Wow. I'd only seen a short clip of that before. We were always taught to never run from a grizzly (or any bear), but for grizzlies, don't do anything sudden. Now I can see why. You'd never get away. Duck and cover. Heard of a lady who had to endure a brown bear licking her head. Never bit her.
Had a couple of encounters with grizzlies here. They were well behaved. This one on the ski slope looked like it wanted to play with the guy. Like they bonded. Must have been a young one.
First encounter was with a grizz walking into a camp where we were building a cabin. I was alone and walking up to where we had a food table for the crew. It was outside - no cabin was up yet. Almost got to the food and saw a huge bear on the other side of the table walking toward me. I turned around and walked back, which the bear did also. I told everyone else, but no one else saw it. I climbed a tree and stayed there for a while. Everyone laughed at me. They wouldn't have if they had seen what I had.
The second time was when I had just gotten out of the outhouse. My VSO was in the cabin and had seen the bear. It was between me and the cabin, on the other side of some alders. As I got out, my VSO saw the situation - I was heading right to the bear. She couldn't do anything. I had no idea what was going on, but suddenly heard a thundering set of footfalls running into the woods. I thought I had spooked a moose. Nope. When I found out what it was, I was rather shocked. Grizzlies in that area - we call them brown bears, are not like grizzlies in the interior. These bears eat a lot and get really big.
Normally, areas are either full of black bears or full of brown bears. Some places have a mix, but with brown bears that are moving on to somewhere else. Places where the brown bears stay, the big bears chase out and/or eat the smaller ones. We think that may have happened to one of the cubs we had seen that summer. A black bear had 3 cubs at the beginning of summer and only two later. |
