I don't know if this has been posted elsewhere or not. This is one tough man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOQAhKrOOww

Tom

Very interesting account, and a very interesting man. As you said, one tough fellow.

Thanks for posting.

He passed the test of where the rubber meets the road. He did not lose his focus.

I don`t know if I could keep my cool like he did.i had one close encounter with a grizzly while hiking in the Bob .I saw the Grizz first on a kill and backed myself away from it .I don`t think it saw me,but I will tell you my heart was about to jump through my chest.This Dude has balls!!!

Keeping cool under pressure certainly saved his life. We all wonder if we could do the same?

Very interesting but he is the victim of political correctness associated with the myth of bear spray is better.

As he stated he is an accomplished hand gunner but he reached for the spray first.

Sorry when some thing to trying to kill you spray is a poor choice.

I used to work with Todd, and yes, he knows his way in the back country. He was (and probably still is) in charge of the trail program on the Gallatin National Forest.

Todd is definitely not a victim of political correctness. Bear spray is not a myth, and it has and will work in most encounters. Unfortunately for Todd, the motherly instinct of this bear to protect her cubs was stronger than the effects of the bear spray on her.

And yes, Todd is an accomplished hand gunner He kills his elk almost every year with his pistol. Not all grizzlies will attack humans on sight, and we can't just go around shooting every one that we encounter in the woods.

In my 42 years of living and working in grizzly country, I only had two close encounters with grizzlies.

The first was one fall when two of my friends and I were camped at the end of a road near West Yellowstone. We had a moose and two elk hanging in the stock rack in the back of my pickup. One night I went out of the tent just before going to bed, and a grizzly was at the top of the road cutbank about 30 feet from me, woofing and clicking his teeth at me.

I had my Ruger SBH .44 with me, and shining my flashlight on him with my left hand, I shot one bullet over his head. He showed absolutely no reaction to the shot, so I fired another bullet into the pine tree next to him. Again no reaction from the bear.

So I picked up an apple size rock and threw it and hit the bear. He then ran off into the night. That bear was wearing an ear tag and a radio collar, and I later found out that he had been a problem bear near Cooke City, and he had been trapped and moved to the remote area near West Yellowstone where we were hunting.

The other close grizzly encounter that I had was in the Absaroka Wilderness south of Big Timber, MT. The previous fall a horse had broken his leg and had to be put down. When the snow melted the next spring, a grizzly found the horse and claimed it.

A local outfitter began using that trail to take dudes into the Wilderness, and on numerous occasions that bear had charged the outfitters pack strings. So the local Forest Service Ranger called me to come in and blow up the dead horse with explosives to eliminate the bear problem.

A couple of Ranger District employees went in with me, and when we got to the dead horse, the grizzly was feeding on it, but when he saw us he ran off. After I blew up the horse, the bear wasn't seen in that area again.

quote:

I had my Ruger SBH .44 with me, and shining my flashlight on him with my left hand, I shot one bullet over his head. He showed absolutely no reaction to the shot, so I fired another bullet into the pine tree next to him. Again no reaction from the bear.

I have found that habituated bears are not effected much by the noise of gun fire.

Guns are designed to shoot projectiles noise is a unwanted side effect of that process.

In all my years over 50 of them camping, backpacking hunting in bear county lower 48 AK. and Canadian.

I never had to shoot a bear in self-defense harassed a couple out of camp and away from the house.

Spray is a good harassment tool. But when it comes down to defending oneself from a serious attack it has proven inadequate.

When determining what is an effective rate of success one needs to look at the method and research used. The reasons behind and who is conducting the research.

Not all research is the same and a lot of it has an agenda it is trying to promote.

Setting the parameters of what constitutes a failure and what constitutes a success is very important.

When studying two methods one would think researchers would use the same criteria for both. Unless one is trying to pad the numbers towards proving one is better then or the other.

Some would call your shooting the pistol in the air a firearm failure and call your rock throwing a success thus rocks are better then firearms.

Or the time I chased a bear out of camp by hitting it with a rock while never firing my 41 mag.

Now we have two incidents that prove rocks are a 100 percent better then firearms.

Or add to that the time I shot next to a bear and he just looked at me and popped his teeth and didn't leave.

He only left when I pushed the issue and was fully prepared to kill him if he did not leave.

He choose to leave.

Now we have two cases that prove firearms are a 100 percent ineffective.

Again we are back to what is a success and what is a failure.

Bear spray promoters like to call any time spray is deployed and the bear leaves a success no matter what had happened.

They also like to call the same actions by the bear a failure with a firearm if the bear isn't immediately killed and stopped a failure of the firearm.

I sorry but in true research one can not have both ways.

http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2...laws-in-studies.html

http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2...be-required-for.html

It is one thing to train for a situation like this and another to keep your cool during an attack. It also depends on what you are use to. I grew up in Chicago and at a fairly young age would take the L downtown and then go the Greyhound bus terminal and take the bus to my grandparents farm. It was no problem, no fear or worries. Being up a drainage and attacked by a grizzly would put me in a panic for sure.

Tom

quote:

It is one thing to train for a situation like this and another to keep your cool during an attack.

Having seen some very nasty things go down in my life and talked to many survivors of life and death situations.

I was a LEO trainer for decades good training helps. Now I run my own firearms self-defense training business.

One tends to fall back on their training when the SHTF.

Train properly and the training kicks in.

That is why the person who was attack if you watched the video most likely automatically reach for his can of spray.

Even through he had a handgun with him. Then even after the first attack he didn't get his handgun out.

His mind set was most likely spray don't shoot bears.

I teach use the most effective means that you have available to stop the attack.

That might be as simple as leaving up to using deadly force.

The one thing about self-defense situations none of them are ever exactly the same.

They might have a lot in common but a lot of things are variable.