The post about cooking inside a log ( https://algonquinadventures.boardhost.com/viewtopic.php?id=3078 ) reminded me about something I tried once, to keep my campsites free of visitors.

I had been in a high-rise building downtown when a locksmith came in to replace the locking mechanisms on all the mailboxes for the building. So the guy worked away for more than a few hours after which he passed holding a stack of little cloth bags, that the individual locks had come in. Instantly taking a shine to the bags, I asked the guy what he was going to do with them... it turned out he was fixing to toss them out so he was happy to give them to me.

Each bag was equipped with a draw string. Maybe six inches long for the old timers.

Ok, so I went to a hardware store and bough a box of moth balls. I popped a ball into each sack and wrapped the entire mess into one or two heavy gauge poly bags. On my next trip to A.P. I decided on a campsite in the interior and up my tent etc. Before dark I went around in a WIDE CIRCLE around my camp, and every couple of feet I hung one of the little bags on a spruce tree. Bingo, silent night!

In the morning it was just a case of going around and retrieving all the bags and then squaring them away.

If you look at video from these motion-detector cams that they have nowadays, of the trails the place is just crawling with wildlife at night. I thought this might be a reasonable, non-invasive way to temporarily tell the critter folk to stay the #$%^&@! away from me.

Of course you'd still have to choose your location carefully. Nothing worse than setting up and going to sleep only to discover that the night shift of a colony of beavers is coming on stream in that very spot!!!