hobo bear canister!!!

[PayetteRucker]

They hung their packs from trees, 10-15' above the ground.

You can hike for 20 miles around here and not see a tree tall enough, and black bears have no problems climbing trees. But apparently that makes me completely invalid and a liar about my adventures... everyone who has ever hiked backcountry since the dawn of time has carried a 3 pound food canister. This entire arguement is invalid, based on the fact that a bear will smell the food you prepped for dinner anyway. Whatever you cooked the smell will linger on the cookware and around the campsite in general so you can hide your food but a canister isn't going to prevent a bear from coming around.

 

[Iboschi]

Cook sites should always be AWAY from sleeping quarters and upwind.

I'm headed over to the Whine and Cheese forum for a snack!:thumbup::thumbup::thumbup:

 

[PayetteRucker]

wind around here changes on a dime, if there is any. Should I be building two fires then? one for cooking and one for staying warm? It seems kinda bogus to take all the time and effort into building and maintaining two completely seperate fires just to boil my can of soup at night.

 

[roughedges]

Cook sites should always be AWAY from sleeping quarters and upwind.

I'm headed over to the Whine and Cheese forum for a snack!:thumbup::thumbup::thumbup:

I believe you mean that the camp site should be upwind from the cook site.

Think I'll join you over in w&c.

 

[Iboschi]

I believe you mean that the camp site should be upwind from the cook site.

Think I'll join you over in w&c.

You're right of course. I was just so EXCITED to have some Whine and Cheese that I misspoke. Thanks for the correction. That would indeed be a fatal mistake See you in W&C!

 

[Ramm9]

But apparently that makes me completely invalid and a liar about my adventures...

The inconsistency and obvious lack of basic wilderness knowledge for your environment is doing it.

Cook sites should always be AWAY from sleeping quarters and upwind.

Yep, backpacking 101.

wind around here changes on a dime, if there is any. Should I be building two fires then? one for cooking and one for staying warm? It seems kinda bogus to take all the time and effort into building and maintaining two completely seperate fires just to boil my can of soup at night.

How about that. Among many other reasons, that's why those little alcohol stoves are so popular with back packers that actually know something about what they are doing.

 

[MustardMan]

PayetteRucker you're missing a critical point in all these discussions - the popularity of backpacking is exactly why more and more elaborate measures have to be taken. We have simultaneously destroyed bear habitat, giving them less room to forage for food, while encroaching on their territory carrying tasty morsels. Bears at one time were afraid of humans, especially when most humans happened to be carrying guns. Now they have learned to identify us as a source of food. Bear bagging and canisters and cooking away from camp are all concerted attempts to reverse that association, and are more necessary in areas that get lots of traffic from hikers.


Try your "gun on the chest, food in the tent" method regularly in Yosemite or The Smokies, and you're taking a big risk of becoming a statistic. And advocating that method in a public forum, when you clearly have NO IDEA about anything outside of the small area where you hike, is a good way to get somebody mauled.

 

[carspidey]

PayetteRucker you're missing a critical point in all these discussions - the popularity of backpacking is exactly why more and more elaborate measures have to be taken. We have simultaneously destroyed bear habitat, giving them less room to forage for food, while encroaching on their territory carrying tasty morsels. Bears at one time were afraid of humans, especially when most humans happened to be carrying guns. Now they have learned to identify us as a source of food. Bear bagging and canisters and cooking away from camp are all concerted attempts to reverse that association, and are more necessary in areas that get lots of traffic from hikers.


Try your "gun on the chest, food in the tent" method regularly in Yosemite or The Smokies, and you're taking a big risk of becoming a statistic. And advocating that method in a public forum, when you clearly have NO IDEA about anything outside of the small area where you hike, is a good way to get somebody mauled.

Man... I almost discarded my Protein Canister idea and got me at GUN to secure my food in my tent

 

[stingray4540]

I've never even seen anyone around here use one of those things. So what did people use in the backcountry back when bear populations were so much higher and there was no such thing as a 'bear canister?'

