Originally Posted by
nsherry61
1) Personal anecdotes make for great stories, BUT they are pretty useless for responsible decision making. For instance, I've spent most of my life drinking untreated water in the back country, I grew up sleeping with my food to keep it away from predators, I have slept within sight of bears in the Olympic National Forest and within smell of bears in Denali National Park. I once heard a large animal sniffing outside my tent in the Three Sisters Wilderness in Oregon, but was too scared or tired to stick my head out and see what it was.
I've never been ill from a water born disease (that I know of) in 55 years of drinking untreated back-country water.
The only animal problems I've had concerning food was rodents in a few places and a raccoon once when I had food in my vestibule instead of under my head.
But please, don't be stupid and regularly drink untreated water when treating water is so easy and getting sick is such a significant downer. AND, please don't head into bear country and sleep with your food because, yeah, the chance of a problem is maybe 1 in 1000 - 1/10th of 1%, but, it is still real and you don't wont to be that one in 1000 person, and again, the cost of safer alternatives is very, very low compared to the cost of that 0.1% encounter.
2) Ziploc bags are absolutely NOT odor proof. And I don't think most animals choose what to chew through based on appearance. I have always kept my food in ziploc freezer bags (i.e. the thicker and more odor proof ones). I have never had a rodent chew through a bag or backpack that wasn't containing food exactly where the chewing occurred.
3) Finally, from a number of studies with dogs, who apparently don't have as good a sense of smell as bears, I have never seen an example of an odor proof bag that even significantly slowed down the dogs' ability to find the contraban of choice. The most that odor barrier bags can do is reduce the intensity of the odors that escape, so probably reducing (maybe significantly) the size of the area around your food storage that a bear would pick up the odor and care, and that is not a bad thing. . . but, as any well trained scrounge could attest too, it doesn't take a genius bear to know that where there are people, there is food, and once a bear has the temerity to investigate the possibility of food in the vicinity of people, they'll be close enough to smell odors even those originating from inside an odor barrier bag.