Bear Bags! (or Bear Canisters!)

[Carol]

In many parts of California, including the Pacific Coast Trail, hikers are required to carry to carry bear canisters.

Bear Canisters are a bit of a misnomer...they are really canisters for your food or anything else with an odor. The canisters seal up tightly and create a storage cell that bears can't smell...which is good. The downside? They are also heavy and bulky, most hikers do not like to carry them....including myself.

I don't live in an area where bear canisters are needed, I prefer to use a bear bag.


Bear Bags! by Sikaranista, on Flickr

Anyone use bear bags or bear canisters? Have a favorite method?

 

[Sukerkin]

Alternatively, one of these:

[video=youtube_share;Qtzk8HNPzHY]http://youtu.be/Qtzk8HNPzHY[/video]

 

[arnisador]

Where we are living now in CO we have all sorts of catches for regular trash b/c of the black bears!

 

[Makalakumu]

On one of my various wilderness adventures, I watched a bear rampage through a campsite and rip the top off of a "bear cannister" like an old tabbed beer can. I am not a fan of the cannisters. Bears know you have food in camp. If you cook, they can smell it and they can smell the food in the cannister. I'm surprised that the company can get away with marketing it like that.

The upside of a bear cannister is that it can slow the bear down from getting your food. You can cache them under rocks or pots or something else that is going to make a lot of noise if the bear comes into camp allowing you to do something and drive the bear off. Or let it eat your food if your pissing your pants because a bear is in your camp.

Bear bags have their upsides and downsides too. Bear bags require rope and bags. This makes them compact and easy to carry. They also require trees, which aren't so easy to carry. Bear bags are only as effective as the human putting them up. Black bears are amazing climbers and they are completely willing to play trapeze with your food. 12 feet off the ground and 6 feet from any climbable limb is a good rule of thumb. And even then, the damn bear might get your food.

In the end, there are no fool proof methods.

 

[jks9199]

Used bear bags plenty of times in the SNP. Best was a trip many years back in Boy Scouts when we had to put one guy's PANTS in the bag! He was kind of careless opening his pudding cup dessert... The result was pudding all over -- and pants in the bear bag!

 

[Tgace]

I was in the Adirondacks when a 500lb Black Bear wiped out the food stores of all of our neighboring campers. Watched him roll a bear can off into the woods. Don't know if he got into it but does it matter?

I always ran a line between 2 trees and hoisted the bag up on the middle of it. Many people just draw a bag up a few feet off the trunk...even the 500lb-der could climb whatever tree he wanted too.

Sent from my Kindle Fire using Tapatalk 2

 

[Carol]

On our overnight trip hiking the Wapack trail, my friends and I hung a version of the PCT bag -- this is one example:

http://www.backpacker.com/skills-how-to-hang-a-bear-bag/slideshows/162

We ran in to a slight mishap with our hang. One of the guys brought the setup, he was using ultralight (2mm) cordage with a carabiner that had a rather aggressive clip. Not a good combination!

We tried to get the bag down in the morning, but couldn't. It had taken a couple of tries to get the hang right. On the second try, unbeknownst to us, the cordage had gotten tangled up in the carabiner. The hanger of the bag was still sound asleep. We didn't want to wake him as there wouldn't have been anything that he could do either. That bag was not gonna move from the branch. And our coffee was in it!

So, we put together some "Wapack Engineering". We took a knife and attached it to a long stick with first aid tape. The stick extended our reach by about 5 feet, this was used to cut the cordage free from the biner, and our bags came down. And we made coffee. And life was good again :lol2: