Ben O'Brien's Grizzly Bear Encounter

I was out in this train and it's this grizzly bear. This grizzly bear, my dad's there and I'm cow calling. Okay. And you think the elk's coming. I think this elk's coming. But it's not. It's not. I see the elk go across this ridge, right? It goes across this ridge. And then I see this brown flash go down this hill in front of me and there's a bit of a, you know, if you look like this, this brown flash has to go down this ridge and then around the corner of the spine of the ridge and stay down in the valley. I know that above me is a elk carcass freshly killed yesterday. So I'm calling. I'm waiting for this big bull elk. I'm looking this way. And I turn around. I look down below me and a hundred yards below me. My dad's here. I'm here. And I turn around below me and there's a giant bear. A hundred yards below me. I turn all the way around. I'm like, dad, there's a bear. There's a bear. There's a bear. There's a pistol right here. Is his dad a pistol? He's not. He's a bow only. I have a pistol and bear spray. Is dad a bear spray? He does not. At this point he's not. So luckily I'm between him and the bear. The bear goes down the drainage. I remember as a hunter, mostly I'm worried about is this a black bear or a grizzly bear. I didn't know at the time. It was kind of shadowed in this ravine as it was going up and I'm looking through the binders. I'm like, I don't know what this is. I'm not sure if it's a black or grizzly bear. Grizzly bears have a distinct hump that you're looking for that's different from a black bear. And they can be in this black bears sauntering down. At the risk of making this a longer story. Yeah. Explain why it's way more dangerous if it's a grizzly. A black bear, you and I have experienced this in Alberta together. A black bear is not as aggressive, not as predatory. Black bear attacks are very less frequent than grizzly bear attacks. I don't know that I could explain kind of just the nature of a grizzly bear. A black bear is an omnivore in many ways. A grizzly bear is a carnivore. And in this scenario, if it was a black bear, I would be looking to shoot it rather than being afraid of it because I love black bear meat. It's delicious and black bear fat. You've had clay nucum on. You make bear grease. It's one of the best things that there is. So I guess that maybe explains the difference. For people in comparison, it's like a golden retriever versus a wolf. Pretty much. That's a pretty good comparison. It's a completely different animal. I wish there was a wild apologist to kind of really lay it out there. You'd probably say German Shepherd Wolf. Yeah, something like that. That's a fucker. I'm trying to be more comedic. It's a different animal. It is. And I would say that you've seen it when we were hunting bait in Alberta. When a black bear comes in, you're willing to stand your ground. We were on our way. We saw a grizzly in Alberta. When we were on our way to where we were hunting, looking eye to eye with a grizzly is wild. It's a wild thing. And when a grizzly bear comes through a stand of timber or a mountainside in this case, things go quiet. And we didn't even... When I was in Alberta, the one I've seen in the wild was not that big. But the one you saw was big. This is one of the biggest bears I've ever seen. I'm talking big hind end. Give me a roundabout. I have no idea. I would guess it at the six and a half to seven feet. I don't know how to guess how much it weighed. 350? 350. Oh, fucking weigh more than that. 450. 700. 600 pounds. We later found... 700 pounds. We later found the track on the road where... We later found the track on the road where we walk in every morning. So the drainage, this little two tractor road where we walk in, we found this thing's track. So it is sauntering up this drainage. And there's a moment where my mind's not in the right spot. It's in the place of is this a grizzly bear or black bear? And now that I look back on that moment, that bear was about two seconds away from ripping my face off. Oh my God. I'm cow calling. To that bear, I'm a cow elk. And to me, I wasn't scared. I wasn't pulling from my pistol. I was watching it as a hunter might watch any game species that it comes... Thinking an elk's gonna come over the ridge. Yeah. And a grizzly bear. And a bear. How many pounds? Maybe seven, eight hundred pounds. I don't know. I hope I'm not wrong about that. It's a big one. Let's be nice and say six hundred. Imagine a six hundred pounds super predator. One swat. One. One full clip towards you. I've interviewed many people that have had their face ripped off, their testicles ripped off. I know the pure carnage that a grizzly bear like that can do. And I also know in my pack is a tourniquet and all the medical supplies a man might carry. But I also, and I'm pretty close to town. My dad's there. We have our cell phone service. We're not in the backcountry. I know at this point when I determine it to be a grizzly bear, it's already walking up the drainage away from me. I determine it's a grizzly bear. I know then that if it turns back to us, we got a problem. But if it keeps going up the drainage, I know where it's headed. It's headed to that elk carcass that was there. And so luckily for us, it goes up the drainage. It heads over towards the elk carcass and ducks into the timber. And that's, I mean, it's not the end of it, but that's the end of that encounter. And you're carrying a pistol? I have a pistol. What caliber? A .44 Magnum. It's a Taurus .44 Magnum ultralight. And I have a chest holster. It's from a guy named, it's Razco, a guy in Bozeman makes his chest holder that attaches to the bottom of the chest. Is this a revolver? This is a revolver. And I have bear spray on the hip belt of my. So you can get off six? Six shots or five shots? I can get off six shots. Six shots. And I know, again, having been in the industry and talked to a lot of people that have had encounters, I know kind of how this is going to go. And likely how it goes is the only way you get out of it is you get mauled and the bear loses interest or the person that's with you saves you in some manner. Right? Yeah. There's a pretty famous. But your dad doesn't have a gun. He doesn't. He has a bow. And you're in front? I'm in front. So I'm between these two. And again, this is. Is your pistol in, is it, you have to open up a snap to pull it out or is it in a kydex or something? It's fully in a molded holster that I can pull out and present. Easy. It'll be double action because I don't have it cocked. And do you have a thought when that's happening where he might run