Bear Spray Or A Big Bore? What Actually Stops A Grizzly

The debate plays out around campfires and ranges across the West and Alaska: when a grizzly charges, do you reach for bear spray or a firearm? The stories that fuel that argument are rarely as vivid as what Bret and Glenn Bohn described.

A Close-Range Fight

Bret Bohn, a 35-year-old hunting guide from Wasilla, Alaska, watched an 8-foot grizzly hit his 77-year-old father Glenn at full speed. “It looked like a semitruck hitting a fire hydrant,” Bret said. According to his account, the bear grabbed Glenn behind the neck and dragged him down the slope at a run.

Bret sprinted after them with a .375 rifle in one hand and a .454 Casull Ruger Super Redhawk Alaskan in the other. According to Bret, wildlife officials who later investigated the scene said his footprints were spaced so far apart they looked like an Olympic athlete’s.

He made himself known as he closed in, shouting so the bear would lift off his father. “I was running straight at him, shot him in the neck, and then the bear kind of backed off. And that’s when I smoked him, got him in the vitals,” he said.

The bear then turned on Bret and charged. He fired a third round into its head at what he later measured as 5½ feet, “from claw mark to my bootstrap.” By his telling, the bear reared up even after the head shot; Bret put another round in its throat and kept firing as it rolled down the mountain.

Glenn survived. According to Bret, his father recovered in nine days with a single surgery to repair his mangled face.

The Official Line

The National Park Service takes the opposite view for most people in bear country. It warns that “using a firearm during a bear attack may only worsen the attack,” noting that an injured bear is more aggressive, that a charging bear is harder to hit than to spray, and that a firearm endangers hiking partners.

According to the National Park Service, bear spray is “easy to use without much experience, and a highly effective tool for deterring bear attacks.” The message from the agency, boiled down: if you don’t know how to run a pistol, don’t carry one for this.

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