I've probably outlined my bear story in another bear thread, don't recall for certain, but here it is. In 1989 I was a former bicycle mechanic and was then working as a machinist and braze-welder for Synchros, making nice mountain bike parts. One sunny October late morning I met up with a couple of guys I'd known from the old bike shop job who said they'd show me the ropes on Seymour trails. Though I'd ridden a lot in the mid-1980's and raced a few times, a severe injury had taken me out of that loop for a few years. But I'd gradually worked my damaged leg back into good shape so I was up for some climbing.
Their ride to meet me along the underbelly, close to the Second Narrows (now Ironworker's Memorial) bridge had been eventful. A driver had been honking at them as they rode the nearly deserted road side-by-side, they'd flipped him off and waved him around as there was lots of room, so he'd gunned it past them then jammed on the brakes, leaving his car sideways across their path, and jumped out with a hatchet in hand. He ran at them and took a swing, one of the riders blocking the blow with his forearm and getting a nasty bruise from the axe handle. He punched the driver in the nose, who then backed off, bloodied, and got in his car and drove off, swearing. They called in his plate # and took some deep breaths then rode on, meeting me a bit later than planned.
We got to Seymour and did a bunch of technical climbing. Pride kept us from dismounting much, so it was mostly lowest gear stuff, slower than walking pace, going up a bunch of tree root steps and single track trails. Good times! That's what I loved most in mountain biking, like trials riding. Downhill... not so much, especially since I'd smashed the middle of my left thigh on a tree branch while doing a bunch of flips at about 40km/hr during a race at Whistler, taking almost a year in sports physio therapy to get away from crutches then a cane. Climbing is rewarding work. Descending is just scary, for me anyway.
So we got well beyond the powerline, did a bit of rollercoaster sort of riding across the face, then they decided it was time to head down as one guy had some work to get back to. Shortly after starting down I managed to break my seat clamp bolt. I had to scour my bike for something close to it to cannabilize, as the unstable seat was going to make the ride too difficult. The guys didn't have patience to wait a few minutes - I think mostly because those two had smoked a fat joint at the end of the climb and were by then pretty out of it. I've never been a pothead, don't see the point.
Anyway, it was around 4pm I think when I waved them off. I had a a light and big battery, and thought it was fully charged. Didn't know where I was, but how hard could riding down Mt Seymour be? I finally settled on sacrificing one handlebar stem bolt which was redundant (a custom stem I'd built which was plenty solid with one less bolt) and put that into the seat clamp. Took off down the tricky little trails in the deepening shadows, eventually having to turn on the light as I found myself running out of daylight. The headlights in those days were incandescent and sucked down battery power like crazy. And it turned out I didn't have more than a half charge, so only about 45 minutes' light. I made it to a thick bit of undergrowth just as I began to see some distant city lights. Ran out of trail. A steep cliff in front of me made me bushwack with the bike on my shoulder for a while, lots of spider webs, the odd stumble (I was wearing Italian racing shoes with snap-in cleats and slippery plastic soles), until I finally ran out of lamp light just a few minutes before I found another trail which was relatively clear and went straight down.
Turned out it was only a few hundred metres to the bottom of the steep slope. I'd made it! Didn't know where I was still but that was okay. Totally moonless and overcast, the only light coming from low cloud, a dim orange from the street lights along Dollarton Highway. When I got to the bottom of the trail and tried to see something, eventually I made out a few little mountain-like shapes, which combined with a dully bad smell told me I was at some sort of dump. I'd heard there was a dump near the base of Seymour, so figured I was pretty close to the road. Started walking, then as the light got slightly less dim maybe halfway through the dump road I started seeing a brighter patch way ahead... then made out the low straight line of a steel swing gate, the sort made of a welded up triangle of 4" pipe, maybe a metre high. I got on the bike and started riding to cover what was likely around 250 metres of remaining road... and about halfway there I just about fell off the bike when there was an explosion of gravel being kicked beside and behind me on the left, beside one of those big piles of landfill.
