As for bear bells being effective, the main purpose of them is to make a bear aware of your prescence. It is better for a bear to know you are coming down the trail than to not know. I would much rather have a bear aware of me than having a bear being suprised by me and then reacting defensively.

As for firearms against bears, it had better be a large caliber handgun, since the skull of a bear is very tough to penetrate with small caliber handguns. A monster bear was killed in Alaska that had survived a person emptying a .38 at it. Four of the slugs were found inside the bear as were 12 7mm slugs from the person who killed the bear in self defense. The bear was originally 50 yards away when it charged the hunter and was within a few feet when it finally dropped to the ground. It was still alive then and took several shots to the head to kill it. This bear stood 14' high to the top of its head and weighed over 1600 pounds. Granted that this was an Alaskan Brown Bear, but it still goes to show how much damage a bear can take. I have this information from a very reliable source, maybe someone from Alaska can confirm this event.

Sorry if this scares people, but it shows how much respect a bear deserves. Granted the griz of MT arent nearly the size of an Alaskan Brown Bear but they still deserve the same respect. And for the record, it hasnt changed anything I do in the backcountry since I have a lot respect for a bear. I have been within 10' of a bear and I did nothing wrong, all I was doing was setting up a tent when he wandered through camp. This was the first bear I saw in the wild and have seen many since that first one 12 years ago.

Ultimately, bears are wild animals and by nature unpredictable. There is just no way to say that a bear will behave one way in one instance and another way in another.

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Take care everyone and cya around. Mark