Sharpshin

Speaking of CrazyGuyonaBike (other thread), there is a blog there I cannot re-find. A fairly recent account of a 60 year-old gentleman who wanted to be (and became) the first guy to ride a bicycle from the US to the Innuit State of Nunavut, which ride IIRC involved about 500 miles of remote dirt roads each way through the North Woods.

Notable because once up there he was encountering about three black bears a day (attracted to the forest margins along the road), most of which had probably never seen a human. Neither had he been allowed to bring bear spray into Canada.

His accounts of the effectiveness or lack thereof of various bear-scaring devices and strategies are quite humorous. For the most part the bears either fled or ignored him.

Out of all these bears, only two caused him problems, both large mature males.

In the first such encounter, he had stopped to pee when a bear emerged from the woods and, totally ignoring him, began to tear into the panniers on his bicycle. The trip was saved when the bear bit into a pressurized can of mosquito repellent, the explosive escape of the same causing the bear to flee the scene.

The second was potentially more serious. Along his route were scattered single Cree hunting cabins, generally left open and unoccupied most of the year. He was sleeping in one of these and had locked the doors to protect his stuff from bears. A big male black bear arrived and tried repeatedly to get into the cabin through the door and windows despite his best attempts at scaring it off. IIRC the gist was the gentleman felt that that particular bear was coming after him along with his stuff.

I wish someone could locate that account. he even had to cache food on the way up so as to be able to make the trip back.

Mike