Re: [Philmont]: Bear Bag Alternative

Not having seen this list in a while, I'm not sure if this idea has been suggested already or not. Pardon me if this tip is redundant.

When our crew went last year (620) we were relatively new to the use of bear bags. What we found at Philmont was that when you find the bear cable each night, you will usually find one or two other crews sharing it. Being newbies, we used all 6 of the Philmont supplied bear bags for our 12 man crew. After the first day we discovered that we really needed to identify which of our bags was which, and which group of bags belonged to our crew when suspended from the cable. The boys took a marker and drew a symbol on the bottom of each of our bags, (rock band symbols that they could identify with). This worked out very well and helped us to avoid the same sort of incident that befell one of our sister crews. It seems that one of the crews that shared thier camp one night got up before 1st light and inadvertently took one of our sister crew's bear bags thereby causing them to come up short on meals. If I were to go again, I believe I would take a small roll of reflective tape and code the bottoms of the bags with this. (Especially the oops bag.) This would seem to be most helpful at night or in the early morning hours when headlamps are in use. I would probably avoid the use of two dots spaced close together as this could cause some excitement amongst the other crews.

Hope this is helpful for your great adventure.

Eric
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: John LeBlanc
  To: Multiple recipients of list philmont
  Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2004 3:46 PM
  Subject: [Philmont]: Bear Bag Alternative

  Well, it's not really an alternative, but a better mousetrap.

  Instead of using the Philmont issue bear bags which are woven poly feed sacksgo buy some nylon mesh bags designed to contain basketballs/volleyballs/soccer balls. These can be had for a few dollars at most sporting goods stores.

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Received on Wed Feb 18 13:11:18 2004