While a camp stool is perhaps the most popular multi-use application for a bear canister, this tip is best suited for short trips when you're trying to put an emphasis on good food and cold beverages. Bear canisters are a piece of gear added, reluctantly, to the kit of most backpackers only when required for an upcoming trip.

However, if you're wanting to freshen things up in regard to food and don't mind some added weight, the underappreciated bear canister can help you turn your first night into a feast. There's something satisfying about eating a meal better suited to car camping – like beef or chicken wrapped in foil with vegetables mixed in and cooked over coals – when you're a few miles from the trailhead, but actually pulling this off can be a bit of a hassle.

Using a Bear Canister as a Cooler

A solution, albeit a bit awkward, is to partially fill a Platypus bottle or other water reservoir and mold it to inside of the bear canister – then place the canister in the freezer. You can then either put ice cubes in a Ziploc bag or a wide-mouth water reservoir. If you're hiking early enough in the season or otherwise come across a snowbank, you can swap the frozen Platypus and bags of ice cubes out with snow. Before your trip, take the bear canister out of the freezer and put in everything you want to keep cold – meat, other perishables, beverages – and pack the cooler/canister in as normal.

It doesn't insulate as well as a real cooler would, but it can buy you enough time to hike in (and in areas without restrictions) get a nice bed of coals going (or your backpacking stove fired up), then toss some fresh food on to cook that has remained chilled. Yet another multi-use application for a bear canister would be to extinguish a fire before bed, if you had one...or for that matter one you might find unattended and/or unextinguished (hopefully this is not the case!) during a hiking day. And, since you've got a bear canister, no need to hang a bear bag for the rest of your food.

For a selection of bear canisters on the market, take a look at this page at REI Co-op.

Editor's Note: This Trail Tip originally appeared in Issue 38 of TrailGroove Magazine. You can read the original article here.