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Bear spray stopped charging sow, hiker says
Couple walking on Peters Creek Trail in state park used Counter Assault
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Still, Ramm and Alexander could have lived without the exciting weekend experience. Veterans of 20 years of tromping through the Alaska backcountry, they've been contemplating for days how it might have been avoided.
"The whole thing is kind of embarrassing," said Ramm, who is convinced that if the couple had made more noise and paid more attention while working their way up the Peters Creek Trail, they could have avoided the encounter.
"It was the classic bear-charge scenario, I guess," he said. "We were walking into the wind, in dense willows, near a loud, fast-running creek. We should have been shouting at regular intervals, but weren't. ... We might not even have been talking at the time.
"Anyway, we startled her, and we were quite close."
The Ramms did get a quick warning from the sow.
"I heard her woofing," Ramm said, "though woofing seems like a trivial word for the intensity ... and force of it."
The sound alerted him to grab for the pepper spray. He had it in his hand and ready by the time he actually saw the sow crashing through the brush.
He remembers turning to his right, pointing the pepper spray, thinking "This is really bad,'' and pulling the trigger.
Then the bear was gone.
"The point I want to make is that all this happened in no more than six seconds," he added. "The bear was certainly within 20 feet by then. There wasn't a big margin of error. It was a very serious screw-up for us to have gotten into a situation with so little room for error and such serious consequences."
The encounter, he added, wrecked the rest of the outing.
Ramm and Alexander continued on into the high country above Peters Creek, but they had the bears on their minds the whole time.
"We both should have been carrying pepper spray," Ramm said. "Not that we should have both been using it then, definitely not. One was enough. (But) with another full canister we would have felt fine about staying back there for the full length we'd planned. Instead, we hiked back in another four miles or so, spent the night and packed back out the same way the next day.
"There weren't," he added, "a lot of alternatives for ways back out."
Peters Creek has one trail and lots of brush. The bushwhacking is miserable.
"We would have liked to stay longer," Ramm said, "but we just weren't sure how much spray, in practical terms, we had left."
Pepper-spray aerosols are considered a one-shot deterrent. All companies recommend replacing the cans if they are used. The Ramms are now replacing theirs.
Ramm hopes never to need Counter Assault again but adds that he's now confident that it will work if he needs it.
"We'd be happy to proselytize for pepper spray," he said.
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