Bear Hang

So Erin asks what a bear hang is. (What's goin' on Erin??)


(Illustration by Mike Clelland)

All it is is a bag or canister or some other kind of holding device that is tied to a rope that is tied to a tree in a pulley fashion (depicted above). This way, a bear (or any other menacing beast) can't get to your food, even if she smells it.

There aren't too many bears around here, but there are some. A quick geology lesson ...


That's my drawing, hold the applause.

Basically, hydrothermal vents allowed lava to spew from beneath the Farallon plate (shown moving underneath, or subducting, the North America plate, above). The lava cooled really really quickly when it hit the water, forming basalt rock. As the Farallon plate kept diving down in to the depths of the Earth, the North American plate scraped off all the sediment and hardened basalt, forming the Olympic Mountains. Just that easy.

A little side note that I think is super cool... scientists think they know that the Earth's magnetic field reverses its polarity every several hundred thousand years (meaning that your compass will one day point south, rather than north). One supporting fact for this theory is that as lava cools to form basalt, its iron-oxide magnetite crystals align with the earth's magnetic field. So what that means is that if you look at a section of basalt rock, you'll notice stripe patterns that correspond to the polarity of earth's magnetic field at the time that rock formed.

OK, back to the point. After the mountains formed some tens of millions of years ago, a bunch of glaciers hiked down from up north and setup shop right between the Olympics and the rest of North America. That seperation prevented a lot of species from making there way over... grizzley bears being one of them.

But I just heard two days ago that a ranger saw a cougar (or mountain lion, or puma, or whatever you wanna call it) crossing a jeep road. Uh oh.