True tale of a backpacking scare (and how to avoid it)

Mother nature is often a peaceful space, filled with fresh air and quietly beautiful scenery. But once in a while, she can provide something else — a genuine fear for your life.

This lesson was made abundantly clear to me on a recent backpacking trip with a friend. We hiked two miles up to a pristine view of Emerald Lake, which is filled with arctic grayling and their distinct blue fins. These prehistoric-looking fish led to my initial mistake.

Arctic grayling are not the smartest fish in the stream when it comes to avoiding an angler’s hook. In fact, I was able to catch 10 the first evening. Even though I released the fish, their smell was everywhere and I’d forgotten soap. No amount of scrubbing with lake water could get the smell off. This was my first mistake, and certainly not the only one.

No backpacking trip is complete without candy bars, and we chose a bag of snickers. My friend was a first-time backpacker, so I explained that the snickers needed to be stored outside the tent. Apparently, my friend considered under the fly to be “outside the tent.”

Night came and the temperature dropped to the 40s; I went to bed caked with fish slime and snickers sitting “outside the tent”. To a bear, the tent probably smelled like an appetizing burrito with multiple layers.

Around 3 a.m. I heard a noise outside the tent. The sound was somewhere between the clomp of hooves and the padding of paws. It was coming from about 15 feet away. As it got louder, I sat up in my bag and pulled the safety off my bear spray. Whatever was making the noise was close enough for me to hear breathing and sniffing. The sniffing started slow and became faster. It’s nose scraped the outside of the tent.

I am not a particularly loud person, and I don’t swear frequently, but, the scraping against the tent invoked enough fear in me to produce lots of loud cursing. Fortunately, the curious nose scraper promptly ran off. Unfortunately, I also woke up everyone camping around the lake.

Obviously, I made many mistakes on this backpacking trip; here is a list of steps you can take to avoid a similar situation:

1. Bring soap to wash off any food smell
2. Cook away from camp
3. Change clothes after eating and before sleeping
4. Hang food, toothpaste, deodorant and other fragrant items in a tree away from camp
5. Do not keep snickers under the fly

This is only a list of the rules that I didn’t follow, a more extensive list can easily be found with a Google search. I did do one thing right: I brought bear spray. If you don’t own bear spray and are planning on going into the mountains, it is available for rent at the outdoor recreation center here at MSU located behind Yellowstone Hall.