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delvxe
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delvxe
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PostTue Apr 12, 2016 4:02 pm 
Do you always hang all of your food, cook gear, etc? I have come to always hang all of my food, cook gear, bowls, smelly stuff, and trash every night. Getting the stuff down in the AM is always a drag. I would love to be able to keep my stove, pot, and a couple of via packets in the tent for either the morning or just a cup of warm water if I wake up cold. Am I likely to regret making this a regular pert of my trips? If there are bear boxes or I am in the ONP I would use best practices of course. What do you do? Do you hang everything? nothing? something in between?

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kawi_200
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PostTue Apr 12, 2016 4:26 pm 
I have a bear can that I put my food and smelly stuff in and leave somewhere around camp, usually not the "appropriate" distance away. Sometimes I leave it right in camp. It really depends on how popular of an area I am at.

Wait, there is a 6am?!?!
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contour5
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PostTue Apr 12, 2016 4:52 pm 
I rarely hang my food, because most of my favorite places are above treeline or in places where the trees aren't suitable for hanging. I always carry a 50' line though, and occasionally use it in lowland forest. I also have a can which I only use where it's required. I double or triple bag all my food in zip locks very carefully. Same with food trash. It's important to have clean hands, to avoid smearing taco grease all over the outside of the bags. My stuff sacks full of zip locks go into my pack, which sleeps a short distance from my tent. I like to have a good line of sight between tent and pack. Never a problem in the last 15 years. (previous pack has chew marks from wrappers forgotten in water bottle holders) I never keep any food in the tent. Never! I sometimes make hot drinks right outside the tent door, but I always get up and bag the empty wrappers before going to sleep. I've actually developed a mental checklist for making sure this gets done. Kind of a drag when it's raining, but it's nothing compared to spending the whole night watching bears slowly and methodically eat their way through your food. So far the multiple zip lock approach has worked for me. My system may eventually fail, but hopefully it will involve watching my pack get ripped to shreds, as opposed to having a large omnivorous predator tear its way into my tent. I continue to ponder the ursack. I'd need two or three, and they're pricey.

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Randito
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PostTue Apr 12, 2016 5:17 pm 
The risk of bear attack in the WA is rather low -- at least statistically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_bear_attacks_in_North_America Personally I've lost a lot more food to mice in WA than bears. Many years ago we had a bear rip down our hung between trees food cache on the Olympic Pennisula (3rd Beach) -- but I've had mice chew into my pack more than once and have had to fight off racoons in both the San Juans and on the Olympic coast. (The food was secure enough -- but the sound of them fighting among themselves while trying to raid the cache was louder than my snoring) I find that an URSACK to be a lot easier to use than hanging and has been effective against mice (though there are some chew marks on my Ursack at this point) OTH if you were camping farther north in BC, AK or NWT -- you need much more diligent -- including having separate clothing for cooking and eating and cache food, kitchen gear and cooking and eating clothing quite far from the sleeping area. A friend of mine was doing a river trip in the NWT and after a few nights were feeling a bit lazy and only had 50 yards of separation between kitchen and camp -- of course that was the day that a griz happened by -- fortunately the griz upwind and nothing bad happend -- but after that they kept a much greater separation.

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Backpacker Joe
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PostTue Apr 12, 2016 7:08 pm 
My stove and coffee already have significant others. We're just friends. moon.gif

"If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide." — Abraham Lincoln
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wakerobin
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PostTue Apr 12, 2016 7:15 pm 
Ursack. I sleep so much better at night.

Between the silence of the mountains and the crashing of the sea...
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Ravenridge
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PostTue Apr 12, 2016 9:27 pm 
With me, food, garbage and all scented items go in the bear can every night without exception. I always place the can at least 50 yards away from the tent. I was glad to have followed this policy when a bear approached my tent in the middle of the night at Lillian Lake in ONP. I awoke to hear its sniffing and snorting outside the tent wall, but it left after I called out. I found fresh bear scat outside in the morning. eek.gif

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hikersarenumber1
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PostTue Apr 12, 2016 9:34 pm 
it depends on the season and location, but remember if a bear gets your food, its not just you who is SOL... if its cold, I always sleep with the fuel canisters, though..

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doublemom
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PostWed Apr 13, 2016 9:04 am 
After having been a "bear incident" in Yosemite a couple of years ago, I'm super-careful about *everything* that has touched food being far away from my campsite. I know bears in Yosemite are much smarter and skilled than our WA bears, but it still made me appreciate their determination to get to food. In Yosemite our bear cans and stoves were a good 150 yards from our campsite, and the bear popped one of the tabs on our BearVault and almost had the second tab opened, but it was stuck full of grit and luckily he didn't get it open. He played soccer with my Jetboil and the plastic mugs we were eating out of, completely crushed them into bits. To me it's just not worth risking it. And as mentioned before, little critters can do a heckuva lot of damage to get to food also. Darned chipmunks got into my food bag hanging on the bear pole my first night on the Wonderland Trail and stole all my cheddar cheese!!!

