Bear spray at close range can change everything. It has to be instantly accessible or it is of little use. That means carrying it in a holster on your belt or pack waist belt. Practice deploying it.
I was out in the back acreage last night tending to some things to get ready for the temps in the teens. I had my dog and a headlamp. Knowing that there are bears around changes what it feels like to be out there. Situational awareness all the time.
Bear at the back fence yesterday in broad daylight 1500 hours.
He seemed to be discouraged by all of the barking neighborhood dogs and their scent.
Is Nevada Fish and Game doing anything to trap them and move them away from town?
Where was it exactly. West or North Carson? Pinion Hills?
Hi szihn,
Nevada Dept of Wildlife really has their hands full. Bears have moved into all of the residential areas in Carson Valley. There is a Bear Hotline. I called and left a message and they never even called back. I am in the East Carson Valley next to the BLM fence. I have a one million acre back yard of public land. It is pinion-juniper and sagebrush and does not look much like bear habitat.
I met an NDOW guy at my local lake checking for non-native hitchhikers on boats. I talked with him for awhile. He would not admit that NDOW takes bears from Lake Tahoe and releases them in the mountain range behind my house. My neighbor saw two culvert traps in the are 2 weeks ago. I believe that NDOW was releasing bears from Tahoe, not trapping them out of our neighborhood.
I wish I could say I am surprised, but knowing the inner-working of state governments (and Nevada being where I learned it) I am not surprised at all.
Government creates the problems and then offers you a “solution”---- which is ALWAYS for the people to give up more control and freedoms.
I don’t see much loss of freedom, yet.
Depends on your view of the Bill of Rights.
Nevada has lots of freedom and lots of room. Why I like living here. One million acres of Government owned Federal land behind the house. Legal weed, alcohol all the time, gambling and prostitution. I can carry a loaded revolver in my truck without a permit.
I see no loss of Freedom at the moment, but there is a lot of it on the horizon.
Went out hiking behind the house yesterday on BLM land with my dog.
I did not see any bear tracks although we had some snow and wind lately.
It is very open country so it is possible to see a long way. A few wild horses but that was it.
People living in cities have different problems than people in the country. Cities dominate the legal decisions for the state and ultimately the entire country. That’s why the electoral college was instituted, to give areas with less representation a more level playing field. Rising crime rates in large population areas follows the lenient prosecution. The influx of homeless will only increase homelessness. If you open a spigot, you can decide when to turn it off. When you smash the valve and don’t have a plan to fix it . . .
hmmm off topic and political.
Agree, just thinking about how we go to a pristine environment and find that people use it for a dump. We can go deeper into the wilderness to find pristine nature. Then we are encroaching on the bears. They find your back pack full of food. In a bears mind: I found it. Its mine. You want it, you can have it over my dead body, because I got to fatten up before I can go to sleep. Its complicated.
There are beautiful spots along the Jones Falls in Baltimore, but its not safe to get there. Then the sites are litered with shopping carts, tires, furniture, trash bags, plastic bottles, styrofoam. We just sigh and drive further out. Some don’t have that option. I wonder how we can solve it without going out to push the bears away. Awareness. Think total picture. Not just the space around us.
According to several bear conservation sites, Black bears have been increasing their numbers dramatically over the past decades and consequently their range. It is just as likely that they are moving into our territory as we into theirs. The MN DNR, for instance, says that since 1989 there has been a 54% increase in Black bear population in the state.
While many species are adversely impacted when humans move outward into the wild - especially since recent events have sent underprepared folks looking for respite in the wilderness - bears, coyotes and even mountain lions are learning how to live in developed areas. This brings us into proximity with each other because of wildlife adaptation, not just the relentless expansion of humans.
I thought the OP was about black bears in a specific area, one I never visited.
My experience when paddle camping wild areas (AK, WY, CO) was that sometimes I would see signs they had been around.
In grizzly country in AK, we just decided to NOT CAMP THERE. Even so, one night I heard something moving around not far from our tents and in the morning found huge grizzly prints and the flattened vegetation where it had sat or lain. Not right near tents but not that far away. We knew it was time to be extra-cautious—the salmon run had just begun. That’s the closest encounter we had.
In contrast, black bears that consider human presence a signal of easy scrounging have been a worse problem. Where we used to live, people left their garbage bins out the night before pickup even though both the trash companies AND the state wildlife dept repeatedly told people to put it out only the morning of pickup. We always, always followed this advice.
People also left bowls of pet food outside, another bad habit.
Unfortunately, right when we moved into that house my husband ignored the seller’s warning not to store bird seed in the built-in under-bench boxes in the front porch. My husband ignored both his advice and my reiteration of it. The predictable happened not long after that. I awoke to loud banging sounds, turned outside lights on, tried to wake up my near-deaf-and-sleeps-like-corpse husband to no avail, and then I ran down to YELL at that bear while waving my arms around. It was hitting the Plexigas porch windows. The bear ran away…and returned within half an hour. I again hazed it and this time it stayed away.
I was livid. My husband finally figured out that the warnings were valid and never stored food in there again. When I called the wildlife dept they said that in late summer bears forage up to 20 hours a day! They advised spraying ammonia around the porch to mask the seed scents for a few days, to keep the bear from becoming a repeat visitor. It worked. No more bear trouble after that, and we lived there for 15 years, among not only black bears but also mountain lions. We left the claw marks in the redwood siding even when we got the buildings professionally restained. Good warning to the next owners!
Yellowstone NP requires backcountry campers to go through bear orientation. Do not ignore. They also have rules on how to store food. Do not ignore. Heeding these rules, we never had trouble there on any of our several backcountry camping trips there. Also, if bears have been reported too many times in a certain area, there will be posted advisories. I think there was even a temporary closure of a few sites at least one time.
Ironically, black bears sometimes migrate down to big subdivisions from the wilder areas. We read of this every.single.year happening in the fast-growing greater Durango, where too many people think it’s cool/amusing/“we’reCountryPeopleNow!” to leave garbage cans, uncleaned cooking grills, and of course DOG BOWLS outside (because getting a dog means they’re a local now!). Of course, all the bears care about all summer and early fall is gorging themselves. The subidivisions turn into bear magnets and the complains to relocate roll in.
Wildlife dept says they want to move bears into the wilder areas. I personally know from observing bears and deer that even though they might retreat to wilder areas, the easy living of garbage, dog food, food scraps left around (bear magnets) and cattle pasture, provided water, fruit trees, and relative protection from poaching (deer magnets) means that I see MORE deer in pastures than in the wildlands.
So far, in my location, black bears seems to avoid getting near humans. We see them once in a great while on gamecams or see their tracks and scat. They’re still wild enough not to hang nearby. But the suburban or exurban subdivisions full of careless people and pets are a different story. Don’t give them any hope of easy food.
Relocating a bear does not always solve the problem…
A Relocated Bear Walked 1,000 Miles Back to Its Favorite Campsite - Backpacker
Solve the people problems and you solve the bear problems.
Just by accident 
Had to laugh about the husband part.
A few years ago something go into the small metal garbage can that I keep bird seed in. It has the bail type handle that snaps over the lid. The lid was folded up over the bail and only scraps of seed remained. I happily told my husband “we have a bear!”. He laughed and said, it was just raccoons, silly.
You’d think that after almost 40 years married to a biologist he’d know better.
Soooo. I put a little seed back into the can, bent the lid back into place, put it on the cement walk and put a 2 foot ring of diatomaceous earth around it. The next morning, I grabbed my husband by the lapel and drug him out to see the foot prints. “Still think it’s a raccoon?”, I asked.
I would have said it’s just a big raccoon.