We've got great weather in the heartland. I hunted up the Chisolm Trading
Post box this past Saturday. Very nicely done, Duff. The bags in your
boxes have kept everything nice and tidy. I tried Martin's Martin, too, but
in the 45 minutes I had before the park closed, I couldn't find it. I
would have loved another set of bearings to do a triangulation or resection
on, but I guess you can't have it all. I also checked on a report of
non-finding for the Lake Overholser Spillway box, but it's still there,
though the hitchhiker that had been in it is not.

One way that _some_ water gets into boxes, and certainly enough to cause
unbagged paper to get squiggy and metal rings or staples to rust is through
condensation of atmospheric moisture. Most of us place boxes in nice
weather. By late evening the materials in the box will have cooled enough
to condense a bit of the humidity sealed in the box at the time of closing
it. After that, cooler weather (in winter for instance) exacerbates the
problem--turning all the atmospheric moisture into water droplets inside
the box. Bagging is sure a good solution to that. Much less air and thus
moisture sealed into a bag than in the air volume of the box. That little
bit of moisture has done a nice job of rusting staples on my
write-in-the-rain notebooks and making the glue holding the stamp to backer
a bit tacky. Mostly though, my problems come from my cheap rubbermaid
boxes, placed unfortunately in place that can get drowned and, after
soaking for a while, let water in. That results in a box full of water with
stamp and notebook floating in blue or red water. Write-in-the-Rain
notebooks aren't the best for some stamp inks, but they do survive a
soaking and can be dried out with little ill effect. Ultimately, though
ziplocking is a really good and less expensive strategy for dealing with
moisture and if sealed well will even protect against drowning.

DW