Black Bear Country precautions?

matilda said:
As DWK said, mothballs are the best defense against bears.
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Your mileage may vary:

Had a pretty good test of it many years ago. We arrived first, set up camp and lived in harmony with neighborhood bears for three days. They kept their distance and we did nothing to attract them.

A late arrival at camp was really bearophobic, and had heard the same as you. Before coming he specked it all out and made his preparations. Special looped wire stakes formed from coat hangers to stick in the ground. Into the loops went sacks of mothballs fashioned from his wife's old stockings. He ringed our camp with the things, quite confident that he had bear proofed us, but good.

The bears came right over to check out the new smells. Still no interest in our camp, but dang. They sure were fascinated with his handywork. Rubbed on them, batted at them, pulled them out of the ground and dragged them all over tarnation. There wasn't a one left around our camp by evening, but we kept finding the things when we hiked out- one well chewed and close to a mile away.

Yup. They had an affect on bears. And yup, we haven't let him forget it. Years later, he still gets a box or two of mothballs for Christmas. He's also earned the knickname Mothballs, or just plain old Mothie.
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Man black bears are getting a bad reputation in here...I encountered a lot of bears over the years up here and they always run away, some sonner than others but they always do. When running into a bear, don't run away, stand your ground, slowly take out your knives, and with a low tone voice look him into the eyes and tell him " this is going to by a nasty fight but i'm gonna live..." :) it always works for me...:) never the less remember that black bears are very shy so don't worry to much and enjoy your staying in the woods instead...but keep an eye open for that crazy bear...:)
 
Thirdeye,

Great photos!

When fishing for salmon on wilderness AK raft trips I keep a few Sellier & Bellot single rubber ball loads in my pocket. I've never had to use one but if a bear got too persistent in entering our camp, I might try one. Needless to say, it would be backed by Dixie slugs and my friends would be backing me up.

DancesWithKnives
 
When using mothballs, make sure they are the paradichlorobenzene variety. Some people have had success with napthalene but others have found bears were not deterred by them.

In 1993 I changed careers and took a 4 month, 15,000 mile driving trip through Northern Canada and Alaska. Camped out nearly every night, usually in bear country. One time I was in a free BLM campground in AK and was cooking dinner. Large black bear walked right in to my camp like he wanted to join me. Grabbed my Mossberg Mariner and chased him off. Back about 15 minutes later, so I ran him off again. After I finished my dinner, he showed up once more on the perimeter of my camp. I had fixed some salmon and Stagg chili for dinner, if I recall correctly. I still had the unwashed Stagg can so I decided on a little test.

I put the Stagg can on the ground and covered it with about a 3x3 ft piece of plastic, weighted down by a few rocks. I tossed a half dozen para mothballs on top. Climbed in the back of my truck to watch.

The bear wandered into my camp and started sniffing around. At one point he came up to the camouflaged Stagg can, sniffed a couple times, then walked across the camp to the fire pit. There he managed to find one of those little single serving fast food mayo packets that had been opened and used. After chewing it, he departed.

It's certainly not any kind of evidence you could rely on, but an interesting experience nonetheless.

I have also camped on the banks of many salmon rivers and used mothballs both under and on top of a tarp placed over coolers carried to the shore from the rafts. I've come back from a day of hiking to find brownie tracks wandering around the camp and the coolers, but the coolers have never been touched.

My friends and I have experienced situations in which para mothballs do nothing to deter small varmints like mice and packrats. But I've had good results with bear and some varmints larger than mice.

DancesWithKnives
 
Two years ago, my brother-in-law was backpacking. He was fiddling with something in his hands and not paying much attention. He came up over a small rise still looking at his hands. When he looked up, there was a black bear cub sitting on the trail about 20 yards away just staring at him. My sister and their two dogs were behind him. He backed up slowly. The cub ran up into some trees where another cub and momma joined up and they all took off. He was lucky! That is exactly the type of situation that most bear attacks stem from.
Every black bear I've seen has ran like hell to get away from me.

I'll have to look into mothballs - learned something new! It's funny when you cook away from your camp, store your food away from camp - and then you go crawl in your sleeping bag, probably smelling like what you cooked for dinner.

Does anyone know how black bears feel about dogs?
 
They don't like the Karelian bear dogs much! Of course, those dogs are trained to run them off.

One time a pesky and starving black bear was disturbing our wilderness camp in the Sierra and one of our burros took out after him. He ran like hell.

DancesWithKnives
 
thirdeye said:
Even when they finally came down, she just "shooed" them back towards the mountains by walking after them and clapping her hands.
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This has been my experience with black bears, and seems to be what I hear from other actual black bear encounters. They're just scavenging, and usually don't want anything to do with us, so they'll scare away pretty easily.
 
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