Like I said, in areas where bears don't associate humans with food, hanging food properly works just fine. And "back then" people who went into the backcountry knew what they were doing, they weren't a bunch of couch potatoes who decided to drive into the mountains, by the bus load, and bring coolers of food to leave out for the bears and raccoons. But back then bears were also more afraid of humans, and there natural diet was more abundant as well. Now, in some areas, bears respect us about as much as they do squirrels... We're just another animal in the woods now, since they see so many of us. It just so happens, we ALWAYS have some tasty treats in our trucks, coolers, pockets, tents...

ETA: Never mind, just read MustardMan's post, he beat me to it, and gets the point accross better.

 

[Pritch]

I've never even seen anyone around here use one of those things. So what did people use in the backcountry back when bear populations were so much higher and there was no such thing as a 'bear canister?'

PR, your boldness and eagerness to encounter wilderness is commendable, and a resolute will to survive is invaluable. I enjoy hearing about your adventures and seeing the pictures you share. That being said, Dude, stop being an ass.

Bear canisters are not prescribed for all areas with bears - just areas where bears have been educated to associate people with food. Those areas tend to be heavily hiked areas in California where bears are not hunted, so their only association with people is as food dispensers. Clearly people in the past didn't use them, and likely the need wasn't there, because the volume of hikers wasn't there and the available habitat was larger.

Also, I don't believe anybody was pushing you to use a bear canister. I don't believe bear canisters are required in any part of Idaho, and the prevalence of hunting, at least of blackies, would support your assertion that the bears will vacate at the first whiff of people.

But apparently that makes me completely invalid and a liar about my adventures... everyone who has ever hiked backcountry since the dawn of time has carried a 3 pound food canister. This entire arguement is invalid, based on the fact that a bear will smell the food you prepped for dinner anyway. Whatever you cooked the smell will linger on the cookware and around the campsite in general so you can hide your food but a canister isn't going to prevent a bear from coming around.

The whole point is to deny habituated bears a payoff from raiding human camps looking for food. This has been clearly stated previously in this thread but I guess facts and specific knowledge that doesn't mesh with your own half-baked take on the topic aren't relevant.

The facts are that you:
1) didn't know the difference between canisters and bear bags,
2) didn't have a clue that their purpose is to deny access, not seal in scent,
3) didn't know that they weren't hung,
4) insisted that they didn't work, (without any evidence), and
5) advocated keeping food inside your tent, despite substantial evidence of that leading to maulings.

They sell bear bags EVERYWHERE around here and they're all used with a lanyard for throwing around a tree branch so as to hang the bag at least ten feet off the ground and ten feet away from the trunk. This is supposed to keep a bear out of my food? Ya, right. The last year I've spent in Idaho backcountry I've NEVER had an issue with it. The only time I came remotely close was when we had a pack of coyotes run through our 30+ person camp on the Snake River in Hell's Canyon. Bears, at least around here, are skittish in general-the slightest sound or smell of humans will send them packing. We have millions of square miles of public land, and although we have lots of wildlife, they don't have much experience with human interaction, as they have room to exist away from human society. Whereas a Wisconsin whitetail will sit and stare at you ten yards away, if an Idaho whitetail were to smell you upwind of them they'd be long gone by the time you ever see them. I'd like to see a bear that can't get into a 3 pound plastic bin get into a metal soup can that's burried in a pack. I know they can do it, I'm just saying, I don't care what anyone says, they aren't failsafes.

I don't care what anyone says." It is amazing how often that phrase is found in your posts. I guess ONE year in the woods is sufficient to just "know" everything, irrespective of the facts, or your own ignorance on on this topic. I realize you are 21 years old and therefore know everything, but if you live to see 31 without going the way of Treadwell or McCandless, you may actually learn to consider the facts and input that others with actual relevant experience may bring to a topic.

Simply relying on your precious "Will to Survive," with no regard to the facts and relevant experiences of people with more and different experience than your own is a recipe for a Darwin Award.

 

[Esav Benyamin]

... relevant experiences of people with more and different experience ...

Should be the subtitle of this forum,
NOT "how I strode forth and conquered the wilderness."

 

[ffchris]

I stand corrected. After seeing the video posted, I understand now.

 

[Ron L]

I just hope that gun of yours doesn't have a front sight on it.

 

[Shoki]

I stand corrected. After seeing the video posted, I understand now.

