Maggie's Farm

Driving from Seattle to Anchorage you can see a lot of bears. Last trip I saw 27 bears, Grizzlies and black bears. Saw a beautiful black bear with four cubs walking near the road. Kind of rare to see four cubs. Once saw two 2 YO grizzles, probably two brothers. Both big and fat even in June. I came face to face with a black bear one in a campground, scared the shit out of both of us. I froze and she slowly backed away. I came up on a brown bear once in Alaska and he was on a caribou. Very tense, I was easily over 100 feet from him and that may be the only thing that saved us. I had a rifle and a handgun and I'm pretty sure I could have shot him if he rushed me but I'm also pretty sure he would have still been able to kill me. He huffed and grunted and I backed away and didn't feel good till I had walked the two miles back to camp. Another time I got tired of fishing, it was between tide changes and the salmon weren't coming in right then, so I walked up river to explore. Came around a bend in the river and a black bear cub was chasing fish in the river about 100 feet in front of me. My hair literally stood on end, I knew momma was near and I had no idea where. My .357 on my belt felt small. I backed away and walked slowly until across the river a couple hundred yards away I saw mom and cub walking away.

One other story. Me and three friends flew into the Alaskan interior on a one week caribou hunt. After some success over three days we were kind of off our game and I decided to go off by myself and try for a large male caribou. We had seen them but the area was mixed brush and trees and not great for sneaking up quietly so I decided to sit and watch. Unlike deer caribou travel all times of the day so you are as likely to see one at noon as at dusk. So sitting quietly on a hillside with my back to a tree I could easily see a couple hundred yards in any direction. After about an hour I heard a noise and off to my left I saw movement. Large brown bear maybe 100 yards away. Eating berries and hunting it kept lifting it's head and sniffing the air and looking around. Then suddenly it was alert looking right at me. Well, not at me then I heard a couple of my buddies coming from the direction the bear was looking. I turned to look for them, turned back to look at the bear and he was gone.