Get off the tracks when the train’s coming.
If there’s one animal in America that stirs up simultaneous fear and amazement, just at the mere sight, it has to be the grizzly bear. Grizzlies are found in the western part of the lower 48, Canada, and Alaska. They can live in a number of terrains, from arctic tundra to high mountain forests to coastal regions, and feed on an impressive range of foods which include fish, small mammals, berries, grasses, and of course, larger mammals such as deer, moose, and elk.
Grizzlies aren’t just big… they are hyper-intelligent, incredibly fast, and built like tanks. Of course, you can usually tell you’re looking at a grizzly (and not a black bear) by a few distinct features. The first and most noticeable is the big muscle hump on their shoulders, which is used for digging. Grizzly claws are also much longer than a black bear… sometimes up to 4 inches long. They also have a more concave face shape, whereas the black near is much straighter from the forehead to the tip of the snout.
But overall, the size, strength and speed clearly favor the grizzly bear… despite weighing upwards of 600 pounds or more, they can run over 30 mph.
Canadian Grizzlies
While the Lower 48 only has a few pockets of grizzlies left (mostly around Yellowstone and Glacier National Park), Canada is absolutely crawling with them. There are an estimated 25,000 to 29,000 grizzly bears roaming the Canadian wilderness, and the vast majority of them live out West in the rugged terrain of British Columbia, Alberta, the Yukon, and the Northwest Territories.
Because the Canadian backcountry is so vast and remote, the bears up there are true wild animals that often have zero exposure to humans, making them incredibly unpredictable if you stumble into their backyard. And while we use the term “mama bear” to describe protective human moms, the real-life version is infinitely more terrifying. A female grizzly (called a sow) with cubs is arguably the most dangerous animal on the continent.
Protective Mamas
Sows do not do “warning signs” if they feel their cubs are genuinely threatened. If you accidentally surprise a mom and her babies on a tight trail, her instinct usually isn’t to run away… it’s to neutralize the threat immediately. The overwhelming majority of fatal grizzly bear attacks on humans aren’t predatory (meaning the bear wants to eat you); they are defensive maulings by a mother protecting her kids.
Cubs stay with their mother for about two to three years, which means for a massive chunk of a female grizzly’s life, she is on high alert, ready to absolutely destroy anything that gets too close to her family. They’ll even take a run at a rancher’s full size truck…
A video from Alberta, Canada, went viral again recently, and shows both the aggression, power, and raw athleticism of a mama grizzly bear. A rancher was driving down a rural road in Alberta when he spotted a mama grizzly and three cubs ahead on the road. Naturally, he started filming and when he got close, the mama bear sensed danger and charged at his truck.
He described the scene:
“I was driving to help a rancher friend near the community where I grew up in southern Alberta, Canada. We have a second home here, and I was spending some time helping friends and working on our ranch. I drove to my friend’s ranch, and on the way, I saw these bears, running down the middle of the road.
I grabbed my phone and began recording and when they left the road I pulled over and the sow grizzly bear turned around and charged my truck!”
I want you to notice how effortlessly she dives between the barbed wire fence. She’s screaming mad, absolutely massive, and yet, she’s still able to so gracefully leap through a gap no more than a foot and a half wide? Of course, if she did catch a barb, she probably wouldn’t even notice… she was seeing red to protect those cubs from his truck.
But that’s the way mama bears operate… even though there was no real threat. In fact, there’s rarely really a threat to her cubs other than a boar who wants to mate with her (male bears called boars will sometimes attack cubs to try and mate with the mother). But even the slightest perceived threat… a lone hiker on a trail… is enough to send her into attack mode.
You certainly do not want to tangle with a mama grizzly… if this video isn’t proof, I don’t know what is.
