Backpacking in Grizzly Bear Country

hey y'all Dixie here today I want to talk to you about backpacking in bisley one of my biggest fears before through hiking the CDT was knowing that once I got to Wyoming I would be in grizzly country ever since I was a little girl and I learned what grizzly bears were I thought who in their right mind would put themselves in an environment to be attacked by grizzly bears and I just had this idea that they had bright red LED lights for eyeballs and that if I was there they would Maul me and it was just a matter of whether I would survive or not and you know as I grew up I didn't get over that in my mind while I was backpacking in grizzly country that's what it was going to be like if you are familiar with areas that make up grizzly country Grizzlies actually live in five states in the United States including Wyoming Idaho Montana Alaska and actually there have been some spotted in the northern Cascades in Washington you can identify Grizzlies by the big ol hump on their neck and also if you're looking at black bear prints versus grizzly prints you can tell a difference there's a little method where you can draw a line under the toes and based on the last toe where it falls either you know above or on that line you can tell the difference in grizzly tracks or black bear tracks people will tell you statistics that you're more likely to get struck by lightning or be in a car accident then attacked by a bear but those just didn't really make me feel a whole lot better I wanted to know how to avoid encounters with grizzly bears and you know if I was to be attacked I knew there was a difference on how to deal with black bears versus Grizzlies so I wanted to educate myself on that as I prepared to hike in grizzly country bears are wild animals so there's not a one recipe fixes all with a bear encounter the two biggest things that you can do though is to try to prevent having any kind of contact with them while hiking and you know also making sure that you aren't unknowingly inviting them into your camp the first thing I want to cover is how to avoid Grizzlies while hiking now to be fair it's not like they want to come up and hang out and play with you and stuff like that they really don't want anything to do with you so if you can make your presence known like hey there's a human here hiking then most of the time they're gonna run away if they hear you coming now the trick is you have to make yourself known so that means you need to make a lot of noise whether you're hollering out hey bear singing you know we sang a lot daylight come and me wanna go my instinct because I was a little nervous was to almost want to be quiet and like sneak around the woods you know so I didn't disturb any bears but no that's not what you need to do you definitely need to make noise people have asked about bear bells and I myself before backpacking just in general in bear country on the Appalachian Trail I wonder did I need bear bells and were they the most effective tool for letting a bear know that a human is present and I really found mixed information on that I think there have been several studies and they seem to all have kind of contradicting information some people say yes it does deter bear some people say the bells actually attract curious bears I've only come across one backpacker hiking with bear bells that was on the Appalachian Trail it was a section hiker and in my other three through hikes I have not met anybody hiking in bear country any kind of bear country with bear bells but I have seen a lot of cows and sheep - just for myself it would annoy me and I prefer to sing and holler to the Bears and stuff like that I found that there were areas where I realized it might be more important to holler out and make myself known and that was especially near water sources so if you think about it you're sitting next to a water source you've got the rushing water it's kind of hard to hear somebody coming up well it's the same thing for a bear so they're getting down there drinking water just like humans and they need to know like hey there's a human approaching so a running water source is an easy place to accidentally sneak up on a bear and startle them and a startled bear can be an aggressive bear other areas where you might want to try to make a little more noise might be like berry patches or thick brush that has maybe like a tunnel so if you're hiking in willows that kind of line both sides of the trail me personally I don't want to find a bear around the corner and have it you know barreling down that willow path so I try to yell out in advance so it can try to cut out somewhere else also if you know there are any carcasses in the area of dead animals that is prime grizzly feeding opportunities so you don't want to be there because they can definitely get aggressive if you do have to hike in an area that has a carcass I mean a lot of times if the national forests or parks know about them they will post signs I saw a couple of those on the CDT but of course if something dies recently and nobody knows about it except now you and probably a bunch of Grizzlies who can smell it then you know just kind of make yourself known and get out of those areas as fast as possible it's also recommended that you hike in groups in grizzly country so in groups of three or more people is preferred when you're not alone you're more likely to make noise and also Bears seem to be a little deterred by larger sized groups than individuals I certainly hiked alone in grizzly country so I'm not saying you know you're definitely gonna be attacked and eaten if you're alone I mean there have been people who have died in groups who have been attacked so all I'm saying is that that's what's recommended I did sometimes hike alone and if I could be in a group then I tried to do that and finally it is recommended that you do not hike during dusk or dawn now I know a lot of you are like but Vicks and you know we're not hacking in grizzly country yes I was and had time not been of the essence as far as me making it to Canada before a bunch