[pct-l] sleeping with your food

[Rick Donahue]

The smell approach matches my own experience at home. We live in the Sierra
Foothills and have a real problem with
bears that like trash. Trash pickup is at 6 am. Many put their trash out the
night before. You can usually tell who has
not been careful in disposing of food waste in the trash can because it's
spread all over the street in the morning. The
only solution I've found is to put 2-3 tablespoons of bleach or ammonia
inside the top of our 96 gallon trash can. I've
been putting the trash out the night before now for 5-6 months and have not
had a single problem... yet.

--Rick

 >Date: Mon, 7 Dec 2009 11:59:09 -0800 (PST)
 >From: Jereen Anderson <jereenanderson at yahoo.com>
 >Subject: [pct-l] Sleeping with your food
 >To: pct-l at backcountry.net
 >Cc: reddirt2 at gmail.com
 >Message-ID: <363559.93010.qm at web58604.mail.re3.yahoo.com>
 >Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
 >
 >As stated, I never sleep with my food. Years ago I used to hang it high in
trees. This did not always work. Clever bears still  >sometimes managed to
get it. Besides, in the high country of the Sierra the trees simply were not
tall enough. Sometime in the  >seventies the bears would start coming up to
the higher elevations - because they knew that we backpackers had food. I
had  >some success puting it in waterproof bags, weighing it down with
rocks, and, using a light rope, tossing it into a lake under a few  >feet of
water.
 >Then, about 20 years ago, I discovered "bear charms" - cotton tobacco
sacks with 2 or 3 mothballs in each. On my PCT thru-ride  >I carried about
20 of these in an OPSAK. In the evening I surrounded my saddle and pack bags
with them and also my tent. I  >stored my food in a large OPSAK and put it
next to the saddle bags. I would like to point out that the OPSAK is 100%
odor proof  >and that the URSACK is not. Bears and rodents cannot smell your
food if it is stored in an OPSAK !? The mothballs function as  >an effective
bear repellant - they really dislike the smell. If there are any lingering
food smells around your canp - or on you - the  >mothballs are a second line
of defence. I also want to point out that, while I have found that bears
dislike the mothball smell,  >rodents are not discouraged by it.