Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game 150 qt cooler for a qtrd bear?

Is one 150 quart cooler large enough to hold an average black bear cut into quarters and ice to cool it down? Should the skin with head attached go into a different cooler? If so, what size cooler would be needed for the skin/head?

Thanks!

Yes

The skin and head will take up as much room or more than the meat. I have only dealt with black bears up to 350 lbs.

Yep they shrink up perty good when you get the hide off

A 150 is huge. You might get more use from having two 80’s as long as you are going to cut up the bear anyway. I’d want to keep the hide separate from the meat once I got them separated.

Thank you for the comments so far. I wouldn't expect the bear to be larger than 350 pounds. It would be brought out on my back, so my idea is to just cut it into manageable pieces for a backpack and then process it more at home. If it was very large I might debone some of it, and in that case a smaller cooler would definitely suffice. I need to buy a cooler or two - the ones I currently have are too small - so I'm trying to get an idea of what size(s) to buy.

Couple of white shrimp coolers will work fine.

I brought home my archery spot and stalk black bear quarters, (leg bones left in) with all the boned out neck and rib meat last week. After having them in a snow bank in game bags for 8 hours, I headed the hour home and put them into plastic bags and then into my small 5 cubic foot chest freezer, which is coincidentally about exactly 150 quarts. The meat plus the skull fit easily off the bear, a decent sized 18-3/4" P&Y green boar that had a 4-3/4" pad. I did not save his hide but I likely could have squeezed it in, but there would not have been room for ice if using a cooler versus my freezer.