Sunday June 3, miles today 11.3, miles from Springer 97

Bears! Bears! Bears!  For the last several days we had been hearing about the bear problems in the area we're hiking.  There were reports of a large wily black bear that has become an expert at getting to food sacks.  Before I left the Top of Georgia hostel, I received a quick lesson from Bob the manager on hanging food bags, he prefers the double tree method where your send your cord up a tree then toss it over to another tree and tie it off.  At Standing Indian shelter we had a little competition on hanging food bags.  Obi-Wan and I used the double tree method, Hellcat used a double carabiner method where you throw your rope over a high branch, attach a carabiner to one end with your food bags, pull it all the way up then tie another carabiner as high as you can then let the rope slide back up, the second carabiner is stopped by the first and the only way to bring the food bag down is to pull the rope down, untie the second carabiner and let the food bags slide down.  The rest of the folks at the shelter pretty much tied their food bags to the end of a line, threw it over a branch and tied to the tree trunk.  After judging the merits everyone added their food bags to Hellcat's or our contraptions.  We had no problems with bears.

We started our hiking with a two mile climb of Standing Indian mountain.  At the top, there were about two dozen girls and six escorts from the YWCA taking pictures.  They had been raided by bears.  I heard they hung their bags over trees at about 5 foot off the ground, good enough to keep most rodents out, but the bears had a smorgasbord.  I started to wonder if we were skillful or whether the bears were just full.  Three miles further, there was a note at a campsite saying they had bear problems and warned to be careful how you hung your food bag.  A mile and a half further we ran into Carter Gap shelter to escape a mid afternoon downpour and met two woman hikers who were planning on getting out at the next road because they had just been raided.  They had just left their food outside their tents.

At about 5 pm we we stopped at Betty Creek campsite where the log book warned of two smaller bears.  We set up our tents, cooked our dinners and hung out food bags using Hellcat's double carabiner method over a large leaning oak.  We had no problems, but there was still a lingering question of whether we were skillful or whether the bears were just full from the weekend of hiker food.