Agreed. A lot of stuff, let it be. A knife on the trail, pack it out...

A friend of mine is a park ranger. He has loads of stuff that people just get to tired to carry and throw along the trail. I'd do what they do - pack it out, turn it in, and come back in a month to get it if no one claims.

when hunting there have been times when I have had to stow my backpack and some other non-essential gear under a tree marked with trail tape so I could hump out the meat to my truck.(this can take up to 4 trips when alone and when hunting Moose) I have since bought a meat hauler bag that can fit the meat with the gear but a lot of my friends still use the ditch the gear under the tree technique.

A hunter would be REALLY pissed off to return and find someone walked off with his gear.

If I had to leave anything behind (and it would seriously pain me to have to do so), I'd leave a note on waterproof paper pinned right to the outside of my pack/stuff with instructions to any passers by that if it were beyond xx/yy/zzzz date and I had not returned, to take my stuff to the nearest ranger/conservation station and report it.

That move could save my butt if something had happened to me while I was doing whatever it was that made me leave my stuff behind.

Good idea

I hated leaving anything as well, thats why I got the Erblestock J104 for hunting as I dont have to ditch gear. In the past I would take my PSK and FA supplies etc and stuff them into pockets, take a GPS grid of where my gear was stowed, mark the location visually(but not noticable to someone who just may wonder by) I didnt want to draw attention to where my stuff was because I am not so trusting of other people as some.

It sounds silly to do but if you want to get the meat back to the truck something has got to give. A moose quarter is just way to hard to carry with some styles of back pack so it comes down to one or the other. I keep my rifle as well and dont ever leave it in the truck to be stolen by someone. It stays with me back and forth between trips. Besides, A guy trotting along with a quarter of meat on his back all alone in the vast wilderness of northern Alberta is a bears dream come true.

LOL. That's more funny to me today for some reason. Maybe it's the Bear Aware certification I got last weekend.

The funnier thing is that you're not supposed to drop the meat and run...because then you're feeding the bear and habitualizing it to associate humans with good eats.

I suspect the training documentation was written by a hunter who'd rather fight a bear than give up his 1/4 moose.

I was using the word cache loosely - forgot there's still places where folks may churn up the ground to bury a real cache. Out here in the PNW we try not to disturb the soil, instead you throw a trailhead bike or pack or non-essentials behind trees or ferns or rocks and usually return to find it okay. There's lots of cover ten feet off trail without burying things. And if its a food cache, much better to hang it than to bury it, today's cache hole becomes tomorrow's mud hole (once you've returned and emptied it out).

Someone else said something that strikes me as a good idea for marking gear so others don't assume its lost (besides a note) - put a rock on top of it. I can't think of too many situations when a thinking man won't ponder how that rock got there if the owner didn't place it.

Another bear factoid: Burying food won't stop a bear if he's determined. Uncle Grizzly's claws were made for digging and they've been recorded digging up to 6 feet deep in a 13 foot diameter because they smelled something tasty...in the case I read about it was garbage.

Geez, so if he smells your grave, your food??

Grizzlies prefer rotting meat/carrion to fresh (one of the arguments for playing dead...they're less likely to eat you until you're 'ripe'). They're more scavenger than active hunter.