How (not) to avoid getting eaten by bears:
a few weeks ago CF and i went backpacking in yosemite. we had been warned about the large bear population and when we searched the NPS website prior to our trip, we discovered that park regulations require you to put all scented items - everything from food to toiletries and even bug spray - in a bear canister* (hanging food from a tree is apparently insufficient, and where we were headed, it was remote enough that we wouldn't have access to groomed campsites with bear boxes...).
so, naturally we were already a little bearanoid when we arrived at yosemite. just to be safe, we asked one of the park rangers what we should do to prevent a bear from attacking. "don't cover yourself in peanut butter." she said.
ok, so maybe we were being a little overanxious about the whole bear attack thing after all. so we laughed about the peanut butter comment... well, at least until later that night, when we were sitting around a campfire, faces and hands completely covered in sticky s'mores. with melted chocolate, sticky sugary marshmallows and a fine dusting of graham cracker crumbs all over the place, it suddenly occurred to us that this was probably much, much worse than covering yourself in peanut butter. which was really not a good thing, especially when our tent already looked like a bear-sized happy meal:
a few weeks ago CF and i went backpacking in yosemite. we had been warned about the large bear population and when we searched the NPS website prior to our trip, we discovered that park regulations require you to put all scented items - everything from food to toiletries and even bug spray - in a bear canister* (hanging food from a tree is apparently insufficient, and where we were headed, it was remote enough that we wouldn't have access to groomed campsites with bear boxes...).
so, naturally we were already a little bearanoid when we arrived at yosemite. just to be safe, we asked one of the park rangers what we should do to prevent a bear from attacking. "don't cover yourself in peanut butter." she said.
ok, so maybe we were being a little overanxious about the whole bear attack thing after all. so we laughed about the peanut butter comment... well, at least until later that night, when we were sitting around a campfire, faces and hands completely covered in sticky s'mores. with melted chocolate, sticky sugary marshmallows and a fine dusting of graham cracker crumbs all over the place, it suddenly occurred to us that this was probably much, much worse than covering yourself in peanut butter. which was really not a good thing, especially when our tent already looked like a bear-sized happy meal:
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| bears + s'mores + kids tent resembling a happy meal = probably not the best idea ever |
anyway, we apparently managed to clean up enough that we survived the night without getting mauled, but i think the moral of the story is: s'mores might not be the best idea if you're trying to avoid a bear attack... oh, and never assume a park ranger is joking.
*if you are not familiar with bear canisters, they are essentially the backpacking equivalent of the black box on an airplane, which is to say: you and your backpack might be torn apart beyond all recognition, but the bear canister will not be destroyed.
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