It's hard to believe that spring bear season is already here! Hands down a spring bear hunt is my second favorite hunt right behind mule deer.

What's truly great about bear hunting, you can honestly use whatever gear you have available. Especially when it comes to the plethora of different hunting options for spring bear. You don't need a super heavy weapon, you don't need a ton of weight in optics, but for me, it's just something that works well. Spring bear is just a fun, fun hunt!

You can watch the video below for a look at my 2021 spring bear gear list, or jump further down this article to see an item by item list. This year Chris Neville and I are doing a full backpack hunt so this is everything I'm carrying in my pack. Some of the items for this hunt Neville and myself are splitting up. For instance, I'm having him carry my solar panel (but I haven't told him that yet). While I love the challenge of a solo hunt, being able to split gear when hunting with someone is a huge advantage.

I haven't put everything in my backpack yet to get an exact weight yet. We are going to do another video shortly where we have everything in our packs before we go on our hunt and hang the packs on a scale. For people who are curious, currently, my full backpack weighs around 54 pounds based on my excel sheet when I weighed each piece of gear the other week. And that weight includes 2 liters of water. The 54 pounds I mentioned does not include food as I'll be honest, I just haven't had time to put together my food list yet for this hunt, so that is why you don't see it in the video or this article. This will be a roughly 8-day bear hunt and is pretty much the exact gear I will be using. I'm going to go through my gear again several times and see if I can toss anything out. That's why I like doing these gear list videos/articles as it gives me a great way to check and plan everything as well as ensure I don't forget anything. Which I why I always try to tell people to take all their gear and place it on your floor and run through it several times to ensure you have everything and to see what you could live without. I keep my gear lists in both a Google Sheet that I can access from my phone and I also have a custom excel spreadsheet I built several years ago that I linked in some previous articles for people to download and work off of.

Gear list video

Gear list breakdown for a backpack spring bear hunt

There will be another video that will follow up this article where I will take all my gear and place it in my backpack and show you all the true weight. I did my best to weigh out every piece of gear individually in the table above, but a good reference will be the full pack weight video.

A few different categories of gear I'd like to talk about

Camp gear

This year's camp setup is fairly trimmed down. The beauty in this system lies in the packability of Stone Glacier's Sky AirULT tarp, vestibule, and mesh system. It's worth mentioning that I've done the whole floorless shelter thing enough times in the spring that I'll admit it's no longer fun to sleep with ticks at night. Dealing with ticks all day, and then have to deal with ticks that crawl into your shelter at night and then in the morning you find them on you or worse... starting to dig at your skin. So we stopped using floorless shelters in the spring a few years ago and this year that will continue.

I consider this a fairly light sleeping setup that is barely over 5 pounds.

Optics

To be successful at spring bear hunting, in my opinion, you need a ton of patience, determination and you need quality optics. My optics setup weight increased a bunch this year by purchasing a Swarovski BTX setup. I'm excited to see how it performs on this spring bear hunt!

Footwear

In the video, I totally spaced out and forgot that last year on our spring bear hunt was when I initially used the Hanwag Alverstone II GTX boots. These boots are so comfortable and at a Flex 3 rating, they are a great do-it-all boot.

Clothing

There's no denying that I love quality hunting clothing. Each year I appreciate the quality and the full layering system that Sitka offers. They have everything I need when it comes to clothing that can hold up to any hunt I go on.

In conclusion

Best of luck to everyone headed out after spring bear this spring. Have fun and enjoy the time on the mountain. There's no better way to kick off the dust and experiment with gear, food choices, and hone your glassing techniques than on a spring bear hunt.