Food Storage in Pack

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This baffles me too.  i use varmit bags in the SW.  While i have not been broken into, i have seen pictures of holes eaten in the varmit Opsaks. The Ravens in the SW pluck thru the metal mesh bags in the SW.  I just hang food in bear country because i do not want a bear to make all my food into one flavored mush if I leave the Opsak bear bag on the ground.  I have also seen videos of bears ignoring the “odor proof” bags but also have seen a video by a vet showing dogs easily finding food in “odor proof” bags.  I am sure that if these bags worked, the drug cartels would be ordering them by the truckloads. Seems to me the only thing close to foolproof is the bear cansisters and I just cannot bring myself to carry them.

Looking for enlightment

Art

I don’t use OP sacks at all. I just use a dry bag and hang it to keep it away from critters. While bears can be a problem in places (here in the NE corner of the USofA they are all black bears,) they are usually no more pesty than a ‘coon or ‘possum. In the High Peaks area they have figured out how to get into a bear canister (by unscrewing the top of a Bear Vault or smashing a Garcia on some rocks or something.) Really, a good hang avoids both types of problems.

A dry bag is wanted to protect against rain and morning “mountain mist.” Often, it rains or mists heavily in the early morning (between 400 and 800) so everything gets fairly damp. I usually carry bulk foods (cocoa, coffee, Jiffy Mix, rice, spaghetti, salami, pepperoni, jerky, olive oil, etc.) These are in freezer bags inside of the dry bag. I use medium dry bags, so they lay across my pack, on top of my bedding. Usually one full one per week out. My ditty bag has the bear line and works as the rock sack.  The tarp fits into a grease pot. Along with my bitty bag and sweater this makes up another row across my pack.  So, I end up with 3 rows (1. bedding, 2. food, 3. tarp/pot/ditty bag) for a week out. This is good for a week and fits easily into a Murmur, likely a Blast will fit this easily.  For two weeks, I add a second food bag, not quite full. This just fits into the Murmur, but, the pack is pretty well filled up. If I am fishing, or, taking pictures, I often need a bigger pack for two weeks. Then I bring the MiniPosa. It has a somewhat larger internal volume, a larger side pocket and a second pocket for a garbage bag…usually a gallon sized ziplock folded in half. Hope this helps!

Thanks, James. I am currently waiting for a custom Zimmer Quickstep which will be replacing my GG Gorilla. Just looking to make sure I have an efficient method to pack my food and the thing I like about the blast or something like the Granite Gear Air Zip thingies is that they roughly match the horizontal shape of a pack which has an obvious benefit.

I pack my food per day in a 3L ziplock-bag and label it with a marker.

The food for the other days are on the bottom of my pack, each in their own 3L-ziplock. The food for the day is on the top of my pack.

Works fine for me.

Arnel, I was actually considering that if people chimed in and said they skipped the odor proof bags. I already utilize gallon heavy duty ziplocks in my kit for other stuff where some people would opt for true stuff sacks (headlamp, TP, wetwipes, first aid, etc. all fits in one in front mesh) and love it. Cheap, durable and I can see al my stuff inside it. Now that I know you are doing this successfully, I’ll probably save myself lots of dollars and just pack per day. Love this idea…

In my experience there’s no need for a odor-proofbag here in Europe.

But that’s Europe, off course. We have very beautiful mountainregions, but very limited wilderness. And very limited bears. ;)
Then again,  during my trip in Sarek National Park (Sweden, one of the more wilder regions in Europe) I never used odor-proof bags. They’re not very popular here as well.

I love the ziploc-system. Easy to organise and fit perfectly on the bottom of my pack. It’s light and as you pointed out, the fact that everything is visible is a huge advantage.

As I hike in a place where bears recognize ice chests and packs on sight and don’t give a fig if they actually smell food in them, they take them or tear them open, Opsacks are of no use to me and I use regular old ziplocks.

I don’t think odor proof is even possible — are you handling the bag after dinner, putting food in it then closing it up? that transfers some amount of odor to the outside of it. We’ve had bears licking the bear canisters before.

