The Inuit used to have a tradition that the only person allowed to wear trousers made from a polar bear hide was the man who killed it - with a spear.

So if you ever see an Inuit man wearing polar bear trousers know that this is one bad MF you don't wat to fool with.

Friends worked on an oil spill team in the late 70s, his job was to sit on a tower rig with a 375 H&H.

There is videos out there of a fella using a 22-250 and two dogs to hunt polar bear.

Gets very close to the bear and most of the time only needs two shots.

It’s that’s time of the year I binge a few docs about the beast of the Gevaudan and other wolves attacks. I just discovered that in my little town that was a village back then, 4 people (mainly kids) were killed and eaten by wolves in between 1748 and 1756. In the whole region, the number of victim was about 80.  And this is not in gevaudan but a totally different case

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WAIT,  I was assured by Lurch and The Algorical that all the Polar bears would be dead by now
due to the climate catastrophe ..
so obviously this is Fake News

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uh..Welsh is probably the true Mother tongue of the Britons...the Romans bastardized it while the Scot were still grunting and pointing.

that said,  my Tad, Nain and Taid and all the Modryb's and Ewythr's spoke it, I never understood a fucking word..

Based.

That reminded of something. Do they actually pay guys to sit in towers and provide overwatch like in that Liam Neeson movie The Grey?

Kato is from Wales...



but Stoya killed the bear.

Nah, just zulu's

I was wondering how it made it that far south... Glad I'm not the only one.

He was shooting a revolver.

The life lesson here is:

In Alaska, each time you step out your front door..... you become part of its food chain.

It's like a snowy version of Australia.

That is terrible.

I will say however if I lived ANYWHERE in Alaska other than in the city portions of Anchorage or Juneau I would always have a large caliber handgun on me-period.  Hell I have land in country in the Ozarks where the bears are puppies compared to a polar bear and I carry a 44 mag on my hip all the time.

Big cats are often about equal or even smaller than their prey so they have to make sure what they intend to eat is either dead or unlikely to get away before they start to eat it. They will generally crush the throat and cut off air supply, often biting into blood vessels in the throat so their prey usually dies quickly.

Bears are often larger than their prey so they can usually hold it down while eating it - no need to kill it first. It's going to die somewhere in the process anyway.

 Depends on where you live in Alaska.  Once your halfway past or so down the Aleutian chain you are pretty safe, unless your drunk and fall in the water.

Terrible way to go. RIP

Yep, got to speaking with a polite fellow in London once. Could not understand him well at all and could not figure out why. Finally asked him where he was from, turns out he was from Wales. A few Scots can be a challenge depending on where they are from and how much they and you have had to drink

Hot loaded 45 Long Colt would be the bare minumum I should think.  If a 45ACP was all I had, I would empty it into bear, but realistically we are talking 10MM/41 Magnum or better.

Bear just wanted a Coke.



Brotherhood of the Wolf is one of my favorite movies.

10mm is a very popular choice for people up there. A Glock 20 with 15 rounds of heavy 10mm is easy to carry and will stop most anything on this continent. It’s the logical choice besides wheelguns

Then there is the native woman with the Enfield in Churchill.

I looked for the video, but it is old footage, I remember seeing it as a kid.

They have lots of Polar Bear incidents in Churchill.

.222 Remington didn't appear until 1950. Maybe it was a different chambering?

You win the internet for today good sir.

For a second, I thought global warming was real.

Lol. You're not alone.

Food chain scarey...

My first thought was “Did the bear find them tasteless and unseasoned?”.

May they RIP.  

When I read Wales, I was thinking of the nation in the SW of England and was thinking, WTF is a polar bear doing down there?

Been people attacked by wolves in this area.
More wolves in the area so they are coming into the villages.

What I had heard was that the bear and this single mom met on Tinder and decided to meet up. She brought her son along and mentioned that he'd always come first.  Then she asked the bear if he made at least 150k a year. Thats when he bear just fucking lost it

Not that I personally know of other than maybe when the pipeline itself was built.....I do believe they had hired shooters to protect everyone from bears/wolves any other danger out there....But that was in the 70's...

Uhm, we've had bears in anchorage for as long back as I can remember..both black and browns....troopers/F&G are pretty good about getting them back out in the wilds away from people..

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https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=livingwithbears.abchome

Some guy at a wolf preserve in New Jersey of all places told me and the small crowd I work with many years ago that wolves don’t attack humans. I’m sick of all these horseshit lies in the world.  They do a similar thing with bears and guns here.  “Bear spray is more effective” what they really should be saying is “we value the lives of bears more than we value the lives of people”.

Wanted to look that one up as I'd never heard of it. I got wary though as I was typing and wasn't too sure what was on the other side when I hit "Enter". Thankfully, it showed me the ammo and not.....something else.

And holy hell. That's a weird-looking slug. But I guess it serves a purpose as there's a picture of a bear on the box.

