5:17 p.m. on June 4, 2001 (EDT)
Hikergirl -
I've forgotten where you will be hiking, but if I recall, it is in the NE. Bears are not quite as educated there as in Yosemite, so bear bagging is pretty simple as long as you have trees available. Get about 50-100 ft of parachute cord (longer is betrer) and a small ditty bag (3 or 4 inch size). You can carry the cord in the bag. Find a tree 100 feet or so from your sleeping area and your cooking area (cooking area should be a hundred feet or so from your sleeping area so the beasties won't be rummaging through your tent with you in it). The tree should have a limb with a fairly clean shot about 20-30 feet up. Since bears can climb (as can other beasties), pick a fairly thin branch (just thick enough to suport your "smellables", which means more than just food - toothpaste, deodorant if any "real" backpacker takes deodorant, snacks, anything that might smell attractive to a beastie). Also, there should be no branches below your chosen one which the bear can walk out on and reach up.
Put a few small rocks in the little bag or fill it with sand and tie it to one end of your 100 foot cord. Uncoil your cord so it will run freely and not go with the bag in a tangled clump. (here's the challenging part) toss the bag (with cord attached) over the branch. If you have enough weight in the bag, it will slide fairly freely to the ground, so make sure you hold onto one end of the cord (otherwise it will just pull right over and you will have to try again). Now, how to toss the bag. I find that an underhanded "sling" is best, but other people use other techniques (like slingshots and fishing line). Anyway, I let out a couple feet of cord and start whirling the bag in a vertical circle, then sling it underhanded upward at a slant toward just above the branch. If the branch is clear, this usually works first shot. If it is a tangle of branches, then it sometimes takes a couple tries.
Now that you have the cord over the branch, you can choose one of two approaches, depending on how educated the local bears are. If they don't know much about humans, then just put your food in a ditty bag lined with a plastic garbage bag (you could use your sleeping bag stuff sack, but it will pick up the food odors and transfer them to your sleeping bag, which might invite unwanted guests to your sleeping quarters). Tie the bag to the end of the cord that had your little ditty bag with the rocks in it, haul it up to perhaps 5 feet below the branch, and tie it off to some convenient spot. The problem with this approach is that a medium smart bear can figure out the connection between the single tie-off and cut the cord (by biting, pulling, clawing, or whatever). A mouse can come down the cord and get into the bag (had this happen, and the mouse left souveniers that I didn't notice when preparing a pre-dawn breakfast, which made me very sick later that day). So you can use a tin can lid that is punched with a hole and put over the cord (like the rat shields used on ship lines).
A variation is to use 2 cords to the food bag and tie each in to a separate tieoff point, separated by some distance. This still seems to work in the southern Rockies. Another variation, especially when there are no clear branches, is to toss the cord through 2 trees and haul the bag up so it is suspended between trees. This requires two tie-offs, and if either one is cut or broken, the food comes within reach of a bear on the ground.
Some areas recommend the counter-balance method. In this case, you divide the food equally between two food bags and tie one to the end of the cord. Haul this bag all the way up to the branch, then tie the second bag on as high as you can reach (a figure-8 or overhand loop in conjunction with a small carabiner makes this easier). Coil the remaining cord and attach it to the food bag so that no beastie can reach it from the ground. Now push the bag up until the two bags are at the same height and counterbalanced. To get the bags down (ah, the magic trick), use the stick or hiking pole you pushed the bag up with (only way to get the bags to even height), to hook one of the bags and pull it down. Say what? Hook? Yes, tie a loop in the cord and leave it dangling slightly so you can hook it with your long stick or hiking pole. With practice, you can learn to loop your cord and leave a little loop that you can catch and pull the cord back down to provide a haul line. The trick of coiling the cord is left as an exercise for the reader (it does appear in several books).
Practice bear bagging BEFORE you leave for the woods. You don't want to be sitting there on the ground, staring up at your perfectly balanced food bags and unable to get them back down.
Check to see if your area has food lockers installed at the designated campsites. Yosemite has some lockers installed in what would otherwise be wilderness campsites. The safest bet is to just bite the bullet and buy or rent the Garcia bear containers. Of the ones on the market, the only ones that have stood up to testing consistently are the Garcias. The Nomex bag lets the bears much the food around, leaving you with broken containers, liquid leaking out, and all your food a real mess. The aluminum cylinders don't seem to hold up in practice. I have broken a Garcia (actually, one of my scouts did, by dropping it of the top of a van onto a concrete parking lot). But Garcia replaced it, no charge. Yeah, it's extra weight, but with the PhD level Yosemite bears, it's the only thing that works consistently. Bears elsewhere may still be trickable with bear bagging in the trees.
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