Electric Bear Fence

[Paddy M]

I’m doing a three-week, packraft based trip this summer at the tip of the Alaska Peninsula.  Awesome area with a very high bear density.  It’s a cruxy spot when it comes to bears and food storage.  It’s open tundra, essentially no trees to hang or tie anything to, and a bear wandering off with our food canisters would be sub-optimal to say the least.  I’m looking into options for an electric fence to store our food inside, and/or surround camp with.  Food would be Opsack’d as an odor barrier inside an Ursack or canister (figuring that out).

Obviously, with the fence, lighter is better, but compact is almost as important since with the packrafts + 21 days of food + bomber gear for Aleutian weather, we’ll have pretty large, full packs.  I’ve looked at the UDAP Bear Shock, the Bearwatch Systems kit and the Airframe Alaska system.  Anyone have any direct experience with any of those, or another system?  Recommendations for food storage in dense bear country with no trees to hang/tie to?

[Adam Salinger]

Hi Paddy,

 

For what it’s worth, I was in the Brooks Range two summers ago.  We had 20 days of food.  We researched for months about how to protect our food.  In the end, we had 12 bear cannisters on our boat and an Ursack each for the backpacking.  We hiked about 200 miles and floated about 100.

We decided we didn’t want to fuss with a bear fence or be fenced in ourselves.    We saw over 20 Grizzlies.  Never did we have an issue with our food.  They wanted nothing to do with us, our gear, or our food.

Just my take and my experience.  Now…if I was dealing with Polar Bears….I’d be probably singing a different tune.

[Bonzo]

I don’t have direct experience with brown bears, but I have plenty of experience with curious black bears and electric fences…and the usual result of an encounter between the two is the fence coming out the worse for wear.  Bear noses are sensitive, but if they want to get inside a fence – the most tempting targets are our beehives and berry patches – nothing short of a physically-stronger-than-the-bear fence is going to keep them out.  Whether or not brownies are the same, I cannot say.

Now…if I was dealing with Polar Bears….I’d be probably singing a different tune.

You and me both…ideally from the comfort of my living room, which is – fun fact – almost entirely free of polar bears.

[BlackHatGuy]

“Now…if I was dealing with Polar Bears….I’d be probably singing a different tune.”

Peter Vacco used to do an extended trip up in Northern Canada every year. Not sure if he still does, haven’t heard from him for awhile. I remember him telling me about one day when he was walking along and noticed movement out to his right. The movement was a mama polar bear and her cub ambling along maybe a hundred feet away. Didn’t pay any attention to Peter (though he certainly paid attention to them!).

Peter is one of the funniest, craziest and funnest persons I’ve ever met. And a great storyteller (of true stories about his adventures, and what adventures they were).

I think he used an electric fence on some of his trips, but I’m not positive. I’m also pretty sure he used a ‘warning system’ fence on at least one of his trips as one of his most hilarious stories includes one, iirc.

[David Thomas]

Peter and I had a discussion on BPL about electric fences for polar bears a few years back.  Maybe try searching for it through Google.

Erin McKittrick hasn’t been on BPL for a few years, but I see her most months.  She and Hig go pretty light (especially when they had the two toddlers along), so I don’t know that all their food is bear-proofed.  Here they are on the Alaskan Peninsula dealing with a brown bear:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iinv_5e_QGg

She wrote up that trip in a book:

 

[Philip Tschersich]

This is the fence system that I built for when we are doing overnight hunts here in Kodiak and we want to protect a meat cache. Note that we only set it up when we are camping with meat (we put the fence around the meat, not us), or around camp when we leave camp set up and head out for the day (though we typically always carry our camp with us because you never know how the day will go). We never bother putting it up when we are in camp sans meat. The fence posts are 12 carbon fiber arrows cut in half with an Easton tent pole ferrule to join the halves. The fence wire insulators are stick-on cable management clips. The fence energizer is by a company out of Australia called Sureguard. It uses two AA lithium batteries which allow it to operate for between 50 and 60 hours. If you want more details on the system, let me know.

E-fences could offer peace of mind for folks who haven’t traveled up here much. But honestly none of us use electric fences for travel in coastal brown bear country.

