I’ve heard that bells and pperspray are a cood combination. The bells and smell of pepper spray in the bear feces helps the ranger verify what happened to you, and that there is a man-eating grizzly in the area.
But what if all you have is a piece of fresh fruit?
What do you do with it once you kill it? 
What, like if you picked a paw-paw or prickly pear?
Or if you’ve pricked the wrong paw, next time beware.
Don’t pick the prickly pear with a paw, next time you pick, try to use the claw.
Anyway… the bear necessities of life will come to you.
Like, in Soviet Russia?
Yes, Grizzlies and Brown bears are MUCH larger than black bears. In the east we only have black bears (although they come in a variety of colors). Out west you’ll see Black and Grizzlies, Alaska also has Polar and Kodiaks.
If a griz is charging you, a few shots from a handgun are unlikely to slow it down enough to stop it from killing you with a single swipe of its paw. Even if you fire a fatal shot (which is unlikely considering size of the bear, the massive frame, thick skin and fat, and very tough skull) the bear will live long enough to make your life short.
I don’t know the details of this case but if these folks were hunting for a problem bear they probably were ready for it, and started shooting before the bear charged. That probably made all the difference.
Black bears are rarely aggressive, though it does happen. Bears that have lost their fear of humans are very difficult to disuade from trying to get at your food. Except for the momma with cubs, they really don’t care about you, just your food. In those cases, be aggressive, look big, yell, scream, make noise. Black bears will run away unless they are completely unphased by humans. Those bears will be shot.
Grizzlies don’t respond well to being challanged. With them, the best advice is to convince them that you aren’t a threat. No sudden moves or loud noises, and DON’T RUN; that will trigger their prey response and that’s not a good thing. Advice differs on what to do if the bear really does attack. Some say to get into a fetal position and cover up and play dead, the bear should give up without doing too much damage. The other school says that once the bear attacks to go into berzerker mode and give it everything you got. If I get attacked, I’ll let you know what I end up doing.
I haven’t encountered any brown or grizzly bears, but I’ve seen my share of black bears in the woods on NY, NH, and ME. Only once did I see more than the bare butt as it ran away. That was a fat ADK bear that spent its days raiding campsites in the Flowed Lands. We yelled and screamed and chased after him to get our food back. That was an interesting night.
Or bear. 
I had an employer who had them mounted and kept them in his office.
Note that he hit it with eleven rounds and it dropped twelve feet from him.
I wonder if he still goes out drinking with his shotgun toting friends who were backing him up. 
Yeah. It’s just as funny the second time. 
I’ve run into a bear in the wild while hiking. It’s was a very hefty bear, and didn’t seem particularly afraid of us. It probably was hanging out less than 40 feet from where we were walking.
Honestly, my first instinct WAS to freeze. I was very, very worried about doing the wrong thing. We started making noise, and slowly moved down the mountain. The bear paced us for about 100 yards, then lost interest and kinda wandered away.
Imagine that. And I just hang my kids’ art work.
Just out of curiosity … what are (were?) the common types of weapons and rounds used by folks who hunt grizzlies and Kodiaks for sport (I assuming it is now illegal, or at least difficult to get a permit for)?
Obviously the weapons of choice are some form of high-powered rifle with a huge round, and the strategy is to bring down the game from a considerable distance. But what are the specifics here?
Would a double-barrelled sawed-off shotgun (where/if legal?) be of use in a him-or-me scenario versus a Grizz/Kodiak at point-blank range (<20 ft)? I was thinking of a sawed-off so that it wouldn’t be so much more to carry than a pistol (but still considerably more). Or maybe that’s a little too risky to carry on a hike?
I am not an expert , but I believe that lever-action .45-70 rifles are popular for bear defense. I would think one of these would be lighter than a shotgun, especially a double-barreled one. If you went with a shotgun, you’d probably want to use slugs for better penetration.
There are a bunch o’ books on the subject at Amazon.
As far as making noise - I don’t think the idea is to make noise when you encounter a bear, so much as to make some noise when you are hiking to let the bear know in advance. Generally, they’ll keep their distance if they know you are there. Not to be taken as professional advice.
I suppose that you could always buy one of those bear suits.
Well, as some people have already mentioned, there’s the problem of hitting the bear in a place likely to stop it or slow it down, something that’s probably especially difficult when you have hundreds of pounds of roaring, claw-wielding terror bearing down on you at 20+ miles an hour.
I did a bit of reading about bear attacks a few years ago before i went camping with a friend in BC’s Garibaldi National Park. The section of the park where we camped and hiked is better known for black bears than for the larger brown Grizzly bears; these bigger bears tends to predominate further inland in BC, espcially out towards the Rockies. But black bears can be dangerous too, and i wanted to know what to do if we encountered one.
Anyway, from all accounts i read of attacks, it seemed that in many cases the key was not which particular weapon was being carried (spray, handgun, rifle, etc.), but whether or not that weapon was easily available. Most experts seem to recommend, at a very minimum, carrying your spray or handguun in an easily-accessible holster right by your side. Even having to reach around behind your back can be the difference between getting to use your weapon or not. Some people even advocate actually carrying the weapon in your hands at all times.
Shane Fumerton and William Caspell were both expert outdoorsmen, long-time hunters, and well armed. But they were apparently surprised by a grizzlies while skinning and quartering a kill, and both ended up dead. Here’s part of an article i found about the incident. I can’t give a link, as this comes from a Lexis/Nexis account, and you need to be a subscriber.
Doesn’t matter how powerful your gun is if you never get to fire a shot.
Here is a picture of Fumerton and Caspell. It was taken a couple of hours before the attack, presumably using the camera’s self-timer. The camera was retrieved at the scene.
As mentioned before up-thread, my gun of choice for bear was the .45-70. My cousin usually carried a Mossberg 500 loaded with slugs. Whenever we went fishing, one of us was always facing the bank, gun in hand. We never had to shoot, but neither of us wanted to be surprised by a bear going for our fish.
Come to think of it, the kimchee may have had more to do with the bears staying away than the bells and guns did!
My second site is from the BC forest service and has the entire story with photos and memorial photos where the attack actually happened. At the bottom of the cite click the recent activites link and you will be connected right to it.
There’s a problem with this, though. This sort of noise-making activity often works only until the bears figure out what it means.
For example, in the case i cited in my previous posts, park wardens had apparently warned Fumerton and Caspell that “bears will now actually head for the sound of a shot because they expect to find the remains of a kill.”
When i was camping in Garibaldi Park in BC a few years ago, quite a few hikers walked with bells around their necks, on the assumption that this would frighten the bears off. But while this did work for a while, the bears got used to the sound, and would often even follow the sound of the bells in the hope of getting some easy food. Some experienced hikers had taken to calling them “dinner bells,” because they signalled to bears that there might be an easy meal around.
Note that i don’t mean the bears followed people to attack and kill them. They generally just wanted to steal their food. But even if a bear does come only with the intention of stealing a meal, a close encounter always has the potential to escalate into a very dangerous situation. Many inexperienced campers don’t follow proper food-storage precautions and then wonder why bears visit their tents.
Ah, dang it. You win…