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Bear spray stopped charging sow, hiker says
Couple walking on Peters Creek Trail in state park used Counter Assault
By Craig Medred / Anchorage Daily News
In the blink of an eye, a defensive grizzly bear sow was rolling like a freight train through the willows along Peters Creek.
Then the brush was bathed in an orange-gray mist.
And in that instant, hiker Carl Ramm saw the sow's eye go wide "and it was gone," he said.
Neither Ramm nor his wife, Susan Alexander, clearly saw the bear leave. They heard it crashing through the summer brush as it beat a retreat with a cub trailing behind.
"It sounded like a small cub," Ramm said.
The couple hadn't known until almost the last moment that they had somehow walked between a grizzly sow and her cub along the Peters Creek Trail, eight or nine miles into Chugach State Park, northeast of Anchorage.
Similar situations have prompted nasty encounters with brown bears. Grizzly sows are extremely protective of their young. Statistics on bear attacks show a predominance of sows with cubs ripping into people, though they don't often kill.
Almost always, bear experts say, their goal appears to be to neutralize the human by getting them on the ground. That's why standard advice for unarmed people is to get down and cover up, linking the fingers behind the neck so the bear can't grab you.
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Ramm and Alexander did.
Ramm was packing pepper spray. He admits he wasn't a true believer, but he had decided years ago that it was a lot easier to carry a lightweight canister of Counter Assault than a heavy shotgun.
"Up until about three or four years ago," he said, "I needed to take a 12-gauge, but I got tired of lugging that thing."
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