Ursack AllMitey

It's been a while since I've written anything.  I've not had much to write.  Now I do.

Ursack AllMitey

So on the trail, there are bears.  Bears are a little bit scary even though they have cute fluffy ears and look adorable.  They are cute, they can also chew me up and spit my out literally.  So I don't want to keep food in my tent in case a bear decides it's hungry.  A fed bear is a scared, possibly hurt, me but also a dead bear.  bears that associate humans with food tend to get put down eventually, and we shouldn't want to put down anything that looks that cute. 

Generally, people on the AT use something called the PCT Bear Hang.  In short, this means hanging a bag full of food (and other smelly things) from a tree so that hopefully a bear cannot get at the food.  I'm not going to do this.

Now before I have an angry mod attacking me with pitchforks for indirectly harming the population of one of the cutest apex predators in the world, I do have my reasons.
Andrew Skurka, adventurer (I want that job title), has relatively recently posted on his own vastly superior blog about why bear bags are probably not the best.  In case you don't want to read a better blog than mine, I'll summarise:

• It's probably going to be done wrong.  

...that's pretty much it.  It actually takes a lot of skill, and thus a lot of practise, to successfully hang a bear bag.  It needs to be far enough off the ground  (approximately 12' or 3.5m), far enough down from the branch and far enough from the tree (about 5' or 1.5m).  Even if someone is the absolute best bear bag hanger to ever hang a bear bag, they still need suitable conditions to it in.
Now I know, I know; I'm going hiking through the woods - of course there'll be trees I can do that from!  But that still means finding one accurately.
It's also time consuming, and can be dangerous as it involves throwing a rock over a branch and hoping to not hit anybody when it comes down.

So what am i doing instead?  I'm going to use an Ursack AllMitey.  Mine arrived earlier this week.  Obviously,  I've not had a chance to test it myself, but it has excellent testimonials.  It's a bag that by its design material is impervious to bears and to rodents.  (Notably, it isn't dog or presumably wolf resistant.  Something about sharp enough teeth and strong enough jaws.) 

I shove all my food and other bear-attracting items into it, tie it shut and then secure it to a tree.  It doesn't need to be high up a tree, it doesn't need to be out of reach.  It's only secured to a tree to make sure a bear doesn't run off with it.