Backpackers, Lock Up Your Food and Save a Bear

Hikers and backpackers, you can save a bear by modifying the way you handle your trail food. The food that you take with you to the wilderness can be lethal to bears. That's right. Your food could spell the death sentence for one of these wild creatures. No, it is not a problem of a bear's digestive system not being able to handle human food. If that were the case, the problem would not be so acute.

On the contrary, many bears love the food that we find palatable. And therein lies the problem.

Here is an often too frequent scenario. A bear gets the taste for human food and starts increasingly to crave it. His appetite for our kind of nutrition becomes so acute that he gets aggressive and dangerous in his quest for the food of man. As in all too many cases, he could become so aggressive that he will have to be killed for your safety and mine. The bear's fault? Not really.

BALANCING ACT

I remember waking up and finding my brother's mauled and shredded backpack lying at the edge of our camp. I also recollect our consternation at finding all the food having been filched by a hungry bear. Fortunately it was our last night on the trail and there was enough food among our group to keep everybody going until we reached the Yosemite Valley floor. Even more fortunate is the fact that my brother had the presence of mind to not keep the food inside his tent. That could have spelled disaster.

Forty years ago, when this story took place, the prevailing wisdom was to hang your food as far out on a tree branch as you could to keep it out of the reach of bears. Hopefully there was such a tree nearby.

The idea was to tie a small rock to the end of a string and throw it over a tree branch which was neither too high for you to lob the rock over nor so low that the bear could swat down your grub. Then you tied a nylon rope to the string and pulled it over the branch. On one end of the rope, you tied your food sack and, on the other end, a rock to counterbalance it. After that you took a stick and pushed the bag of food that was on the end of the rope up as high as you could, higher than a bear could reach, all the while hoping that the rock didn't come down low enough for the wily bear to grab and gnaw off.

The next morning, the trick was to reach the food sack yourself, if indeed it was still there. By the time you were finished with your wild dance of leaping, swatting and hooking, you were more than ready for a hearty breakfast and far more than unwilling to share it with a bear.

My brother and the rest of us were way too exhausted that night to even think about such a taxing enterprise, having arrived at our campsite extremely weary and well after dark. So he did the next best thing that his muddled mind could think of. He put what he figured to be a safe space between his food and his tent. Good thing, but not good enough.

DRASTIC MEASURES

Bears, especially black bears of California's Sierra Nevada mountain range, have become a lot smarter than they were 40 years ago. This is true to the extent that, in many places in the Western United States, drastic measures have had to be taken to not only protect your food while you hike, but to also protect the lives of bears.

We humans are no physical match in this fight over food with a bear that has been habituated to our sustenance. And with its sense of smell being 100 times stronger than that of a dog (one can only guess how much stronger that is than the sense of smell of a human being), hoping that a resident bear will not find your food is an exercise in futility.

SOLUTION: BEAR-RESISTANT FOOD CANISTERS

So, what is the answer to the bear problem with regard to our food?

The best current answer is bear-resistant food canisters. Bears on a number of high traffic trails in California, for instance, now associate these handy devices with lost luck in obtaining tasty food. So they tend to pretty much leave them alone. One bear, according to my daughter, who hiked recently in Yosemite National Park, on finding a bear-resistant canister in her camp, batted it about for awhile, tried to gnaw her way into it without success and then ambled off disappointed and still hungry.

In many wilderness areas, bear-resistant canisters are mandatory. These areas include National Parks, National Forests and other wilderness areas, especially in the western states. Be sure to check the rules in the particular wilderness area where you plan to hike.

SAVE THE BEARS

So, please don't be sloppy with your food management in the wilderness. Save a bear's life as well as your own food. Invest in a bear-resistant canister. It's the right thing to do. What's good for you is good also for the bears.

Copyright (c) Richard Davidian, Ph.D.
Dr. Davidian, Professor of Research and Writing, writes on topics as varied as internet marketing and the outdoors. Visit his Great Outdoors Information blog for hiking and backpacking information.

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