Hanging a Camping Bear Bag

Video Transcript

"Let's talk about protecting your food from critters. You don't want your food being eaten by anybody but you, because you're hoofing it out there. So a really good idea is to hang it up so that the critters can't get it. Out West, if you're going to have problems with Grizzlies, you might actually have what's called a bear canister that you're going to have to haul out. Those are kind of heavy, but out there you kind of need to do it. But for many areas, you can just do a simple bear bag. And what you're doing is taking your food bag and hanging it up in a tree, basically. You want to avoid the temptation to just tie your cord that you can hang it up with, to the drawstrings because the stitching here might break. Another thing is that you can actually kind of make this somewhat waterproof if you take it and tie it actually around the fabric in what's called a clove hitch. Get in there nice and tight. With the other end, you'll coil it up and toss it over a branch. Normally I take a little rock and weight the end, but in this little demonstration purposes I'm not going to need to do that. But you basically flake it back and forth so that when you toss it up and over, it'll go up. You haul it up and then you move off to a tree, preferably a different tree, and tie it off. I like to have neutral colors for my cord. Olive drab is a nice one, too, so that animals don't go, "Oh look. There's a bear bag", and they'll scamper up. Some people will put little metal cans or plastic cups here. If you have any questions about protecting your food, give your local outfitter a holler."