[pct-l]smelling bears

[Lonetrail at aol.com (Lonetrail@xxxxxxx)]

Dude

A bear can smell a Seal under several feet of ice. And old Indian story: An 
eagle can see a leaf falling from a tree while soaring above. A wolf can hear a 
it dropping. A bear can smell it dropping. A black bear is really a lazy 
scavenger. The easier it is for him the better. The problem is when a bear makes 
his mind up on what he wants he is big enough to take it. Understand that! It 
better to let him eat your food instead of you being his food.

Lonetrail

>  understand what you're saying, and I think the reasoning is sound. 
> But this suggests that backcountry bears are primarily smell driven, 
> rather than visually driven.  If this were the case, then the stealth 
> camper wouldn't be safe sleeping with food.  Using my mutt as an 
> example, he can home in on a strip of bacon, which has been hidden 
> behind the tire on the car, from across the yard with a tailing wind. 
> Goodness knows you won't find a disbeliever here, that thru's have a 
> tendency to broadcast a scent.  They ought to be pulling in every bear 
> in a 1/2 mile radius if scent were the key.
> 
> I don't have the answer, but the apparent inconsistancies are giving me 
> something to mull around.  An additional observation; I was watching a 
> hiking show on the Outdoor channel several years ago.  The trip was 
> along an Alaskan river, on the sandy flats of the delta, close to the 
> ocean.  A number of bears were in the area, and the intrepid guide took 
> great care in making sure his presence was made known to the animals. 
> He was always looking for an escape route, and was more nervous when he 
> couldn't see the bears, than when they were in sight.    Yet every 
> night, when he set up his camp, he followed two rules.  He always cooked 
> and washed up several hundred yards from his sleeping area, and he 
> stored all his food and smellables in Hefty bag, placed inside another 
> Hefty, and laid on the ground at a site distant from both the cook area 
> and the sleeping area.  He claimed on camera to have never lost food to 
> a bear.  Now if a dog can smell cocaine or heroin through double 
> wrappings of saran wrap, packed in coffee, inside a trunk stored in a 
> semi, I would think that a bear could catch the scent of beef jerky 
> through a couple of Hefty bags.  
> 
> dude wrote:
>