Almost every bear story that ends badly started days earlier — with a camp that taught a bear something. Bear safety is mostly camp discipline, practiced when no bear is anywhere in sight.
The triangle
The oldest rule in bear country: sleep, cook, and store food at three separate corners, each at least 100 metres apart, with the cooking corner downwind of the tent. You smell like your kitchen; the goal is for your kitchen to be somewhere else. Cook in different clothes than you sleep in where practical, and never — not in rain, not at −40 — bring food, wrappers, toothpaste, or the pot you ate from into the tent.
Storage that works
A bear’s nose is its whole worldview — figures like thousands of times better than yours get thrown around, and the useful takeaway is: assume everything sealed is still broadcasting.
- Hang where trees allow: 4 m up, 1–2 m from the trunk, food and “smellables” together (toiletries, fuel for the stove you spilled dinner on, the garbage).
- Bear-resistant canisters where they don’t — which is most of the tundra. Stored at the far triangle corner, not as a tent-side table.
- Electric fence kits have earned their place for fixed camps and food caches in the high Arctic; a few AA batteries buy a perimeter a bear respects.
On the trail
Most bears leave when they know you’re coming. Make noise where sightlines are short — brush, creek noise, wind in your face — travel grouped, and give any carcass or gull-swarm a wide, upwind berth: a food cache is the one thing a grizzly reliably defends.
Bear spray beats everything else in the statistics, including firearms, and it only works if it rides on your hip or chest strap — a spray in the pack is ballast. Know its arc, its 5-ish seconds of payload, and that wind matters.
If it’s close anyway
Read why it’s there:
- Defensive (you surprised it, cubs, carcass): it huffs, pops jaws, mock-charges. Talk low, back away slowly, spray if a charge closes inside ~10 m. If contact comes from a defensive grizzly — flat on your stomach, hands laced over neck, legs braced apart, play dead until it leaves. Long until.
- Predatory (rare, mostly black bears): quiet, following, unbothered by your voice. Everything reverses — get big, get loud, get weapons, fight with everything. Never play dead for a stalking bear.
Field checkpoints
- Can you lay out the triangle on arrival, automatically, before anything else happens?
- Is every smellable accounted for at night — including the ones that don’t seem like food?
- Spray on your body, and can you say when to spray, when to play dead, and when to fight?