>>>>Thanks for posting - I still can't get to the site.
>>>>
>>>>It is pretty funny - "insane and a science teacher" :) Obviously, it's all the language teacher's fault ;)
>>>>
>>>>I've been within 2 feet of an unrestrained, wild grizzly, but never in direct contact with a bear.
>>>
>>>3 times for me. I hope that number never increases :o)
>>
>>3 times? Sounds like someone sold you bear perfume, and told you it was "bear spray".
>
>Re: Bears Wherever I go Message #1153712

Wow. Sounds like in the latter two cases, at least, the bears really DID like you :)

My grizzly encounter wasn't as exciting as it sounds. One summer when I was 18 I worked as a fishing guide on Great Bear Lake. We used to fish so far from the main lodge that it was too much of a waste of time to go back to the lodge for lunch, so we used to cook up shore lunches. Fresh-caught fish, canned beans and corn etc.

While training, I was told that cooking up the shore lunch would be sure to draw any nearby bears, which could be black bears or grizzlies. Black bears were just a nuisance, they're small and skinny up there (90-100 lbs max) because they're not the top of the food chain - they get regularly driven off their kills or food they scavenge by the grizzlies. You can drive them off by chucking rocks at them and making noise.

OTOH you don't mess with grizzlies. One of them comes along, you pack your stuff back in the boat and drive off.

One of the training days, I was out with 2 guys who were trappers in the winter. Sure enough, while we were cooking lunch, a grizzly appeared and headed for us. We put the frypan and other food in the bottom of the boat and started heading over to a nearby island, the idea being to finish eating there. I asked the other guys, shouldn't we have a gun so we can protect ourselves from bears? One of the other guys said, "Nah - this is what we do with problem bears..."

We turned around and went back to the grizzly. We went up close to shore, and upwind so the bear would be sure to get a good sniff of the fish and other food we had in the bottom of our boat. No hesitation - the bear ambled into the water and started swimming towards us. We puttered slowly away from shore, with the bear following us, until we were in deep water. We then turned the boat in a circle and came up behind the bear and right alongside it in the direction it was dog-paddling. It was puffing away with just its head out of water - man, do they have bad breath.

The other guy then said, "If this was a problem bear, near the lodge or an outpost, we'd just drive the bottom of the boat over top the bear's head, and keep it there until it drowned. This isn't a problem bear - we'll just go somewhere else and finish our lunch". With that, he reached out and patted the swimming bear on its head. That's something you don't see every day ;)

The whole rest of the season my boat was approached only once more, by a skinny little black bear. Me and my guests brandished paddles and chucked some rocks and it grudgingly went away.

In hindsight, the most potentially hazardous encounter I had with a bear was right here at home. In our townhouse complex, the sheds housing the communal garbage dumpsters were not strongly built and some people would regularly forget to close them properly, so sometimes they would get visited by local black bears. One night I was taking a bag of garbage over to the dumpster and I almost walked into a mid-size bear right at the foot of my driveway. We startled the heck out of each other - fortunately it decided to run off and not take a swing at me.

Not long after that, the municipality came out with bylaws against bear attractants, and we rebuilt the complex sheds to be much stronger. Bears are now infrequent in this complex - although still common on Vancouver's North Shore.