Someone should start a bear stories thread. I’m too busy to monitor one proper but would contribute if’n it appeared. My guess is there’s stories to tell . . . just like Martin’s.
Okay, here’s my story:
I was hiking, the evening of July 3rd, 2003, up in the San Gabriel mountains. I’d just parked at the pass and hoofed it a couple of miles up the PCT to the Little Jimmy trail camp. There was nobody there, and it was getting dark, so I dropped my pack on a picnic table and walked around the camp to scout the best site to pitch. (I was only carrying a snug bag and a bivy sack for incliment weather, so basically no set up.) I walked back toward my pack after maybe three minutes, when I suddenly heard some rustling behind me, I started to turn and then found myself flung to the ground. What happened? Uh-huh. Above me, exhaling the worst morning breath you’ve ever smelled was a 200lb black-furred monster, ready to tear my head off and suck out my intestines from the neck.
Only he didn’t. He stood over me for a few seconds, his paw on my shoulder blade (no claws, BTW…the claws kind of fold back rather than forward like a cat), and then trundled over to the pack. He stood up–he was easily as tall as the pack standing on the table, smelled the yummy peanut butter and honey sandwiches I’d been planning for dinner, pulled the pack of the table and started to drag it away.
Now, here’s where crazy enters the picture, in the form of a 5’10" German-Irish-Czech (and a little Osage Indian) male of no outstanding physical presence. I knew a little about bears, and a lot about the $1000+ in gear that was in the pack (plus my wallet and car keys). So it begins with the yelling and jumping and the throwing of sticks and rocks. The bear was, frankly, a little freaked out. Here’s this Pinky, who doesn’t look like anything dangerous–no claws or teeth to speak of–and yet he’s telling Mr. Bear to hand over the pack or else. Bear thinks to himself, “Well, he doesn’t look dangerous, but he seems to know more than I do, so maybe…”
He let go of the pack and backed off a few yards. More shouting and stick throwing convinced him to move off another dozen or so yards. I walked over, picked up the pack and slung it over one shoulder, and backed off while continuing to yell and threaten with a largish rock I had in my hand. Paddington kept looking at me with a countanence halfway between confusion and disappointment. Here, he’d found some tasty treats, and some nasty ape-boy came and took them away. You just can’t win against The Man. 
I hiked back out to the trailhead–I don’t think my insanity-fueled courage was going to let me sleep in that camp that night–and drove out. I went back the next day to pick up a canteen that fell out of one of the pack pockets and to file a report, which USFS failed to forward to California DFG for about a month. In the meantime, our ursine friend “menaced” some Girl Scouts who were camping at the same site. DFG came out to trap and kill the unfortunate creature after that, there was a big uproar in the local papers,and one of the local channels ran a news story on it, for which I refused to interview; the thrust of the umbrage being that USFS and DFG should “do” something about the bear “problem”, as if it were a) a serious problem, and b) something to be eliminated. Ugh. Must…fight…ignorance.
Anyway, after that, I read up some more on bears and learned what generally benign creatures black bears are. Now, when I see one, or a mother and cubs, while hiking, I consider it a great day, and when Mom is moaning at me to please leave her alone and stop scaring her kids with my presence, I know that she’s just nervous, not threatening.
Here’s a couple of links to news articles about it: Here and here. Here’s another article about human encroachment onto bear territory with a tangential mention of my incident. The first has a terrible picture of me; I mean, my forehead does kind of stand out like a blank billboard butit doesn’t bulge out in mad scientist fashion the way it appears to, and in general I don’t look quite than Hannibal Lector-ish as the picture would suggest.
Stranger