In the Edmonton Sun it said she was armed but didn't get a shot off. She got seperated from her husband after they shot an elk and she was jumped by a sow with 2 cubs. No serious injuries-mainly punctures and cuts.

I guess some definitions of not serious are a little
different than mine. The lady was beat up pretty bad.
She was bitten bad on one side of her face, both back
shoulders, on the chest and the inside of one thigh. She
had the guts to play dead and the bear left her alone.
Her and her husband had split up after they shot an elk
because he went back to get their Jeep and she was going to
the elk. She was armed but the bear got her from behind
and she never heard it coming.
She was awake all the time and told the loggers (who were
the first people they got to) that the bear could have
killed her at any time. One of the loggers told a friend
of mine she was a tough lady. It's only a guess but there
is a good chance that this was the same bear that a fellow
had to fire a shot over it's head the weekend before.

Hunting in Grizzly country does require paying more attention to ones surroundings than some less dangerous areas.If I am hunting alone and come across real fresh Grizzly sign,a gut pile,or notice a high concentration of scavenging birds in an area I am heading into;I simply go somewhere else.When it comes to Grizzly encounters the risk is never worth the reward.When we do have an animal down all rifles are kept within reach,round chambered,safeties on.One must remember that a Grizzly is an apex predator with no natural enemies.Just because a particular bear may never have seen a human before does not mean it is going to turn and run.BE BEAR AWARE!!!

There have been several grizzly bear attacks in Canada, recently. A close friend of mine was chewed up a bit in Northerern B.C in early Sept.

This is Jay's story:

Jay and his father had killed a 6 point bull elk. They butchered the bull and had to come back the next day to pack out the meat with the horses. They come back the next day and were very cautious when they aproached the kill site. There had been no bear on the kill at all so they tied up the horses and proceeded to pack up the meat.(Jay and I have been through this before together, except there was a bear on our elk when we got there the next day. Jay knows what he is doing.)
Jay says he thought he heard a growl so he looked around and never saw a thing. He thought it was the wind picking up. The horses were fine so he went back to work. Then he heard a growl again and he looked up to see a large sow and two large cubs coming right at him. Jay said that he has never seen anything move so fast. The loaded guns were only feet away but there was nothing he could do. The sow hit him and nocked him down. She bit him on the shoulder and Jay started to fight back, kicking her. The bear started biting his legs and then stopped and took off after Jay's father. The bear swatted Jay's father in the back sending flying down a hill into a creek. Nocked somewhat senseless, Jay's dad played dead. The sow then scratched him a few times then left him to go back to where Jay was. While the bear was after his father, Jay had crawled over to the rifles and got a hold of his 444 marlin. When the sow came back, he shot her. To Jay's suprise, the horses were still tied up. 6 hours later they made it to an outfitters camp where they called for help. By then it was dark so a chopper came in the next day.
The day they flew Jay out, the game branch flew over the kill site. A large male grizzly had burried the sow Jay had shot and the elk meat and was laying on it. They decided to leave it alone being the male was not involved with the incedent. They found the 2, allmost full grown cubs, and shot them being that they have been educated by mom.
The game officer had told Jay that since the restrictions on hunting Grizzly in B.C. they have been having increasingly more problems like this and that the government will not listen to thier concerns.

Around the same time in Northern B.C a grizzly came after an outfitters wife right in camp. She apparently made it to the cabin safely. I know no other details on this.

For awhile I had come very complacent or unconcerned with Grizzly bears. Mostly because the bears I run into gave me no trouble. As well as " having to sneek up on them " while hunting them. I would wrangel horses for miles from camp without my rifle.
I am not like this anymore! Not since two years ago when my hunting partner and I had a mature grizzly come for us. I won't go into all the details but fortunately for us, we were in the open and the horses gave us a heads up. We had no problem shooting the bear. What this bear's problem was, I have no idea. But it had some kind of problem because the bear came to our wind.

I have heard people say that if you don't give bears any trouble, they won't give you any trouble. I say these people don't know shit from fat meat.
I say bears will do what they want.

Daryl

You summed all Grizzly encounters up pefectly Yukoner. BEARS WILL DO WHAT THEY WANT!!In the mountians here,our motto for Grizzly encounters is: Hope for the best;but be prepared for the worst.

P.S. Sorry to hear about your friends encounter Yukoner. Sounds like he did a good job of making sure a bad situation didn't get worse. Imagine if the two grown cubs would have jumped in.YIKES!! Papershredder

Daryl, I'm just a flatlander from Kansas, USA and don't know diddly-squat about hunting bears (Griz). However, I've read quite alot about bear behavior, bear attacks, bear habits, and have seen many, many documentaries on TV about the ENDANGERED, passive, though unpredictable grizzly bear. Damn near every one of the articles, stories, etc. had a tendacy to lean toward the "you leave them alone and they will leave you alone; excepting the sow with cubs" theory. However, I came to my own conclusion about animals a long time ago. That, being just like humans, dogs and other animals roaming this big earth, grizzly bears have personalities too. And the "playground bully" mentality is not excluded from Ursus Horribilus. Your post about the bear coming upwind at the guys further leads me to believe sometimes individual bears KNOW they are the biggest kid on the block and like to shove their weight around. Just a theory I have. Again, I am NO bear expert but would love to someday visit the northwoods and do some bear hunting. Both black and grizzly. Thanks all for the interesting topic and input. Good shooting! Mike

It's not just the western grizzlies that are doing the attacking. When I first came to Canada 37 years ago I decided to take my wife and young son camping in Algonquin Park in Ontario. I had been told it was crawling with black bears. A teenager had been killed there recently. I decided to take along a camp gun to hopefully drive any bears away, a .22Magnum. It's not a big killer gun, but I figured it would do the job, and make us feel more secure. At the park entrance the first question I was asked was did I have any firearms. I told the truth, and he sealed the gun case saying it was not allowed. I told the park ranger to stick it, turned around and drove away. I've never been back to a Canadian Park. Every year I seem to read of at least a couple of maulings at the hands of bears. It seems their protection is more important than ours. We're not told of all the attacks, just like you rarely read of a suicide anymore. Maybe this kind of news is bad for tourism or our world image. I go nowhere near a bear without a firearm. That's just the way it is. Best wishes.

Cal - Montreal