Camp Cooking...

[mPalozzola01]

So I know the general rule, you don't cook in camp/tent etc but here is a question. Does anyone cook their dinner before making camp for the night? For instance stop an hr early or a mile or so before ur planning to stop for the night.... cook eat then walk off the smells/and itis while ur at it.

I was reading the story about the kid who got pulled from his hammock and one of the questions that came up was "I wonder if they slept in the clothes they cooked in?" ... so it just made me think walking off the smells and distancing ur self from the cooking spot couldn't hurt... or is this just pure overkill coming from someone who spends much more time in alligator backcountry(s.fl, even tho central and n.fl have the largest black bears in the country because they don't hibernate down here ) then bear country?

[10-K]

I did this a lot on the PCT but it was more about getting in some extra miles than it was worrying about smells.

Quite often I feel like I'm ready to stop at the end of the day but I've learned that once I stop, pitch my tent and rest for 30 minutes or an hour I feel like hiking again - but generally don't because I've already made camp.

So.. now I know that I can stop, cook dinner, eat, maybe brew a cup of coffee and relax for an hour or so I can hike for a few more hours afterwards.

[garlic08]

I do it all the time, though it has little to do with fear of animal attack. Evening is my favorite time of day to hike and an hour or two after dinner caps off the day nicely. I hike a bit in grizzly country and it's sort of on my mind then, though.

[mtnkngxt]

I like to eat early unless it is the middle of winter. I'd rather stop eat and then hike on to my camp spot.

[nsherry61]

1) Remember, put bear danger into perspective. Statistically, you are probably about 100 times more likely to be injured or killed in a car getting to the trailhead than you are to have trouble with a bear.

2) Decades ago, as a cocky stupid youth, I never hung my food, I slept with it to keep the animals away from it (like a large number of experienced - and maybe stupid - people still do and don't confess to, by the way). I have slept with my food within sight of black bears in Olympic National Park. I had a large animal sniff my tent once in the Oregon Cascades. I didn't go out to see what it was (probably a bear), yes, I was scared, but I've never actually had problems.

3) We will never know for sure, but, I suspect that bear that pulled the kid out of the hammock was heading for trouble at some point regardless of the specific behavior of that kid that night. If it wasn't the kid that night, it would have been someone else, some other night, soon after. By the time a bear is that bold, it's already been well trained and headed for trouble.

[Odd Man Out]

On the forums I've read that cater to PCT hikers, this activity is described as stealth camping, in that you are minimizing the odors at your camp site by hiking some distance after cooking supper. This is a perennial source of confusion since the term "stealth camping" has at least two other definitions. I do not think there is any good evidence that odors from clothes will attract bears to your tent. I suspect this idea was speculation based on how people thought bears would behave. There are many misconceptions about bear behavior that people who study bears have revealed. The North American Bear Center has a great page with some of this info. Note this is only about Black Bears. If you are hiking in Grizzly territory, then the rules are completely different.

http://www.bear.org/website/bear-pag...-a-humans.html

However, I expect that it is true that tenting at places that are not established camp sites (e.g. AT shelters) decrease your risk of bear encounters - not because you have hiked away your odors, but because bears tend to go to developed camp sites because they have learned where the food is. This dispersed camping (one of the other applications of the term "stealth" camping) eliminates the bears that come to the campsite by habit.

I hope this thread does not turn into yet another sleep with food/hang food debate, since that was not the question of the OP and has been discussed ad nauseum previously. However it was while researching that question I communicated with Dr. Tom Smith, Wildlife Biology Professer at BYU and one of the leading experts on bear-human conflicts. He was the lead author on a well know article that analyzed all known fatal attacks by black bears from 1900-2009 (all 63 of them).

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...mg.72/abstract

In our e-mail exchange, he addressed this issue (food odors on clothes) directly. He said:

"I've long said that the presence of people is more of a deterrent than food is an attractant. But the context wasn't in support of sleeping with food but rather to dial back the paranoia people have about food scent. This notion of "don't sleep in clothes you cooked in or even have them in your tent" is misguided as far as I'm concerned."

Hope this helps

[shelb]

While you might cook your food before you hit the sleeping area, your neighbors most likely will not!

Suggestion: hang your food. Do not bring it into your tent. Make sure to clean out your pockets.

While I have no personal knowledge of what happened to that young man, a few people on the trail were saying it was possible he had food with him or wrappers in his pocket (this is only rumor!).