When visiting boy scout camps (as a member of SAR) to help the staff develop safety plans (preventive SAR is part of  the deal) we rolled in to find all the staff involved in kitchen cleanup. Someone had left a sack of trash in the kitchen the previous fall, it drew in a bear that tore open a window, and the bear had polished off the trash then went on to OPEN CANS OF FOOD. How does a bear figure out there is food in little cylindrical objects if he’s not smelling it?

I’ll just keep using the bear canister, just the same.

I do the same as James Marco most of the time.

I use Gallon Zip Locks to organize my food. One for breakfast items, one for dinner stuff, another for lunches/snacks. This breaks the food up into separate packages that make it easy to keep things organized in the pack. Dinner and breakfast stuff can go on the bottom of the pack, lunch bag at the top. Then at night I place all three food Ziplocks into a 12″ x 19.75″ Opsak. I stick that inside a silnylon stuff sack with drawcord, then hang it from a tree. I don’t care if the Opsak is truly odor proof, I’m really only using it to insure that my food stays dry. Hanging food is the best way I know of to keep critters large and small from feasting on your grub.
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Australia and Europe:

We use separate small light stuff sacks (usually silnylon) for each item. Muesli for one breakfast goes in a 6″x10″ plas bag, rolled up. All the muesli bags for the trip go into one silnylon bag. Rice for two for one dinner, a packet of soup, some dehi vegies: these go in one slnylon bag: dinner for one day. And so on, so we end up with lots of small silnylon bags. All these bags get ‘packed’ into my pack, along with other gear.

We do NOT try to put everything into a single food bag: that is never effective for volume or packing. As each bag is sort of waterproof anyhow: plas bag closed up inside silnylon bag, we do not need a dry sack of any sort. The total weight of the simple plas bags is a few grams. I will add that most of our other gear is also packed in plas bags in silnylon bags too.

Overnight our food is stored INSIDE the tent. Never would we leave ANY gear outside the tent. But we don’t have bears and raccoons here. Our native animals largely avoid humans. Different country, different animals.

Um – but if you stay in any of the old cattlemens hut in our alpine areas, you MUST hang all your gear from the rafters overnight, or the native bush rats will dine. We have given up on those huts: out tent is more comfortable. So some things are the same.

Cheers

I thought nylofume bags were pretty popular but no one’s mentioned them so maybe not. I might try parsing things out in seperate small Ziploc bags then stuffsacks when I use a frameless pack on an upcoming trip. However, I figure if I pack my heavy food bag vertically down the middle I’ll be OK.

So far I’ve only used the smaller bags to seperate clothing to pack along the outer edges.

I’ve only done this once, but using a big nylofume bag to seal up smelly laundry on an Amtrak is pretty handy.

but using a big nylofume bag to seal up smelly laundry

Huh? I am normally still wearing my walking clothing! I don’t carry a change.

Cheers

Fellow Midwesterner here.

In my pack I split the food into several silnylon stuff sacks – typically one for today’s trail snacks, one for future snacks, and one for breakfasts and dinners (or one for breakfast and one for dinner on longer trips).  That allows me to load them more easily into the pack. I find the stuff sacks to be more convenient than ziplocks, lighter for the equivalent volume, and of course more durable.

At night they all go into a drybag (which I use to store the sleeping bag during the day).

I hang my food by the NPS anti-raccoon method: tie a loop in the middle of a rope, tie the rope between two trees about 6-8′ above the ground, clip the food bag to the loop.

I’d imagine the Opsacks are for limiting the distance a bag of food is smellable from rather than eliminating smell from something it has already found visually in an area its become habituated to too for food in.

I have an incredibly large yellow silnylon stuff sack that is my food bag and is also used as a hang bag.  So, why incredibly large?  Answer: so that I can’t stuff it to the point that it’s full and tense- I want it floppy so that I can pack it flat against my back in my pack since my food tends to be the densest thing I carry.  Then everything else gets packed around it.  Within the incredibly large yellow stuff sack I pack much like Roger- one large bag of instant oatmeal, one large pack of a standard dinner, etc.- again, in a loose floppy random plastic bag rather than packed tense, and I measure it out as I need it.  When you use a lot of individually packed meals like the hiking meals you buy at REI there is a ridiculous amount of volume wasted in the packaging.  Having a single floppy 3-pound bag of freeze-dried mac-n-cheese is thus much easier to pack efficiently than eight individual smaller mac-n-cheese pouches.