How do you carry while hiking?

[wnycollector]

Another +1 for safepacker. I carry my 2.75" Ruger Security Six .357 in a safepacker. Unless you know what a safepacker looks like, it just blends into the rest of your gear.

 

[ursavus.elemensis]

I guess it depends on where you hike and what the local customs are for that area. I've just returned home from three days of hiking in the last stretches of deep, unspoiled (and largely unexplored) wilderness in northeastern PA. The approach areas are frequented by people who like to do illegal things generally out of public view, but who are unwulling to go more than a mile off the main roads to do it. Deeper in the woods there are black bear although I have no fear of them. Seen dozens in my hiking and never had a problem. There are evolutionary reasons why black bear have survived in the lower 48 and other bears did not make it to the 2nd millenium of the common era, and it boils down to the black bear being smart enough to walk, crawl, or run away from people. Animals fighting with humans is always a case of even if that animal wins the battle, the species will lose the war, (as the loss of the brown bear from most of the lower 48 can illustrate). There are also coyotes and wild boar, although they too tend to leave the humans alone in this area. There are rare sightings of big wilderness cats, but they are not really a threat to people in this area. So, there is no need for anything larger than a street-level CCW caliber (my preference is 9 mm, yours might be different). And, for the human threats, it is definitely tactically better to conceal carry while hiking. The other hikers one might encounter are likely to feel uncomfortable and threatened just by the presence of an armed person in the middle of the woods and there is just too much risk they'd assume you were in there for no good reason and start making calls when they got back to the main roads and their cellphones were working again. So, again, concealed carry is the best option for this particular environment.

Oh, so anyway, I carried a 9 mm Sig Sauer in my "fanny pack" in the front of my hiking pack waist belt buckle. The fanny pack straps go around to my back and buckle above the waist straps for the hiking pack. I can take the main pack off my back to get water or camera, and not have to remove the fanny pack. Did not run into any trouble on this set of hikes, but did see a mother black bear and three cubs walk across the old road trace I was hiking and they scampered up a hill and out of sight. As I said, they don't engage humans in conversation or conflict. (By the way, there is not a single recorded case in the United States of a mother bear attacking a human who happened to get between the mother and her cub(s). That is behavior that black bears do not exhibit). There are sporadic black bear attacks on humans, even black bear get diseased minds, but those attacks are extremely rare and many of them are provoked.