How to Prevent Bears from Getting into Your Food Supply While Camping

Video Transcript

"Hi! I’m Kate with Zoar Outdoor on behalf of expertvillage.com. I am going to talk to you about hiking and backpacking. If you are a multi day backpacking and are in bear country or generally any time of the year besides winter, you are going to want to put your food up in a tree in a bear bag situation. It’s a real easy thing to do if you have a good arm. You need some rope and you want to go up, over a branch and you will be slinging your food from that. So to start out you need to enough rope to go up and over that branch and down to the ground where you will be attaching your food on the ground. Once it is attached, you take the other side of it and you pull it up into the tree and tie it off. This way it's a ways off the ground so you and I can get to it and a bear can get to it. It shouldn’t be anywhere near your campsite. You can also lure it down in the morning to get your food because all it is tied off. Make sure the branch you use is meaty enough to hold up your food stores. If you are in bear country, you want to make sure you don’t have any food in your tent. If it’s grizzly country, you don’t even want to smell like food which is why you are going to put your bear bag far away from your tent. You’ll even have your cook site far away from your tent and you might even consider washing your hands before you go to bed. If you are in grizzly country, sometimes the campsite will have actual bear vaults for you to put your food in because it is an issue. There are companies that make plastic containers that you can put your food in and you can backpack with those. Whatever percussion you think you need to take, you should take because bears eating your food are a big deal but bears being in your campsite are a bigger deal. So keeping the bears far away from you, far away from your food is a very good precaution to take. "