away, but if I shoot him, he might attack me? Yeah, I mean, as he's like a calculation, right? Yeah. And Hunter, I'm more interested in what is this thing doing? Why is it here than I am like, I should run away. Right. And that is, I think, both appropriate and also probably not the best thing to be doing, man. Like, you should probably be. Can you remember what you thought? Like what went through your head when you realized it wasn't an elk and it was a giant grizzly bear? Finally. Finally. Yeah. Because you are in the country or you know, dude, I've been out in June, set in a trail camera and heard a wolf howl. I told you, I talked to the game more and he's like, there's bears around. And so the thing that you do is you prepare for the worst and you really, really prepare for the worst. And I did it knowing that there's folks that I've talked to, like I said, that have had really life changing experiences. One of them in Kodiak, a brown bear ripped off his testicles. One of them in Alaska. A brown bear, I think grizzly bear ripped off his face. And so I know these stories. I know them all too fucking well. What is the video of that one guy? Yeah. Pretty recently. Glen Bong. Yeah. And many, four or five years ago. Right? I would have been back in, yeah, roughly. Roughly there. Whatever. It would take a few years. Yeah. I mean, it's incredible online. It's horrendous. Yeah. They keep pulling it offline. Unfortunately. They put its face back together again. Pretty good. I have the full, I talked to that guy, I know that guy very well and I have the full story of that. You can listen to it on The Honey Collective. There's a podcast with Brett Bong. Yeah. I listened to it. It's amazing. It's a whole other show probably. It's like that's one of those conversations where a vegan or an animal rights activist would be like, good, good. Some people might say that. Some people might say that. I'm glad. I'm glad that fucking bear got that guy. People said that about that Brett Bong and his father Glen. Yeah, they did. It was attacked. There was a lot of people saying like, because they were hunting bears at the time and they were hunting bears in their den on the Denali Highway in Alaska. Yeah. And so people were like, good, you hunt them in their den. That's what happens. Yeah. And that's where I come back to the emotion of finally because so much of my hunting life in Montana has been anticipation of those encounters. And that was the first ever? With a bear, with grizzly bear. Yeah. Well, not the first ever of my life. First ever of Montana. I was once on a caribou hunt up in Northwest Territories. They helicopter you out into the middle of nowhere and then you have a, I think a 12 hour delay before you can hunt once you've been helicoptering in the wilderness. I think it's 12 or 24 hours, but you have a delay before you can hunt. So you'd literally have to sit there and wait. And we were there at a time in August when there was no darkness. It was literally light pretty much the entire 24 hour day. And so we sat on a ridge line and we were glassing for caribou in the, in the period where we couldn't hunt. And here comes this sow grizzly bear down this drainage. Every bush that she went by. Every piece of moss, she was crushed. She was upset. She's having a bad day. Whether a cub got taken or she was just in a predatory mood. It was, I remember glassing her with a spine and I was like, I hope she doesn't come over here. And we were sitting on kind of a. Is that normal behavior when like a cub gets eaten by a boar? I don't know if that's normal behavior. I imagine it to be. For folks who don't know that that happens a lot. And the females try to fight the boar off. I imagine it to be. I imagine them to be aggressive in the times that they need to be, but I don't, I don't know enough to know if that's like every time a cub gets eaten and she goes out and whacks the shit out of the next thing she sees. I don't, I don't know that, but in this case, this sow was alone. She was not, she didn't look all that mature, but she was going down this drainage. Just everything she saw, she was hidden. And I thought, well, if she comes by me, you're fucked. I'm fucked. Yeah. And then we would call it a glass and tit, which is kind of a raised up ridge and glass and she got at some point below us where we couldn't see her. What a terrifying idea of a mad grizzly, like a road raging grizzly. You're like, dude, oh. And then you think like. That's what that is. It's like someone just fucking fuck you. And where do grizzlies live? Right? The grizzlies don't live by the urgent care, right? They live in places where if they whack you, you're fucked. You're fucked unless your friend knows how to break both your legs. You have to crawl to save deep. Right. So in the examples of Brett Bond, who we were just talking about, he saved his father. His father got his face ripped off by a grizzly bear. He comes running down the hill with a 454 kasool, shoots this bear, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, kills it. It actually, I was reading some of his accounts of the hunt. He measured five and a half feet from his bootstrap to where the bear died when he was defending his father's life. His father had been attacked. Oh my God. How much did the bear weigh? The bear is now in Glen Bond, who's 70. He's probably in his 80s now, is in his living room. He got it mounted full standing mount and it's in his living room. I bet that bear weighed 800 plus pounds easily. And again, apologies for getting that wrong if that's the case, but we got to wrap this up. But before we wrap this up, how does that bear story end? Is that it? Yeah, the bear leaves and goes to eat that elk carcass. How close were you at the closest time? 80 yards. Oh. Toward death. How many seconds would it take for a bear sprint at you from 80 yards? Two. Do you think you'd have time to pull the gun? Well, we did a whole thing with Clay Newcomb. If you look on the old meat eater YouTube, where we tried to figure out how quickly you could draw your bear spray. Not so quick. Not so quickly. I probably would have gotten mauled. But again, that's the reality of the world in which we live, Joseph. That's a nice thing to say if you don't get mauled. If you do get mauled, you should say, I should take a roller skating. Yeah, if you don't get mauled, you're like, ah! If you don't get mauled, I am going roller skating from here on out. I'm going to take up crochet. Like if you got mauled and you had the opportunity to not get mauled, you're like, yeah, I'm going to do something else. I'm going to keep my face.