uncle had his sprouting corn pulled up by crows, not once but twice. A huge flock of crows were hanging out waiting to be fed again (70/80). (crows will pull up a corn sprout and eat the seed kernel).

At night he went out with a stick of dynamite, a blasting cap and about 30 gallons of shelled corn. When he set it off the next morning he took out the whole flock of crows who were feeding on the pile of corn. The hard dried corn kernels acted like shrapnel.

I saw the aftermath... Black feathers covered the ground 50yrds in every direction. It looked like someone had plucked a giant black chicken. 😅
 
havasu said:
I'm curious, but when you set fire to dynamite, will it explode, or just flare up?
Click to expand...
That is what gave birth to the Nobel Prize. Nobel's invention (dynamite) finally made working with explosives safe. It would only explode if hit with a shockwave greater than the speed of sound.
If burned, it just burns.
Now, I hate to ruin a lot of TV shows that we loved in our youth, but every one that you saw that had a hissing fuse burning toward dynamite, it could not possibly set it off. Det-cord, yes.
It was just as fake as the bright red tubes that we were lead to believe was dynamite in our youth.
I've seen lots of dynamite, white, brown, grey, dark grey, dark green, never ever seen red. :(
 
Peanut said:
One year my uncle had his sprouting corn pulled up by crows, not once but twice. A huge flock of crows were hanging out waiting to be fed again (70/80). (crows will pull up a corn sprout and eat the seed kernel).

At night he went out with a stick of dynamite, a blasting cap and about 30 gallons of shelled corn. When he set it off the next morning he took out the whole flock of crows who were feeding on the pile of corn. The hard dried corn kernels acted like shrapnel.

I saw the aftermath... Black feathers covered the ground 50yrds in every direction. It looked like someone had plucked a giant black chicken. 😅
Click to expand...
And he replanted 40 acres in one fell swoop.😉
 
Caribou said:
And he replanted 40 acres in one fell swoop.😉
Click to expand...

lol... I was a little kid. I remember my dad taking me with him to go see the aftermath... There were feathers and tiny pieces of crow everywhere. The joke after that day was "Did you have to use a whole stick?"

Crows are smart, they will walk down a row of corn just as it comes up, pull up every sprout and eat the kernels. They can wreck a corn crop in a couple of days. Guess my uncle was @#$% off! No one else had a crow problem that year. Every crow for miles around must have been at that corn pile that morning.
 
Last edited:
Old dynamite is bad news. About twenty years ago, a couple junior high age boys were playing in the woods and trespassing on some abandoned farm's back 40 in central Iowa. They found a old rotten shed. Lo and behold it was full of dynamite, probably 30 or 40 years old. Being young and dumb, they somehow set it off. I don't think the authorities ever did find out exactly how they did it. Sadly, they weren't around to explain themselves afterward. The blast shook windows for nearly 20 miles and their bodies were only identified because one family recognized a shoe that was found near the crater. There wasn't anything else left to identify. They didn't even find any bone fragments of one of them. It was like he just vanished off the face of the planet...

Edit: I just looked this up from an old online news archive. My memory was a little off. It was a storage bunker owned by an out of state company. The kids were out hunting and apparently fired a shotgun into the door of the bunker and set off approximately 25,000 pounds(!) of old dynamite. Some houses in the area were knocked off their foundations by the shock wave. The families sued for 24 million and got a settlement, and dozens of homeowners also sued for damages incurred from the blast. The shock wave was felt in Marshalltown, Iowa, nearly 50 miles away...
 
Last edited:
Blasting caps come in three types. The electric cap that uses 6 to 12 volt with a minimum amperage, Radio caps that use an AM signal to set them off, and a fuse cap. The fuse cap has no fuse in it, that is applied just before use and crimped in place. The punch is used to press a hole in the end of the stick of dynamite and the cap is inserted and the clay is compressed over the cap. The fuse is spliced to a fuse with the proper length and the stick is placed into the cavity and topped with sand. The fuse is lit and you walk away to a safe distance to take cover. If using an electric cap you have two wires that are twisted together at one end and the wires are spliced to the short leads on the cap, The stick is punched and the cap is placed. the stick is placed and covered and the wires are walked back to the detonator. Only then are the twisted wires separated and connected to the detonator. Radio caps have a pair of twisted wires attached and once the caps are inserted the wires are untwisted anone is laid down the side of the stick. The other wire is attached to the antenna wire that it is dropped into place and covered with the antenna exposed. When you are at a safe distance the detonator is armed and the button is pushed. All of the charges go off at once. Fused and electrical charges can be timed to go off sequentially or at various intervals. Detcord is normally used with fuse caps in quarries to make sequential blasts in rapid succession.
 
So I had a wonderful story about my dad blowing an old stump out of the ground back in the mid 1960's and just leaning my wrists on the front of this damn computer while typing, wiped it all out, one of these days this dang thing will be set out in a field, turned on and shot at for target practice, Toshiba should be ashamed for making such a POS and if I ever get another laptop, it won't have a touch screen.
 
Yes they are, and if you squeeze a cap in the body of it with more than about 15 pounds it will detonate without warning. That is why you use a punch to put a hole in the explosive for the cap. If you just tried to push it in it would go BOOM!
 
@viking next time you accidentally delete stuff try using "control" and "z" at the same time. Supposed to work at recovering just now lost stuff. don't use "back" key either. Just stay put and see if control z works next time. Personally, I'd try it right now. Also, I can delete stuff here on the forum and it will stay there for a few long minutes but not posted, drives me nuts.
There was another trick at recovering lost stuff on a closed tab. Haven't found that clue yet.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Latest posts

Back
Top