a). Run away
b). Sit still, hoping the bear will go away
c). Take pictures as the bear chews on another camper
If you answered “c” you’re correct!
The article doesn’t say how many of the 11 rounds hit the bear. A .45 caliber handgun will punch a hole in an engine block. If used with hollow points I would expect a chest shot to slow a brown bear enough to take a head shot. However, I remember a National Geographic Special on Kodiak bears and have no desire to see one at any distance.
The Alaskan Park Service doesn’t think much of hand guns:
Protection
Firearms should never be used as an alternative to common-sense approaches to bear encounters. If you are inexperienced with a firearm in emergency situations, you are more likely to be injured by a gun than a bear. It is illegal to carry firearms in some of Alaska’s national parks, so check before you go.
A .300-Magnum rifle or a 12-gauge shotgun with rifled slugs are appropriate weapons if you have to shoot a bear. Heavy handguns such as a .44-Magnum may be inadequate in emergency situations, especially in untrained hands.
State law allows a bear to be shot in self-defense if you did not provoke the attack and if there is no alternative. But the hide and skull must be salvaged and turned over to the authorities.
I would be curious to know how bears react to fire. If there is a natural flight response then the old James Bond trick using a flamable spray might prove a better deterent than a gun in a shakey hand.
I can’t get the link to work now. One of the articles I found says he hit the bear eleven times with “a large caliber handgun”. It does say where or with what caliber.
The Alaskan Park Service may not think much of handguns, but they seem to carry them. 
One wonders why the shotgunners didn’t shoot.
According to the article link in post #11 there were 11 shot fired. Didn’t mention how many hit the target. I wondered about the shotgunners myself. I would have unloaded it. I also thought of the possible irony of the bear getting startled by the camera flash.
Dang, and I clicked on this expecting pictures!
No pictures, folks. . . just a news story . . .
I don’t think I’d have a problem.
My uncle was an animal control officer in Anchorage a while back and thankfully, his work was mainly the ocassional moose and wild dog packs out at the airport. I don’t know what kind of weapon he used when there was a chance of encountering a grizzly, because I know nothing about the names of those thunder stick things. One of my cousins from the lower forty eight brought up somebody or another having used a hand gun to kill a grizzly.
After my uncle stopped laughing, he explained that depending upon a handgun to help you was like depending upon winning the lottery to fund your retirement. It’s possible, but the odds really, really, really sucked. If you actually get a good shot off, they just don’t seem to respect that you’ve killed them and they ought to lie down and die like a polite little bear. What he told us to do in case of an attack is pretty much what’s been covered already.
Holy crap! I knew they were big but I didn’t know they were that big. I just looked it up–adult males can be 8 (one source said 9) ft tall on their hind legs and weigh up to 900 pounds. Average is still 6.5 - 7 ft tall and a good five hundred pounds.
I’ve never encountered any wild animal bigger than a coyote. But he was a big, strong healthy coyote, not much under three feet tall, and I didn’t see him till I was about six feet away. We both froze, looked at each other to see if anyone was going to pick a fight and then he just decided to go on his way. There was no thinking on my part, I just froze, zap! With an animal about ten times the size of that coyote, who knows?
I stand corrected. I can’t find any mention of how many times the bear was hit
I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t wet my pants, given that
I’d be too busy shitting in them.
I don’t know if this is true for everyone, but it is for me. Stopping and freezing just seems to be a natural reaction to having a large potentially dangerous animal in front of you.
Most of my encounters have been of the variety where the bear truly was more nervous of the humans than they were of the bear, and the bear stayed hidden, making those hunh, hunh, hunh, warning noises, crashing the bushes and trees around him, and then calmed down once we gradually left the area.
Each time we heard and saw the bear pushing bushes and doing their warning act, my natural reaction was to freeze and start talking to the bear. All of the other field crew seemed to have the same reactions.
Black bears are what really make me nervous. From all that I’ve read, they, unlike grizz’s, consider anything prey, and will actively hunt you. Whereas a grizzly generally tends to display aggression when you are near a kill or their own cubs. And otherwise, to steer clear of humans.
Moose scare me more than bears though, they are truly psycho creatures. I don’t know, between getting kicked to death, or mauled to death? Tough choice.
How funny, I forgot to mention in my post that the REASON I would freeze is that that’s what I did the very first time it happened. And that was pretty much from fear.
Both my coworker and I just stopped what we were doing, stood stock still and looked at each other. “okay, what’d’we do now”? Should we try to make it to the truck? Naaaw, let’s at least turn off this noisy instrument so we can hear him better and maybe not make him nervous enough to charge??
We ended up standing there frozen stock still except for shutting off the PID until the bear stopped his huffing and shoving bushes and went away.
Thereafter, it just seemed natural to do that on other similar occasions. So far so good (knock on wood :))
So much ignorance, so little time.
First of all, it’s a Glock Model 22 or 23 in .40S&W, not a “Glok 40”. Second, a .40S&W most likely does not have the penetration to consistantly stop or critically wound a bear, especially a brown/grizzly/Kodiak. A hard-cast 158 grain .357 Magnum or a 149 grain 9mmPara (both high sectional density bullets) is about the minimum, each giving better than 16 in of penetration in ballistic gelatin. Neither of these is going to expand though, so unless they hit a vital organ or shear an artery they aren’t going to immediately stop a hypthetically attacking bear. The general minimum for bear is a hot loaded .44Mag softpoint. Most guides carry something on the order of a 7mm Rem Mag/.300 Rem Mag or larger, or a 12 ga Magnum slug. If a bear is preying upon you you’ll probably be lucky to have one or two shots. (In the case of the officers investigating Timothy Treadwell’s campsite they were aware of the situation and proximity of the bear.) Third, it is generally against regulations to carry a firearm in most US National Forests except when hunting and in the possession of the appropriate permits. I believe it is illegal to carry any handgun in a National Forest.
Also, the last thing you want to do when confronted by a potentially aggressive bear is climb a tree. Nor should you run, espeically downhill. Playing dead is generally not a good plan, either. Better to demonstrate that you are neither aggressive nor frightened, and if attacked, respond by fighting back. Here are some of the standard myths about bears.
Black bears are neither aggressive nor do they actively hunt you or anything else. Bears, despite being of order Carnivora, are omnivorous scavengers whose primary source of animal protein is grubs, termites, and ants. They will occasionally prey on old, crippled, and wounded animals but they are evolved as a prey species, not a predator. Read Lynn Roger’s article How Dangerous are Black Bears.
Personally, I run into black bears frequently in the Angeles and San Bernardino National Forests and they seem far more disturbed about me than I am about them.
Now you’ve got something there. Moose are so stupid that they think a human is some kind of competitor for their mate.
Stranger
Nope. I plan on bear hunting as well but instead of your fancy-schmancy shooting stick, I will be armed with a bow and arrow. Maybe two arrows.
Mmmm, bear stew.
As far as I know, this is not true. It is almost always illegal to carry firearms in National Parks, but in National Forest the state laws usually apply, subject to some federal regs.
http://www.fs.fed.us/r3/coconino/faq/index.shtml#guns
http://www.fs.fed.us/r5/laketahoe/faq/index.shtml#12
Otherwise, excellent advice.