[Daryl and Daryl]

Most electric bears will stay close to home.  I don’t think a fence is needed.

(sorry-I’m bored and don’t have a life)

[obx hiker]

^^ Breaking containment again ;)

[Robert Spencer]

An ursack in Alaska with no trees? That does not sound good even with an electrified fence. As for the fence, I’ve heard they a) don’t keep the bears out, or b) end up zapping the people setting it up. I think I would go with a hard sided canister and practice all bear country precautions. Never heard of “a bear wandering off with our food canisters,” but I guess it depends on what it is designed for.

[Dave @ Oware]

https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1465&context=hwi

paper on fences with NOLS experiences

[Dan]

If you decide not to go with the electric fence, a bullwhip is always a possibility.  :-)

https://backpackinglight.com/forums/topic/non-traditional-gear-could-a-bullwhip-be-useful/

[Luke Schmidt]

Just buy a hunting license and bring a rifle. That simple act will guarantee you don’t see a bear….

[Richard Sullivan]

Check out the movie Bear-Like, this researcher and his photographer used an electric fence which worked perfectly. https://www.primevideo.com/detail/Bear-like/0G3IM75AT8A9UA4DU2RMJJSB0H

[Philip Tschersich]

Another data point on the effectiveness of electric fences against bears.

During our recent Roosevelt elk hunt, we harvested two animals 6 miles from tidewater on the opposite side of a mountain from our vessel. It took us two trips over the course of three days to ferry the meat to the boat. For the approximately 24 hours between the first and second loads, we cached one animal’s worth of meat inside an electric fence [the one I described above]. It is hard to overstate how effective this seems to have been. The meat cache was about halfway between the two carcasses (40 and 100 meters, respectively), both of which were fully masticated by bears by the time of our return to the site. But our cache was completely unmolested. Apparently a 10k volt blast up the nose makes an impression.

Again, if anyone wants detailed instructions on how to put together a fence kit, let me know.

[MJ H]

I am reminded of my high school chemistry class where the teacher told a story of a friend who urinated on an electric fence (not a bear fence, but the kind to keep livestock in place) while they were hunting. He said he could not say who, but after a classmate raised her hand asked if it was her uncle, he admitted it was.

[Sam Farrington]

So what happened after the uncle peed on the fence.

After my first up close face to face with two grizzlies, decided to stay out of griz country.  Call me twinky, but enjoyed backpacking much more ever since.  All grass and no grizzlies where I’ve packed in the high country.  But if you must go, carry a loud rifle if trained on it, and try using it first just to scare the beast.  And I would never take small children into griz county because I like to think I’m not an idiot.

Note that not all black bears are black.  A light brown one ran alongside the car for a while, so called the Forest Service and they confirmed such bears do exist.

If the OP’s trip will be all on the water when travelling, no reason not to bring hard canisters.  Using the opsacks inside, rolled up and sealed with clips and placed in the Ursack..  Only dried and freeze dried foods are used, in the belief that fresh food can wait for a restaurant stop on a break.

On the day of my face-to-face in the Canada rockies, the food rode on top of the pack in an opsack inside an ursack, but it was left inside a hiker’s cabin on the other side of a large ravine.  When the bears rambled into the tent site, I left the pack, which probably smelled of food anyway, and tip-toed backwards away from it.  What a relief when the bears went for a pack and not me, amplified in descending into the ravine where they could not see me.

Some hikers from Scandinavia came by, and we watched one of bears playing with one of the flexible tent poles like a casting rod, while the other went systematically through the pack to no avail.  No damage was done to the poles or pack, except some small rips that were patched.  The bears looked kind of cute sitting side by side, but only from close to the cabin on the other side of the ravine, and they eventually left.

Still, everyone slept in the cabin without any outside pee trips.  This was because there were some wolverines around that clawed frenetically on the outside of the cabin door all night, and many thought the grizzlies had come back and wanted in.  Good thing that water bottles can have dual uses.

[MJ H]

So what happened after the uncle peed on the fence.

Electricity traveled through the urine stream and gave him a very painful jolt in a sensitive area. Someone in the class had expressed doubt that an electrical connection could be formed that way. Our teacher was assuring us that it could.

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