I knew instantly it was a bear. Nothing else could move that much gravel, that fast. Adrenaline hit me hard. There was a moment of what felt like weakness, almost a faint, as I grappled with the shock of a bear so close and now running towards me. Then my right leg hammered on the pedal and I cranked it into a higher gear, slamming the pedals harder than I had in any BMX or mountain bike race at the start line. Threw a bit of gravel from my rear tire but the road was decent and I soon got traction.
I got to the low gate in a few seconds. Almost too soon. Dismounted with the noise of slewing gravel getting ever closer behind me, glanced back as my feet hit the ground and I started throwing the bike over the gate with my left hand still gripping the handlebar. A huge black blob was something between 5 and 10 metres behind me and getting bigger, couldn't see anything more than that, just an inky shape getting bigger, coupled with that horrifying sound of pieces of dirt road flying behind it.
The bike landed and bounced as I vaulted diagonally over the gate, landing on the saddle and twisting the front wheel forward as I flailed to get my feet clipped back into the pedals. A lot of drills and race experience got those clamped on the first try and I was slamming on the pedals again within less than a second. I rode hard until I hit the highway, maybe 10 seconds of that. And the sounds stopped behind me! Apparently the gate, my sudden change of motion, or both, had startled the bear and it stopped the chase. I didn't wait to find out if it was considering following up. Rode hard all the way to the bridge, however far that was I don't know (no Google Maps at the time and I couldn't seem to find any maps showing the dump), then the crash hit. Hard. Had a difficult ride the rest of the way home to Kitsilano. Exhausted. Out of water. Slept maybe 12 hours that night.
I was incredibly lucky. My fitness was maybe at 90% of my lifetime best at the time, and I risked injuries pushing my legs as hard as that, but it worked out. I got away clean by virtue of timing, proximity to that gate. Had I startled the bear further from the gate or had I been on foot still at that point I'd have been bear dinner. If I hadn't vaulted many logs during my racing days I'd not have had the muscle memory to perform the complex set of moves needed to get over the gate so gracefully and mount the bike without completely disabling myself on the seat or top tube. I knew exactly how to move quickly on and around a bike, and my machine was a top of the line speed demon - a Ritchey racing frame with fresh knobby tires, every aspect of which I knew intimately, having built the handlebar, stem, and forks from pieces of tubing and chunks of aluminum. I wouldn't give myself any odds at all of making that same set of moves today. Not remotely.
So today I count on a short 12ga to keep me safe. I've read enough and seen enough video to form an opinion on bear spray, and don't like my odds if I give that a try first. I'd prefer yelling and slowly backing away from a bear with a gun in my hands, a 1oz slug in the chamber, to some sort of clown show of dropping a failed can of spray and grabbing for the gun with maybe 1/2 second left before a bear is on top of me. Bear spray may well work. Just too many reports of it failing for me to take that chance. I'm a good shot, so I'll gamble on the big gun, should warnings and general awareness of my surroundings fail.
My one other bear encounter was while climbing on Mt Fromme in the summer of 2020. With my wife and son, just along the road where it starts to turn downhill again towards Grouse, we stopped as we heard violent thrashing behind the wall of salmonberry bushes to our left, downhill. We talked about what it might be, then heard a log hitting a tree and knew it was a large bear, tossing a log around, probably looking for more grubs to eat. Huffing sounds confirmed it. Unless it was a giant pretending to be a bear... but that seemed unlikely. I had the 870 in hand and loaded immediately and we decided to proceed rather than turn back. Walked a few steps at a time and pausing, listening, until we were out of range. Walked some trails for a while, picked some berries, ate some lunch, then headed back past the same spot about an hour later, with no sign of a bear. That shook us up a little but we were glad not to have to interact with it. Apparently the noise it was making covered our passing well enough and I advised both in my family to keep their noise to a minimum to keep it that way. Every circumstance is different and there are many interpretations as to what to do. Improvisation seems important. Adaptation to the particular geometry of the situation and the bear's awareness of human presence.