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Hulksmash
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PostWed Apr 13, 2016 9:54 am 
I must admit i typically have a packet of via and my stove next to the tent or hammock within arms reach for morning joe. Usually my stove is propped up in one of my boots. The remainder of my food is hanging away from camp. After may years of backpacking i have come to realize that keeping food away from camp carefully hung, or in a hard sided canister is a best practice for keeping all critters away including bears. Calling it a bear hang or bear can is just a good "ghost" story to scare people into keeping best practices. I don't have a problem with that tactic, i like to eat my food that i packed in. It is extrodinarly rare for a bear to attack and injure a human. When there is a confrontation as in boo boo raiding the picnic basket it's an "attack", on the other hand when a squirrel raids the picnic basket it has a fluffy tail and it's cute. The result is the same something just crashed your picnic. Keeping a clean camp is not just about keeping that bear from visiting your food. It's about minimizing critter/human conflicts in that camp site after YOU leave. But in the end i've come to the conclusion that it is impossible to eliminate ALL critter attractants from camp, based on the amount of time i seem to be defending my sweaty boots at night.

"Bears couldn't care less about us....we smell bad and don't taste too good. Bugs on the other hand see us as vending machines." - WetDog Albuterol! it's the 11th essential
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thunderhead
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PostWed Apr 13, 2016 3:34 pm 
doublemom wrote:
I know bears in Yosemite are much smarter and skilled than our WA bears
Ya, they are really unconcerned by the presence of even lots of people as well. I was there all of about 2 hours with unsecured food before mr bear came in and sampled some of it. We scared him off easily enough but man did my group let me hear about that one... haha. I figured that out of the 10,000 or so people camping in the valley, what were the odds of the bear selecting our food to steal, so I got lazy and didn't secure our food...oops.

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drm
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PostWed Apr 13, 2016 3:47 pm 
Getting the food down in the morning seems simple to me, but if you want to keep coffee packets out, I would not put them in the tent or pack, where a creature might want to chew through something to get them. Either hang it from a low and easy bring with a string or just set it on a rock or log. That way if something does get it, nothing else is damaged.

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contour5
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PostWed Apr 13, 2016 5:18 pm 
I usually leave my coffee cup out at night, but learned long ago that you have to leave it upside down, unless you want mouse nuggets flavoring your morning cup of coffee. In places with berzerker mice, it pays to put a nice heavy rock on top as well. My old pack was a burly 6 pounder fashioned from a stout high denier cordura fabric. The main compartment was never breached by fang or claw, but the frame panel began making alarming crackling noises after 18 years of use. Replaced it last year with a pack that's half the weight, but made of near-ballistic grade kevlar cordura. So far it's holding up admirably against the onslaught of stabbing twigs, bristling stobs, dive-bombing camp robbers and marauding night rodents. I suppose a determined bear could shred it to rags in a matter of seconds but I sleep well knowing that the skittering hordes of lesser varmints are unlikely to tunnel their way into the breakfast victuals.

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Bedivere
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PostWed Apr 13, 2016 8:37 pm 
In 25 years of backpacking I've never worried about bears in WA. Black bears around here aren't starving and thus they're not terribly motivated to invade your camp. I've only hung my food a few times - mainly in the Olympics and in a few places in the Cascades when I'll be away from camp for the day. A bear isn't going to face me down for my food, at least not in this state, in the Cascades. I dunno about Olympics bears, there's a lot more of them and they seem bolder so i don't take my chances over there. Otherwise my food, which is always sealed in ziploc bags which are stored in a heavy nylon stuff sack is usually stuffed down inside my pack which is either in the tent with me being used as a pillow or leaned against the side of my tent right by my head so any depradations will awaken me immediately. Also, I hike with dogs nowadays, a further discouragement to any animal that might think about investigating my camp site. At least, in the Cascades where they're allowed. The only time I've *ever* lost food to animals was when a food bag was hung from a wire too close to a tree on the coast and a raccoon was able to climb the tree, reach out, and rip the bag open. Didn't have Ursacks back in those days.

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Treehugger5
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PostThu Apr 14, 2016 7:03 am 
It depends on where you are. Grizzly territory? I'm not risking convenience over meeting mama, tyvm. If it's very high alpine territory, I prefer a Garcia canister. Otherwise, I hang, but a proper hang is important, especially in areas (i.e. Yosemite, which now has poles) where bears might be used to hangs. In addition to not wanting to entice a bear myself, I also don't want to start conditioning one. Bears don't differentiate between smells as much as humans, (I've seen a bug spray can bitten through) but their sense of smell is much much stronger in general.

Elrond's Rocket of Rivendell~ hiker and runner extraordinaire
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