Ursacks - good investment?

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Grannyhiker
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Joined: May 28th, 2008, 10:03 pm
Location: Gateway to the Columbia Gorge

Re: Ursacks - good investment?

Post by Grannyhiker » July 27th, 2008, 6:15 pm

I believe that all those places in CA (the national parks) that don't allow you to tie an Ursack to a tree now forbid Ursacks period. The Ursack went through a couple of years of conditional approval in the Sierra (in 2006 and 2007) before being banned it this year. The Ursack folks claim that all the problems were due to people misusing the Ursack (like not tying it tightly enough). However, at least one party reported (on backpacking.net) that when the bear ignored the canisters that others in the party had, went straight to the Ursack and kept working at it until it finally breached the bag. I can believe this because those bears have been trained for years that anything in a bag is a pinata. One problem in the Sierra is that so many bears have become "habituated" in the campgrounds and then relocated to the backcountry. The result is that the worst-behaved or the smartest (depending on how you look at it) bears are in the Sierra backcountry!

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