Yay!!! I’ve really been looking forward to the next “What Gun for Bears” thread just so that I could use the following quote I gleaned from a “Carrying a Gun for Self Defense” thread: “It’s not the odds, it’s the stakes.”
You see, before old age and infirmities set in, my wife and I logged hundreds of miles backpacking in the Idaho and Wyoming wildernesses - where there really
are grizzlies, or so we’ve been told (we never actually saw any grizzlies except from the road while driving through Yellowstone and Glazier national parks). Regardless, at one time or another while backpacking, I’ve carried everything from a heavily loaded .357 Magnum to a heavily loaded .45 Colt, finally settling on a heavily loaded Taurus .41 Magnum. And
both my wife and I carried large canisters of bear spray.
It didn’t make any difference to us that we’d never seen a grizzly while we were backpacking, the few black bears we saw were a long ways off, we
heard wolves a few times while backpacking, but never actually saw one, we’ve seen more cougars in the valley where we live than we ever saw on backpacking trips, and we never had a problem with the moose we encountered - not even the cows with calves. We (I) carried a powerful (for a handgun) revolver, and we
both carried bear spray, because after all, “It’s not the odds, it’s the stakes.”
BTW, I always felt more ill-at-ease at the trailheads than I ever did 20 miles into the wilderness. Occasionally I spotted what I thought might have been 2-legged predators at trailheads. But I’ve never seen any of those types of predators more than a few minutes hike from the road.
