roanmtn;
Good morning to you sir from the still dark and finally snow covered part of BC, I hope you all out east are well, warm and dry.

Hopefully I can be forgiven for sharing another BC hunting story, this one told to me by a very good friend, taking place before the powers that be in Victoria lost their collective mind and banned all grizzly hunting in BC.

If I'm not remembering wrong this would have taken place in the 90's as my friend had drawn a LEH tag for spring grizzly in the Kootenays. His brother in law from Seattle wanted to accompany him on a bear hunt, so off they went. They were part way up the Lardeau River Valley which is stunningly pretty country with the Purcells on one side and the Selkirks on the other. Overall it's fairly steep country too might I add.

They were working the bottom of an avalanche chute where the grizzly bears like to dig for animals caught in the snow slides when they spotted what he termed "a little fart of a grizzly, maybe 5' or so". As they glassed the bear which was several hundred yards away, it suddenly stood up on it's hind legs, began to sniff the air, then dropped down and began running at full tilt down towards them.

The brother in law asked my friend, "Hey it that normal?" to which my friend said he replied, "Not so far"..

There was a fairly big draw below them into which the bear disappeared, but also there was a smaller draw which ran off to one side and behind the two men.

My friend said they were both watching below them intently for what seemed to him to be next to forever, when for reasons he couldn't explain, something made him look behind them towards the smaller draw.

There, crouched down like a cat stalking a bird, was the young grizzly and as it cleared a Doug Fir stump, my friend shot it in the head.

I asked "How close was it?" and he pointed to the front door knob of our house which was about 24' from where he was sitting in our living room by the woodstove.

When I made some comment about how close that all was, he replied, "Yah, the funny thing was Dwayne, I dropped my lighter I don't know how many times when I tried to have a smoke afterward." grin

As to what rifle, its a 7mm Mag. in a Weatherby Vanguard and if I know him, it'd be a 140gr bullet but the bullet weight is a guess.

He had that grizzly hide rugged up and gave it to the brother in law as a little memento of his first BC grizzly hunt.

Thanks for reading and all the best.

Dwayne


This is from this past hunting season where we cut the tracks of 3 different grizzly still out on a bitterly cold day. That folding boning knife is an honest 8½" for scale. We tracked 2 of them for more than 5km on a logging road, finally loosing the tracks at an appropriately named mountain lake - Bear Lake... laugh

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