Storing Food While Hiking Out of Mammoth Area

[rlown]

This is a pretty good site for giving the "correct" information. We shouldn't muddy it up by ever suggesting it's ok to store food in your car. It's just not OK. And, In most cases, not legal.

[SSSdave]

This is a pretty good site for giving the "correct" information. We shouldn't muddy it up by ever suggesting it's ok to store food in your car. It's just not OK. And, In most cases, not legal.

It is true the current Yosemite policy tells people not to store items in a passenger car trunk:

"You may store food inside your car (out of sight, with windows completely closed) only during daylight hours. You may not leave food in a pickup truck bed or strapped to the outside of a vehicle at any time. Do not store food in your car after dark: use a food locker. Remember to clear your car of food wrappers, crumbs in baby seats, and baby wipes. Even canned food and drinks must be removed from your car.

Bears that break into trunks do so after getting inside cars and then smelling food in the trunk. They then work on biting through the back seats making a hole until they can fit their head in. They do not break into functional car trunks from the trunk latch end. All such break ins to any web searching I have done since the policy was put in place has been due to smelly foods in trunks. If bears cannot smell food in trunks they won't bother with all the effort to break in when there are easier car picking nearby.

The reason Yosemite policy is black and white about no food in cars is because if they stated sealed food that does not smell, ie an unopened can of beer, was ok to put in a trunk, one could be sure some clueless fools that can't read simple English would put opened bags of potato chips in trunks too and then whine they thought it was ok. So just another example of policies dumbing down to the lowest common denomenators in our society.

By the way, my Forester doesn't have a trunk and I haven't backpacked overnight out of YV since long before current policy when putting food in trunks still was ok.

David