of snow dumped on me then I certainly wouldn't have just been tempting fate by night hiking in grizzly country but you know there are again calculated risks at times you do have to take during a thru-hike well you don't have to but you know if you want to make it there by the end and so that was the situation I was in and a choice I had to make but again these are not laws they are just suggestions to be as safe as you can be the next thing I want to talk about is how to avoid Grizzlies at camp so how to not accidentally invite them into you definitely want to pay attention when choosing a campsite you don't want to set up near any berry bushes animal carcasses I mean he wants to smell that all night anyway definitely you don't want to set up right on trail I mean that's kind of a no-no anyway but just like humans use the trail animals like the path of least resistance also and so that may be a highway for bears or mountain lions or whatever at night also pay attention to if there is any trash or leftover food from somebody who had lunch in that area or camp there the night before and didn't follow the rules of not having food at the campsite you know just those are all the things you kind of want to look out for and finally you kind of want to check the area for fresh bear scat so there is an area where bears are frequenting you might not want to set up right there I say that however in Yellowstone National Park and in Glacier National Park when I got my permit they definitely scheduled me for areas that they were like and by the way site number blah blah blah has been flagged for hi bear frequency but don't worry so far there haven't been any aggressive encounters so you know in one breath they say avoid areas where there's fresh bear scat and then in another they schedule you to be at a campsite that they know has a lot of bears so anyway again the best practice is to avoid bears though so if there is scat you might want to go set up camp somewhere else the next thing you can do to help avoid inviting bears into your campsite is to make sure you store your food properly now the biggest thing with Grizzlies or any bears for that matter is that you don't want to have the bear start associating humans with a food source so if your food is not stored properly and they're like whom this place smells like humans humans are camped here oh if I go find where humans are camped I can get food you just don't want that to happen because obviously it can be detrimental for people in the way that bears can start attacking people to get their food also the food that you had set up for a seven-day stretch that you're in the middle of you now have very little food and you have to ration the rest of the time so you're putting yourself in danger of having no food and then finally the bear will be put in danger so if these bears start recognizing I can get food from humans and they start being aggressive then a lot of times the bear is put down I don't want to be responsible for a bear having to be euthanized and hopefully y'all don't want to either so it's just best to store your food properly you definitely want to check the rules of the area that you're gonna be backpacking and camping I stated a couple of places along the way on the CDT that had bear boxes and they are so wonderful they're just basically big ol big boxes or vaults that are bear proof so the Bears at least to my knowledge haven't learned to open the boxes yet but you can just store your food in there it's super easy and you don't have to worry about it other options for storing your food might be with a bear canister and then finally you can use a food bag and that's what I did most of the PCT all of the AC and all of the CDT now the rule of thumb for hanging your food bag is you want the bag to at least be ten feet off the ground and at least four feet from if you're hanging it in a tree that vertical support so you want it at least four feet out on that branch some places will say six feet you know again there may be different dimensions based on where you're camping I will probably do a video in the future on hanging a bear bag properly so if you want more information on that be looking for that in the future one problem I had with hanging a bear bag is there aren't always trees to have the perfect hang now if I had it to do again and I knew I was going to be in an area that wasn't going to have the best trees for bear bagging what I might have done is gone with one of those Kevlar sacks they're made out of bulletproof fabric and probably I would have lined it with one of the Opie sacks or op sacks it's basically like an odor proof ziploc bag type thing so I would have put all my food in that and then put it down in that Kevlar or sack the earth sacks are you know like normal bear bags they're just going to be a lot more durable for you know a bag that's not hung properly so if a bear does get to it then you know you don't have to worry about it getting your food and then again associating people with food or you know limiting your supply severely another option for an area that doesn't have the best barrier bagging trees would probably be the bear canister like I mentioned before but both of those options are gonna be a little bit heavier but they are safer options and not hanging your bear bag properly however you choose to store your food you just want to make sure that you put all of your Sennett items in there so chapstick deodorant baby wipes obviously your food your utensils your food pie basically anything that's got any type of scent whether it's toiletries or some kind of food item wrappers trash all of that stuff because you don't want the bear smell on that and coming to get it because they're hungry another good practice is to make sure you're doing the bear muta triangle so in grizzly country people recommend kind of creating a triangular pattern to the way your campus set up so for example one part of the triangle would be where you actually set up your tent and then the two other pieces of the triangle will be where you prepare your food and cook and