Sooooo story time.
Long before Katmai was even a thought in my pea brain, me and @mountainlyons307 were just out doing what we loved. Chasing critters.
It was a Friday and I took the day off to have a long weekend hunting the Wyoming Bear opener. Keaton didn’t have the PTO so he worked and hiked in later to meet me at camp. It was a slow morning and I hadn’t seen anything but a few elk and mule deer.
Keaton makes it up and we set to glassing two different spots. Eventually after he got bored and started looking for neat rocks I ended up spotting a black bear a few hundred yards away in the timber.
I made a rookie mistake and didn’t mark the spot before pulling my binos down to yell at Keaton. After about 10 minutes of waiting we switched to a different vantage point and all of the sudden Keaton spotted the bear standing in a cliff about 200 yards from where I had seen him.
I settled in for the shot and WHAM! Heard the impact and the bear fell off a 60 foot cliff. I called the wife and we waited about 30 minutes to go to the cliff where he had been standing. We found the blood stain and a bunch of blood along the cliff on the way down, marked the spot, and scurried down to the bottom to find the bear.
To our great surprise he wasn’t crumpled in a pile at the bottom of the cliff but we found a blood trail leading into the woods and took off after it— fully expecting to find this bear dead within 100 yards at most.
Well 400+ yards later through THICK timber I noticed my dog go dead still and lock onto something right as we step into a clearing. 10 yards away in the brush this black bear is broad side looking at us. I crack off 2 quick shots and we hear him go crashing through the timber as we try to corral my dog.
After a few tense minutes we hear some more crashing and it starts to get dark so we decided to pull back out of the thick timber for another 15 minutes and listen.
Hear the rest in PART 2
The Grizzly Gaiters were born for one reason. I was tired of getting a new pair of gaiters every time a strap, I knew was going to break as soon as I bought them, did exactly what was expected.
Buy gear meant to adapt. Not to be replaced.
