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A new Forest Service rule has created an uproar after it was announced with little notice and no public input.
The rule says all food and scented items (including garbage) must be suspended at least 12 feet above the surface of the ground and not less than six feet horizontally from the trunk of a tree, or stored in an Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee certified bear resistant container.
Online posts over the weekend blasted the order and Forest Service officials were busy this week assuring people they won’t face “fines of not more than $5,000 for individuals and $10,000 for organizations, or by imprisonment for not more than six months, or both.”
While a news release on the topic was issued last week, the language was substantially different than the order.
The release stated “attractants should be suspended” while the order says “must be suspended.”
Cathleen Quinn, the USFS acting wilderness program manager, said in a phone interview the agency started working on this a year ago.
“This is not a brand new idea but the idea of putting it on wilderness wide is new,” said Quinn.
While bears and campers have co-existed for decades, Quinn said the agency wants to stop problems from occurring.
“It’s getting people to think a little bit harder on what they are doing with their food,” said Quinn.
She said the $5,000 fine is attached to all regulations.
“I think people are missing the point, the focus is on preventing bear problems, not writing tickets. The odds of that happening are extremely, extremely unlikely,” said Quinn. “If we wanted to take a hard line on a lot of the BWCA rules, we could write tickets to a lot of groups. We’re out there educating and more often than not we’re going the education route. If we have known bear issues in the area or egregious sloppy behavior, that might warrant stopping someone.”
She said educating 160,000 visitors is going to take time and that, “it’s going to be a slow process, it’s not going to happen overnight.”
One online post summed up many of the posted complaints: “Reading these comments, I am dumbfounded by the people that buy into this. Another asinine attempt by the feds for control. Unless you were born this morning, people should know the campsites within the BWCA have been there for hundreds of years, but we’ll just go with 1978 for today. So, for 42 years, people have been using these campsites. This is the bears’ homeland. They roam all over the wilderness. These are not the garbage hounds from the outskirts of town. These fluff balls know what’s up. You can hang your ‘food bag’ any direction you want, the wet little black thing on the bear’s face is going to smell something tasty. It’ll check out your tent while you’re out wetting a line and eat your whitey tighties while your food pack hangs innocently by a poor branch that’s been abused by the last 300 campers prior to you. Feds need to worry more about illegal harvesting of firewood and negligence to campsites and less about someone’s pack. This is ridiculous.”