Gotcha

I used to fly for a company called Cape Smythe Air Service up there. Lived in Barrow, Deadhorse, Kotz, and Nome. During that time in Nome I'd fly to Wales regularly. 2 memories that stuck with me about Wales...

1. I did my best to not watch a buddy of mine take a shit on the runway at Wales once. He had to go, code 5, touching cotton, full fecal emergency. He decided the approach end of the runway was his most private option because it was on the backside of the plane away from our village agent. That turd of his was frozen on the runway and viewable for weeks after that. Made its own little snowdrift and everything.

2. As a pilot up there you're used to seeing the remains of aircraft wreckages. They're everywhere. One of them was in Wales. It was the remains of a Cape Smythe Piper Pa31-T3-1040, a very rare aircraft. Only 24 ever built. It happened when a pilot of ours was attempting an illegal GPS-BS approach. We did these approaches a lot and we were good at them. We'd typically let down to 50-100' over the water by the radar altimeter and just truck it in the last mile or so until we saw the runway. Well this guy was doing that but visibility was shit. Less than 1/4 mile. He can't see in front of him but he sees the end of the runway passing under him to the left. He's got gear and flaps down and he makes a play for the runway, overshoots it to the left, attempts to correct it back to the right but way over-corrects. Stalls it, digs his right wing tip into the tundra and cart-wheels the aircraft across the runway. He and his passenger were both fine. They walked away from it but the aircraft was a total loss.

I had always seen the fuselage of the aircraft sitting over by the machine shed at the end of the runway in Wales but the pilot had long since departed the company.

Fast forward a few years and one day I'm flying out of Nome goin to Wales. The weather there is down but it's good enough for me to get in with the GPS-BS approach. I'm flying a T3-1040 and I have one passenger onboard (with a bunch of mail and cargo). So I have this guy sitting up front with me so I can pack the cabin and belly pod to the max. I've even got him on headsets so we can chat. Turns out he's an itinerant school teacher.
Then he says, "been quite a while since I've been to Wales. Last time I was here the plane crashed."
I spin my head around "I'm sorry, come again? You survived a plane crash?"
"Yeah, at Wales."
"What company was that?"
"Cape Smythe."
"You mean to tell me you were the passenger on the 1040 that crashed there a few years ago?"
"Yep. I didn't know what it was called but it was just like this plane."
"So the last time you flew to Wales it was with this company, in a plane identical to this, on a day with weather identical to today's... and the plane crashed... yet, here you are doing it again."
"Yeah, I guess so."
"You've got the biggest brass balls of anyone I've ever met."
"Well, you're not planning on crashing, are you?"
"Well, I wasn't, but now I'm not so sure."

I flew that fucking approach tighter than any approach I've flown before or since.

If the options include either carry a big handgun or you and your child getting eaten, carrying the gun would be the better of the two.

They make some pretty potent 12gauge slugs now.

I was just thinking about that this morning, if I lived in AK, the heaviest thing I have against an angry brownie or big griz would be my 870 loaded with slugs and I still wouldn't feel overgunned.

Bears in general don’t GAF and will go wherever they think food can be had.
Garbage dumps or people; bear don’t care.

You've got a way of writing/storytelling that really grabs ones attention.  Cool stories!

Yes, Alaska Commercial (I used to contract to do work for them my buddy still does it now) used to carry piles of firearms and ammo,  they always stocked the common stuff people wanted plus a lot of "new" cartridge/firearms..Alaska commercial had been  one of the biggest fur trading stores/company in Alaska, even back when it was all Russian land/country/stores....There is a long list of big companies that were from the Alaska commercial banner such as kohls, Nordstroms, bagdad tires....NC machinery..and many more...

Not all the facilities had those, but the ones close to water and polar bear dens sure did.

Every once in awhile my dad will slip and say "Let's go to NC Store" and same with some elders.
Kinda of dates him and the elders.

Once in a great while I will call it NC Store.

I never saw a bear guard in a tower, they generally travel with the people needing protection and bitch that it's too cold the whole time.

I forget if I saw it here or at an OTC talk, but there's a neat/frightening video clip of a polar bear stalking an enclosed oil rig, somewhere near Prudhoe.  It figured out it could hide under a staircase and be invisible to the tasty things that might come out of that moving wall.  

(EDIT:  Must've been OTC.  The Conoco guy was talking about how they installed those anti-bear enclosures that SnowRider was talking about, as a result of events like that.)

Thankfully, the oil company wasn't stupid, had CCTV all around the rig, and ambushed Mr. Bear before he could ambush Mr. Rig Hand.  I dunno if they destroyed it or darted/relocated it.  

I think Svalbard infamously has the restrictions that you're not allowed to camp without trip flares and a rifle above .30, something like that.

Glock 20 and 200 grain hardcast would, I'd think, at least deter Mr. Bear, if not be a stopper, in the bwana sense of the word.  A lot easier to carry everywhere than an 870 with slugs.

They're known to hang out under the buildings, it's usually warned about during site specific orientations.