I was more than a tad skeptical when I first heard of them too. I thought for sure that a bear would have more trouble figuring out how to get the food bag (that I hoped he would think was magically hovering in the air) than he would breaking into a little plastic jar left lying out on the ground. There's numerous videos of bears getting frustrated with the canisters and I had to watch no less than 5 of them before I finally bought into the idea.



Even in my ignorant 'Superman' mentality of a decade ago, bears were pure Kryptonite. Careless food-handling in bear country is like Russian roulette.

 

[kvaughn]

I just hope that gun of yours doesn't have a front sight on it.

--LMAO--And the corners are kinda rounded with no sharp edges.----KV

 

[montana guy]

This is interesting. Some of this information should be used in a book on how one does not stay safe in bear country. Food in the tent, not real bright, a bear wakes you up, you freak out going for your gun and you die potentially. Please videotape all your trips into bear country so when someone finds your dead body they can take the footage, put it on youtube and title it "what not to do in bear country".

 

[Grapevine]

The sadder part is whatever bear kills him would be hunted down as a mankiller due to no fault of the bear.

 

[smersh]

Tangled up in a collapsed tent at night in the dark is a helluva place to have a bear encounter, .357 or not. Apart from that, food in your tent attracts all sorts of other destructive encounters that are less lethal, but very irritating. Raccoons can do a number on a tent very quickly, as can smaller animals.

re. bears v. automobiles: a study got a lot of press last fall that showed they've got a particular appetite for the contents of minivans:

Hungry Yosemite bears zero in on minivans
http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-10-24/news/17183867_1_vehicles-snacks-study

The rebellious bears of Yosemite Valley have developed a taste for that old standard of the suburban family life, the minivan.

The kid-friendly vehicles are quickly becoming a bear necessity along with handouts and garbage slop, according to a study published in the October issue of the Journal of Mammalogy.

Specifically, the burly bruins select minivans over all other types of vehicles, no matter how sporty, colorful or expensive, and rip them open looking for grub, said the study "Selective Foraging for Anthropogenic Resources by Black Bears: Minivans in Yosemite National Park."

"They target minivans," said Stewart Breck, a research biologist with the National Wildlife Research Center, who co-authored the study. "They will pop open windows, peel open a door, rip out back seats. They can do a lot of damage."
Treasure troves

It is all related to what Breck called "fuel efficiency." He means that minivans often contain goodies like smeared peanut butter, moldy cheese or, occasionally, ice chests full of groceries and beer that bears can use to fuel their opportunistic lifestyles.

"I think there are more food smells in minivans," Breck said. "Bears have very good noses. They are like bloodhounds, so they can smell food even when all the doors and windows are locked tight."

Besides chow, nobody knows for sure what the hairy oafs have in mind when they bear down on a parked vehicle, but structural considerations may also come into play, according to the study. Specifically, the rear side windows of minivans appear to be a snap for bears to pop open.

The study analyzed 908 vehicles in Yosemite National Park that black bears opened like soup cans between 2001 and 2007. Minivans were the first or second preference every year, accounting for 26 percent of all the break-ins. That's despite the fact that they make up only 7 percent of the vehicles parked in Yosemite Valley.

 

[tknife]

A few years ago we went backpacking in a part of Sequoia NP where bear canisters are required by law. My friends and I thought this was pretty ridiculous, we didn't want to add the weight and bulk of this thing that we never needed before. But it was only a couple bucks to rent them and we didn't want to ruin the trip over it. Turned out to be not that big of a deal anyway.

I would rather take the advice of the rangers who hike those very same trails for over half the year. They may have just a bit more experience than I who can only get there once or twice a year.

Sleeping with your food right next to you seems extremely silly regardless of your feelings of the canisters. I'm sure the old timers wouldn't have done that either, just doesn't make any sense.

 

[thirdpersonmatt]

When I first saw this post I thought it was about hobo beer canisters. Anyway, I've had a bear tear open a steel dumpster with it's teeth and eat the plastic silverwear along with the paper plates and all the food scraps that were on them. But, I've also seen the videos they play at the ranger stations about how the bear canisters really work and what the bears do with them. I always end up thinking the same thing though: How do you fit 2 days worth of food into such a small container?