[Cdt-l] Sleeping with Food in Grizzly Country

[Matthew Edwards]

Yep, I slept on my food everywhere except Yellowstone and a few places in Glacier.
I would not recommend anyone else do that.
Be here is what i did, albeit stupidly;
Each night when i stopped hiking I would either cowboy or tent but always i would
take my plastic grocery bag of food and roll it up in the garbage compactor bag i use as a 
back pack liner. I would squish all the air out and roll that baby up like a taquito.
Then fold the end over and set it right above my head. I would put my empty pack on top sometimes.
I also usually had a trekking pole leaned across the heap with my days dirty sock hanging on it to dry (which they never did).
However, I never cooked in Grizzly country.. in fact i had no stove. I very rarely ate where i slept.
The foods i ate were summed up in three catagories: Nutella, Peanut butter, Tortillas, powdered Fritos corn chips(a health food)
and Snickers Bars(Kingsize.. naturally).

I did encounter two grizzlies on my CDT hike. One was south of Togwotee pass. A sub-adult griz and i were sharing the same trail
in oposite directions. As soon as we saw each other, and with a few encouraging clicks of my aluminum trekking poles, the bear left.
The other Griz was above Two Ocean pass grazing on the grassy hillside and two far away for interaction.
If I were to do anything different i might have carried my pepperspray in a more accesible location.
I suppose and Ursack would have made more sense than a plastic grocery bag and a garbage compactor bag for food storage.
Personally I think the fear of Grizzly I encountered in the local population of humans was overblown.
Yea a dude got eaten in yellowstone but it was in an established campsite where people cook bacon and store yummy donuts in the trunk of their car.
I am gonna catch hell for this opinion so i will just give it both barrels here... One stinky hiker, making stealth camps in the wilderness has less to fear
from Grizzly than from man himself. Oh...The wilderness is as safe as it should be. Oh.. and.. A man has a right to die in his own back yard.
In the past two years the fear mongering has been far greater than the reality. 
For example: "You'll never make it over: Fuller ridge..Forrester pass, Whitney, Hat Creek rim, The San Juans, The Basin Divide."
Snow, Rain, Heat, Bears, Mosquitos, Forest fires, Snakes, Ticks, Blisters, Giardia..
I am not trying to make light of serious issues. Fear is the biggest challenge for most people. Lets be sure we have answers before we start flinging fear.
A few anecdotal stories by people, and particularly people who don't live in the woods for 5 months at a stretch, does not mean the entire woods are rife with man killing bears.
Okay.. let the slings and arrows begin.. I can take it.
-Iceaxe
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