Being familiar with your defense is more important than which defense you choose...Consider this dead horse beat!
Agreed. But I’m gonna beat the horse some more. Why not? I shoot rifle, shotgun, and archery pretty well. But I’m not worth a damn with a pistol and I’ve never liked carrying one loaded anywhere but on a belt style holder, and to me that’s not really compatible with carrying a pack in the mountains. I also have a strong preference for revolvers over semi auto. In Wyoming bow hunting I usually carry only spray, on the pack where it’s always accessible. I wanna be able to spray even if a bears on top of me as a last line of defense.
When I was in Alaska for my first of two summers in a remote part of Bristol Bay, we could sometimes see up to 14 different brown bears a day from the kitchen window. All of them sows with cubs. We hardly ever saw boars. I carried spray then too, but I usually had the 44 and nearly always had a semi auto shotgun with slugs if we were in a boat away from the lodge.
That is other than the first time I left the lodge by myself, no gun, no spray, and had a run in close with a huge sow and two cubs. See photo 1, that’s the sow and her cubs are in the alders behind her. I suppose her and her cubs were probably the first bears I had ever really seen in the wild at 19 years old. I stupidly got scared and tried to cross the where the lake dumps into the river when they got on the shore behind me with me wading, had to kick off a pair of hip waders that flooded and had to swim back towards the bears as the fish counters reached the opposite bank since they saw my plight and started lobbing off rounds in the air that thankfully scared all but one cub away. I was scared out of my mind, so scared in fact I was still trying to swim for my life for about 5 seconds in about an inch of water when I got back to shore. The one cub was still there, like ten yards away staring at the flailing moron but he moseyed off as the fish counters motored across the river to bail me out.
I don’t know that it’s even debatable in my mind that shotgun with slugs is the best. Just not something I’m gonna carry hunting in the mountains of Wyoming. Photo quality kinda sucks, I took a cell phone picture of my laptop screen of a few close encounters to show a coworker recently so I figured I’d tack ‘em on my post.
Photo 2 is at Brooks Lodge waiting for a plane. Those bears aren’t scary…they see hundreds of people a day in tourist seasion and they could GAF less. Photo 3s a mountain lion that creeped on me a few years back in Wyoming. Had my 06 that time, but he backed off once he figured out I wasn’t the deer he was looking for.
