About 6 years ago, I stayed at a real nice campground near Lake Louise in Banff National Park, Canada.� They had a very fancy electric fence around the campground that looked like it meant business...Gulp!...must have had some agressive bear problems in the past.� Only time I've seen that.� Can't recall if they had a gate, too....but they must have.

(PS� Was also a weird sensation to be able to read a newspaper at 10:30 at night outdoors with no artificial light during the summer...that's the furthest north I've ever been.)

Rich
San Diego

--- On Fri, 2/11/11, Richard A Jones <Jones@COLORADO.EDU> wrote:

From: Richard A Jones <Jones@COLORADO.EDU>
Subject: Re: camping amidst bears, safety question
To: vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
Date: Friday, February 11, 2011, 2:25 PM

1)� more and more campgrounds have bear-proof food lockers so
there will NOT be bear problems.� As they say: A Fed Bear Is A
Dead Bear.� If one wanders through camp and finds nothing it
might not come back.� If it does find something it will come back.

2)� there are "hard-sided campers only" campgrounds in Yellowstone
and maybe other places with grizzlies.� There was talk about this
last summer or sometime and I asked the person posting specifically
and he said he was told a Westy was NOT hard-sided when the top
was up.

3)� door handles:� The Colorado DOW has a bunch of suggestions
to keep bears out of houses.� One is "door knobs on outside doors"
not handles.� The bears don't know to open the handle per se but
"exploring" the door features sometimes leads to the door
opening.� It never does with a knob.� You can apply what you
want to the Westy sliding door handle.� :-)

4)� besides food, deal with garbage.� Garbage Kills Bears.
Richard