If you are taking a trip dri-ice is the best. You know its cold when you have frost on the out side of the cooler!

 

if you seperate it with a tarp or game bag would it still frezer burn the meat? i drew my antelope tag and was thinking about dry ice for the meat.

 

Was the fish frozen first before you shipped it?


I think it would work fine but you need to keep it from touching the meat. If you get a large ice chest you can bone the meat and put on top of the ice with a tarp between the 2 leave the drain plug open to let the water drain out wrap it with old sleeping bag and the meat will stay cool for quite a while. This is what we do with elk in the early fall and it has worked fine with antelope we brought home from Eastern Oregon.

I saw a guy one time antelope hunting he had built basicaly a coffin but it was about 24 inches tall and 5 feet long he line it with styafoam including the lid and ice and hauled his antelope home said it worked well on deer and elk too. This box was well drained. :twocents:

 

how long dose dry ice last in an ice chest? rp

 

Due to layovers there was still some dry ice in a fish box 18hrs later. I think because dry ice is a gas frozen into a solid that it would greatly depend on how often you open the cooler.

Due to how cold the dry ice is I think that freezer burn spots if the ice where to touch or be in very close proximity to the meat is a real possibility. The fish we used dry ice on was already frozen. I think you would end up with meat that was frozen in spots??


Kodiakfisher

 

I've used dry ice to come back from WY before (ice on bottom, then about 1" of insulating material, then boned out meat) We sealed the lid with duct tape so no air could melt the ice and it lasted the whole trip. Kind of a pain though, and we found just replenishing regular ice while allowing the water to drain along the trip was more convenient. We always put our meat in garbage bags and never let it touch the dry ice or get water logged.

 

We also use dry ice to bring back antelope from Wyoming. Just wrap the dry ice in paper sacks and you're good to go. It is usually most of the way gone after 20 hours or so, but the meat is cold and not freezer burned.

No need to leave the drain plug open with dry ice.

 

I have seen dry ice last over 9days in my cooler. I had about 6 - 1lb blocks wrapped in several layers of newspaper, then placed in a small cooler & duct taped shut, then placed that cooler on block ice in my BIG cooler w/ my food. It was 100-110F that week and when I got back home it didn't look like much of the dry ice had evaporated to me.
Hunt'nFish

 

This is good advice and something to consider. I have been on the phone with people to try and find a cold storage in Walla Walla or Pendelton for the upcoming elk hunt. There is not one available and I have been thinking of an alternative. Dry Ice may be it.

 

Beardbuster, PM sent

 

I took a boned out Texas whitetail, wrapped it in my sleeping bag with a pair of two pound blocks of dry ice, and brought it home in my luggage. Worked quite well although if I recall correctly, the airline regs specifically did not allow dry ice on the plane. That would have been on USAir

This was in December following the 9-11 attack and airline security still had not ramped up as it has now.

The problem was that it gives off carbon dioxide. I took my chances but I think now that I would check that out a little more closely. I wrapped the ice in a towel- freezer burn cautions noted above are all good advice. The luggage in an airline generally gets very well chilled anyways due to the altitude, and adding those blocks of dry ice kept the deer frozen rock hard.

I've been curious if you could keep a cooler completely sealed with dry ice in it as it would pressurize as the ice melted. I'd have figured at the very least it would pop off the drain plug.

hth aw

 

Use it in a well ventilated area. It is frozen Carbon Dioxie, a poison, which in high enough concentrations will kill you. About 20 years ago some hunters in the Mt. Hood died when they decided to sleep in the back of a pickup (with a canopy) with an ice chest of dry ice. Carbon Dioxide is also heavier than air so it will sink and hold in shallow depressions, like the back of a pickup, a trunk, or a car.

It is also very cold and will give you frost bite easily. The surface temp is -109 deg.

It can be very fun. Try this, take some dry ice chunks, put them in a 2 liter bottle, put some warm water in it shake and throw. Boom - I would try the throw method first so it does not blow in you hand. Its a dandy noise maker.

 

CO2 is not a poison & will not kill you. But lack of Oxygen will. Anything less than 1-2% Oxygen and you are toast. CO2 is heavier than air and will displace the air. Aside from this CO2 is perfectly safe. The good news is if you get a whiff of CO2 gas it will irritate your nose tissue and sting and you will know it.

My cooler did not have a drain plug but I'm sure if I'd looked the duct tape would have been bubbled to let out the expanding CO2 gas.....your right, it had to go somewhere.

However, I was really surprised by how little evaporated.
I was not sure how much I'd need, so I took plenty.
Hunt'nFish

 

May sound wierd, but smell the dry ice before you put it with any food product. The dry ice I use at work often smells like diesel exhaust. I noticed this when I used some to cool a drink, blech! . I guess the dry ice maker is not being properly vented outside or something. The dry ice we get here in Bend comes from the Portland area, so it's something to check for before ruining an entire game animal.