Our family is so crazy about bears that we even call our home Bear Lodge.
We have more than 20 carved wooden bears scattered around the property, thanks to a wonderful artist named Bob Waits.
My Biggest Bear Story
But the biggest bear story I have been involved in occurred about 16 months ago. Cowboy State Daily Outdoor writer Mark Heinz and I took on the famous “Robo Bear” at a competition to see how fast a person can shoot bear spray at an oncoming grizzly.
Mark did well. My attempt was pathetic. Despite my failure, the video of the encounter was a huge hit. This video has been viewed 717,000 times on Instagram! That is almost one and half times the population of Wyoming.
Dan Thompson, the bear expert with the Wyoming Game and Fish, had this Robo Bear set-up at the Lander Community Center. He was inviting people to see how fast they could pop off the cap of the bear spray container and shoot spray into the face on an oncoming mechanical bear.
Now bears are really, really fast. And, in order to survive, you also need to be really, really fast. I think Mark would have survived his encounter. In my case, I would have ended up being lunch for a very angry bear who would be gobbling me up while nursing his sore eyes and burned up nostrils.
Frankly, I am astonished to think I was in a video that has over 700,000 views. This might mean that people around the world are just as fascinated with bears as we are?
Chainsaw Artist
I always gave myself credit for discovering the artist Bob Waits with his unique bear carving skills.
About 35 years ago, a big hulking young man who looked a lot like a lumberjack had a small display at the Wyoming State Winter Fair showing his bear carvings. They were quite rudimentary but I did a feature story on him and bought one of his bears, which he said was his first sale.
Over the years his skills improved and he became an excellent artist in his own right.
After carving and selling 3,000 wooden bears, he said he had saturated the Wyoming market and was moving on. He loaded up his motorhome and has been doing fine art out in California ever since.
(Cowboy State Daily Staff) 
(Cowboy State Daily Staff)
I think 18 of the 20 carved bears on my property were done by Bob.
In 2010, we built a 24x24 deck with a carport under it and I left the posts long thinking I would have eagles or something carved on them.
Each Halloween, my wife Nancy would dress up in some costume for our grandkids (Wolf, Hayden, and Finis Johnson) and one year she dressed up as Snow White.
Bingo, that gave me my idea for carvings on those posts. Coincidentally, there were seven of them and I asked Bob if he could make the Seven Dwarfs in wood as little bears. He did and they are just magnificent. And he carved them on the spot. Just amazing.
I have other bear carving projects lined up but Bob has not come back. If there are any other chain saw artists out there looking for work, please reach out to me.
Other Bear Stories
One of the best-read stories in the history of Cowboy State Daily is how two college wrestlers from Powell fought off a grizzly bear during a back country trip back two years ago.
It was Oct. 5, 2022, when Kendall Cummings fought off a grizzly that intended to kill and eat his buddy Brady Lowry. They had been out hunting antlers when the near fatal-encounter occurred.
Two other buddies August Harrison and Orrin Jackson came along and helped their mangled and bloodied companians back to safety.
The boys had bear spray in their backpacks but it was of little use to try to fend off the attacking bear. And I can vouch for the fact that there is very little time to act in these circumstances, based on my ill-fated performance that has been seen 700,000 times. What infamy. But I digress.
The wrestlers are featured in a documentary made by an outfit called Brave Wilderness.
Cummings graduated from Northwest and is hoping to become a real estate agent in Evanston. Lowry is coaching high school wrestling in Idaho.
What Kind Of Bear
Here is my last bear story: A unique part of the four-year curriculum at Wyoming Catholic College in Lander is a three-week wilderness course taken by all freshmen just before starting college.
The wilderness trip is a true spiritual experience as these young people from all over the USA (students come from 38 different states) as they bond with others and attend religious services with the two priests who tag along.
The Catholic faith involves communion with wine and bread in the form of hosts. This is where this story starts to get interesting.
A few years ago, despite having to medically evacuate one student for stomach pain and one priest from Florida for altitude illness, that year’s event was splendid. There was, however, this one situation, that I need to share with my readers.
Seems that while the students were off climbing a mountain, a bear broke into the priest’s tent, drank all the wine, and gobbled up all the hosts.
Later, when a ranger was asked if he thought it was a brown bear, a black bear, or a grizzly bear, he allegedly replied:
“Not sure. But I am pretty sure it was a Catholic bear.”