then the third point of the triangle would be where you do your hang for the night or store your food now the idea is area where your food is prepared and cooked and eaten and the area where it is stored for the night those should be downwind from where your camp so you want to be up when do you want the wind if that was the way it was set up the wind would be going this way if you can see my my air visual here and in between all three of those points on the triangle you want one hundred yards I did not practice the Bermuda Triangle what I did to kind of eliminate this issue was I would hike until it hit about six o'clock or so sit down cook my food and then hike for another hour so our mile or so at least 100 yards away from where I had cooked and then would set up camp so that way I wasn't you know walking all around this triangle or anything like that I took care of my cooking and all of that before I ever got to camp I did make sure to hang my food about a hundred yards away from where I set my tent by doing this I also solved the issue of cooking in the clothes that I sleep in it suggested that cooking in the clothes that you sleep in is not a good idea because you've got all that aroma of that good food on your clothes and then you climb into your sleeping bag like a burrito so by stopping and cooking and brushing my teeth and all that in one spot before I was done hiking for the day and then continuing on for a little while that just kind of eliminated those issues for me the main thing is though you do not want to have your food or any of those Sennett items I mentioned in your tent with you when you go to sleep at night because the last thing you want is to wake up to a bear dragging you out while you're trying to sleep now let's talk about what to do if you do see a grizzly the first thing you want to make sure that you do not do but I feel like is everyone's first instinct is run running can trigger that predator-prey thing in a grizzly and make it want to come after you and eat you for lunch so the best thing that you can do is calmly assess the situation now I know if it's your first time seeing a grizzly and especially if it's a very up close encounter luckily for me my first grizzly was across a water source you know now they can run 35 miles per hour so it could have been to me in a matter of seconds but if you're not calm try to get it calm and assess the situation you know is the bear walking away well if it is let it just kind of give it some time let it go on about its business that's probably the most likely thing that's gonna happen if a bear knows you're there it's just gonna go on off and try to get away from you if you notice that the bear is walking towards you down the trail Aaron actually had this happen and had watched videos where this happened and you know people kind of were recording and like backing up as the bear kept coming towards them and so he said that he always thought why don't they just give it some room and actually one of the park rangers at Yellowstone when she was talking to me about bear safety before I got my permit she said you know if you have a bear coming down the trail you just kind of want to give it some room so step off the trail and if you walk sideways apparently they don't see that as as much of a threat as you know walking towards them or even potentially backing away so just kind of walk sideways off the trail give them some space and let them do their thing if they continue coming towards you you do - you know look big let them know like hey I'm a human wave your arms speak to them do not make direct eye contact because they can see that as a sign of aggressiveness but what I've been told is to kind of like look at the mass of the bear so look towards it you don't want to turn your back to it you know you don't want to look over here and not pay attention to what the bear is doing so you want to look towards it but look at the mass and not directly in its eyes and finally if you're hiking with small children it is recommended that you throw those children to the bear I'm just kidding it is recommended that you pick the child up when you spot a bear now all situations again are not you know if you follow this exact list of things you know you're gonna be perfectly fine that's just not the way it goes with wildlife because they have minds of their own so sometimes Bears will growl at you and sometimes they will Bluff charge you and sometimes they'll click their jaws and you know all sorts of different reactions but I think the biggest takeaways are to try to remain calm make yourself known make sure they know you are human and do not run now in grizzly country if you are attacked by a grizzly bear you do not fight back people will tell you with black bears you know you want to fight back with Grizzlies you do not want to do that you want to play dead now that just sounds almost impossible for me you know he's got this big beast coming towards you and mauling you and you want me to be quiet and play dead I mean that just sounds insane but knowing that that is your best chance of survival once the bear is on you in attacking you you know try to play that situation in your mind and go ahead and prepare yourself for that now while you're playing dead what you're gonna do is lay on your front side with your legs spread apart to kind of help prevent the bear from flipping you over you want to make sure you stay on your front side that way your pack can kind of help protect your back and you're gonna clasp your hands together and put them behind your neck like that and just you know lay facedown and good luck the goal is that eventually after the bear takes a few swipes at you and realizes hey this human is dead or is no longer a threat then they wander off on their merry way and you do not want to get up and try to flee until the bear has lost interest has left because again bears run 35 miles per hour and you are not going to outrun a bear you're not going to climb a tree and get away from them because bears can climb trees probably faster than you so you just want