# Bear Boxes

- Link: https://thewrongkindofready.com/bear-boxes/
- Published: 2026-05-22T00:00:02-07:00
- Author: Caleb

This is post 1 of 16 in the series _“The Space between Stops”_

Some stories happen far from home. Others happen on the walk back from school, at
a diner, on a beach, or beside someone who has been waiting for you.

These are the smaller moments: a child arriving at school with the wrong toy, an
aging grandmother asking where we are going, a conversation that suddenly changes
shape, a camera becoming less important than the person holding it. Nothing here
needed a plane ticket. I just had to notice before the moment passed.

  Show all posts in this series

 1.  Bear Boxes
 2.  [For Him](https://thewrongkindofready.com/for-him/)
 3.  [If You’re Hungry](https://thewrongkindofready.com/if-youre-hungry/)
 4.  [It’s Not Stuffed-animal Day](https://thewrongkindofready.com/its-not-stuffed-animal-day/)
 5.  [The Watchman](https://thewrongkindofready.com/the-watchman/)
 6.  [The Photographer’s End](https://thewrongkindofready.com/the-photographer/)
 7.  [Thursday Edition](https://thewrongkindofready.com/thursday-edition/)
 8.  [The Darkest Place](https://thewrongkindofready.com/the-darkest-place/)
 9.  [Thirty-three](https://thewrongkindofready.com/thirty-three/)
 10. [Seventeen](https://thewrongkindofready.com/there-arent-any-rooms/)
 11. [Payday](https://thewrongkindofready.com/payday/)
 12. [The Internship](https://thewrongkindofready.com/the-internship/)
 13. [On-call](https://thewrongkindofready.com/on-call/)
 14. [The Electrical Problem](https://thewrongkindofready.com/the-electrical-problem/)
 15. [Tornado Insurance](https://thewrongkindofready.com/tornado-insurance/)
 16. [Powerlines](https://thewrongkindofready.com/powerlines/)

Every night at bedtime, I asked my dad for one of his “Adventure Stories.” And night
after night, he started with the same five words.

~

A long, long time ago.

Back in the days before “bear boxes,” smart backpackers hung their food between 
two trees. The measurements vary depending on the expert, but your food bag should
be about fifteen feet off the ground and ten feet away from any tree or branch a
bear could climb. During a backpacking trip through Yosemite with Dave, Rich, John,
and me, our attempts at this simple method of protecting our food from bears, never
looked anything like what the experts described. No matter how hard we tried, if
our food bag was ten feet away from every tree, then it hung three feet off the 
ground. If we could raise it fifteen feet in the air, then it rested on the trunk
of a tree. At least we never had a problem with bears…

“Help! Bear!”

And there was Rich, twenty feet up a tree, some distance from our campsite. He climbed
the tree to secure some rope to hang our food bag, and the bear came up after him.
Dave and John started yelling and whistling while banging pots together. I grabbed
SOG—my trusty staff of adventure tales—and ran for the tree, yelling and waving 
SOG in the air. The bear thought this was a lot of fuss over a skinny hiker, and
dropping to the ground, she sauntered off.

Rethinking our choice of trees, Rich climbed a tree next to our campsite and hung
the food bag, ten feet in the air and right against the trunk. As night fell, we
sat around our campfire and talked of the bear that almost ate our food. We fell
silent, and I heard the snapping of a small twig, faintly audible above the crackling
of the campfire…

“Help! Bear!”

And that bear was twenty feet up the tree; in our camp; right next to our food bag.
We yelled; We banged pots and pans; I shook SOG in the air like Thor’s hammer, but
the bear had returned hungry and wasn’t playing with us. With one swipe of her massive
paw, she snapped the cord holding our food bag like it a thread. As our food hit
the ground, the bear followed it down the tree and began rummaging through what 
food we had left. We could do nothing about it, so we crawled into our sleeping 
bags, closed our eyes, and tried to forget about our new companion eating her—our—
dinner.

Events quieted, and in the middle of the night, Dave could hold it no longer and
went out to pee. As he unzipped his sleeping bag, he looked around and hesitantly
thought, “I don’t remember that big boulder in the middle of our camp.” Then the“
boulder” stood. The bear; she was in our camp! Dave forgot all about going to pee
after that and climbed back into his sleeping bag.

We awoke with the sun and salvaged what we could find of our remaining food and 
packed up to start the day’s hike. As we returned to the trail, there, on a small
rise, was the bear. She was lying on her back in the morning sun, scratching her
full belly.

~

“That’s it?”

He smiled.

“That’s it.”

I looked at him.

“Then I need one, too—an Adventure Story of my own.”

“Easy. You just need to start the same way.”

Then he began his next story, the same way he always did:

“A long, long time ago.”

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