First of all ... do you assume that all Canadians live in the woods or something? I'm a city girl!! We don't have to cache our food when we live in modern apartments in the city. Also, I've spent the last 13 years in Manitoba. Manitoba has the occasional bear wandering through, but not often enough to even bother to take extra storage precautions when camping there.


And I've got some "woods sense" ... I know the theories of what to do in the woods. I just haven't had much actual practice. Until very recently, any time I camped in the Rocky Mountains in Alberta (which wasn't often), it was with a vehicle, and when you've got a vehicle, that's where you store your food and stuff.

My touring experience has been in England and Australia where there's no fear of bears, and where the worst thing you might have to worry about are ants, spiders, snakes, and wombats. You don't have to cache your food to keep it away from a spider!

So, the one and only time I've ever actually cached food was this past August, and it went pretty much exactly how I described above. Where we were camped didn't have much in the way of suitable trees to cache stuff on ... there were lots of trees ... just very few with branches that didn't snap as soon as any weight was applied to them. It looked like a fire had gone through the area several years ago ... there was a lot of regrowth, but the larger trees were pretty brittle. Fortunately on subsequent nights, we camped places with caching systems or lockers for our food. It's really nice when campgrounds provide those.