to lay there until the bear has left and it is safe to get up and try to get out and get help now I did have a park ranger in Yellowstone tell me that the only time you want to fight back with a grizzly bear is if you have been dragged out of your tent at night and a bear is currently attacking you or you are being stalked by a bear and then it attacks you so in those two instances apparently the bear views you as prey and as food and is planning to eat you so playing dead is not gonna do anything but excite them and you know makes them go oh hey it already died so now I can start eating it so in those instances you do want to fight back there are ways to protect yourself in bear country and there seems to be an ongoing battle on whether firearms or a bear spray is the best I am NOT here to decide that for you today I think that you should look up and do some research on the best way for you to protect yourself in grizzly bear country and what you feel most comfortable with I can tell you that I decided to go with bear spray and according to some studies by the US Fish and Wildlife they found bear spray more effective than protecting yourself with a firearm they said that people who protected themselves with firearms were more likely to be injured during a bear attack than people who protected themselves with bear spray I have a link to that little fact sheet by the US Fish and Wildlife if you're interested in looking at it and again I know that you can find some conflicting information but overall it just was a better fit for me to carry bear spray I would recommend learning how to use the bear spray practice you know drawing it the bear spray that I used which is counter-attack us all several forestry workers and Rangers and things carrying that same brand but it does come with a little holster and the can that I got is 10.2 ounces it's a larger can they sell a little bit smaller of a can but I wanted to have as much bear spray as I could you know I didn't want to be about to run out and think in man I just wish that I had a little but more so I went ahead and carried the bigger cake now if you decide to carry bear spray they say that when the bear is approaching you and it is about 60 feet away you want to go ahead and give one blast with that bear spray that way when hopefully they hit the cloud as they're coming towards you you know it'll be like hitting a brick wall and they'll turn around and hopefully retreat it's not well then you continue spraying from there so but I would just go how to have it ready to blast the whole can if you need to hopefully none of you are ever in that situation hopefully I'm not either but anyway that's kind of the rule of thumb when the bear gets within 60 feet I will tell you whatever you decide to use protect yourself please just make sure that you actually have it easily accessible like don't have it in the pack it's not gonna do you any good and you're not gonna say hold on a second bear let me put my pack down and get my spray out and you know or my gun out or whatever you choose to carry and you know okay now I'm good you can attack me like that's just not how it works so you need to have it easily accessible otherwise what's really the point of having it all so I highly recommend that when you sleep at night you have it easily accessible I carried my bear spray with me to do everything we went to the bathroom together we watched geysers go off together we hiked together sometimes we ate together you know we just did everything together and I recommend that whatever you take for safety make that your best friend as a final note with the bear spray and obviously firearms just make sure wherever you're hiking you know pay attention to what laws they have there as far as bear spray and firearms are concerned because there are areas where bear spray and firearms are not permitted and as a thru-hike er this is not something that you can fly with so I had mine confiscated at the airport when I was leaving from my thru-hike I just forgot that it was even in my pack so just keep that in mind hopefully I haven't scared any of y'all to where you're just like well thanks a lot Dixie now I'm never going to bear country or especially grizzly country you know there's something special about facing your fears there's something liberating about that and my biggest fear by far was hiking in grizzly country and especially alone I did face that fear I do not regret going to grizzly country you know of course I'm safe and in one piece now so it's easy to say that but all I'm saying is yes know the risks you're taking and take precautions to kind of minimize those risks but don't be afraid to get out there you know I'm so happy that I faced that fear of mine and there's something about being in grizzly country and I know this might sound crazy but they kind of brought me back to just the roots of being a human and being a part of nature and being a part of the wild and I think it's not really something that you can understand until you've been out there and especially encountered a grizzly and just knowing that oh my gosh I'm literally living among Grizzlies and now I sound like the the crazy grizzly fellow but anyway I'm just gonna leave you with that you know don't be afraid to get out there but but know the risks you're taking take as many precautions as you can and just be as safe as possible y'all and with that thank you so much and if you have any questions about my particular experience in grizzly country please leave that in the comments below I will be happy to answer those questions for you and we will see y'all next time

Channel: Homemade Wanderlust

Views: 81,118

Rating: 4.9473329 out of 5

Keywords: travel, hiking, backpacking, hike, gear, adventure, fun, story, Appalachian, Trail, PCT, CDT, thru-hike, Auburn, Alabama, epic, climbing, canyon, national, nature, mountains, update, park, lake, trail, tents, camping, summer, University, Aubie, River, stream, Mountains, National, Scenic

Id: 97a_wO17xTo

Length: 23min 27sec (1407 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 07 2018