Bear.
***An Excerpt From Girl Gone Wild***
A dirty little
secret of the outdoor world is just how rarely people abide by the
rule of hanging their food or even storing it at some distance from
their camp. More often than not they store in in coolers, trailers,
vehicles, tents, or backpacks. In brown bear country, this is stupid
and dangerous. In black bear and cougar country, which is most of
everywhere else, it is only slightly less stupid and dangerous. But
here’s how it happens. First, you do not see any bear or any other
animals for that matter which makes choosing not to hang your food
seem reasonable. But the lack of apparent wildlife is probably
because humans are big and noisy and smelly even if we are trying not
to be, not because they are not there. There is plenty of wildlife
watching your progress down a trail that you will never know are
there, and unless they are hungry or you manage to stumble into their
young, they will probably go out of their way to avoid you. Unless
they are hungry. And something is always hungry.
The second thing
that happens is that you find yourself in a place with nothing to
hang something from, this is a peculiar irony of the tundra areas of
Alaska. There are vast u-shaped valleys carved by the slow
progression of glaciers over thousands of years that, now exposed
thanks to global warming are covered in bright fields of dense, soft
tundra. Beautiful, but not a tree in sight. With no place to hang
food the best you can hope for is good storage someplace down wind of
your camp, you have to let the hanging thing go. Alternately, you can
find yourself camped in such large trees that even the lowest
branches are far too high to reach with even a weighted line, or you
do not have enough line to make the pitch. Again, out of luck, and
not entirely ones own fault.
The
last thing that happens, and it is this kind of experience that can
cause people to give it up entirely, is that it can take an entire
evening to get the food bag hung. Food is heavy and oddly shaped,
which means that you need something relatively accessible and sturdy
to hang it from. I can spend a good half and hour looking for the
right kind of branch an appropriate distance from camp and then
another half an hour or more trying to toss a line, often with one
end tied around a rock or shoe, over the branch. Have you ever tried
to send a pair of shoes over a telephone line? Sometimes you get it
in one shot, sometimes it seems impossible.
Photograph:
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