I was out with my two boys (7 and 13) at a backcountry quad accessible spot about 25 km from my truck. We set up camp and toured around a bit until later in the night. We had dinner around 8pm and played a few games around the fire. I sent my little guy to bed at 10:55 while me and the oldest stayed up for a bit more to let my youngest get to sleep. I was enjoying a sambuca and we were chatting across from each other when he looks at me and calmly says “dad, bear”

I look behind me and there’s a black bear inside 30 yards from me and it’s just twilight where I can see his outline but nothing else. I stood up, faced the bear, kicked some dirt at him and started yelling to try and scare him off. It didn’t phase him, so I told the kid to grab my 10/22 and ammo out of the tent and I already had a loaded mag in my pocket. I fired a couple rounds in the air to scare him off, but no response from him so I fired a few more really close to his head to his left and above him. This got him moving a bit and he ran off into the trees.

Now I looked at my kid and started discussing our options as town is 3 hours away and I wasn’t really rattled, I figured the bear was gone for the night. We talked about grabbing a bit of our gear and driving up the road 5-6 km and sleeping there and then I turned my head and caught the bears eyes light up in my headlamp about 75 yards out. I fired 4-5 more shots close to him again with no response so I emptied the mag again to get him moving.

A few more minutes go by and here a weird noise on the other side of our camp. It sounded similar to a fuel drum expanding and making a dong sound. The first time I heard it didn’t concern me because I hear all kinds of weird noises in the woods that are unexplainable, but after the third one I realized he was in my tub trailer pulling out the full can of gas that was in there. I grabbed a pocket full of .22 shells and moved towards my tub trailer u til I saw eyes again and fired off a bunch more shells.

By this time I realize it’s time to grab the kids and go so I gave the rifle to my oldest and told him to keep turning his head looking for eyes and shoot anything that comes close. I grabbed the littlest one out of the tent, started both quads and pointed the lights opposite each other. I made one more trip to my tent, loaded up my most valuable belongings in my pack sack, through our food tote and cooler on my quad rack and we were outta there.

Something I’m unsure of is the smell that engulfed us just before we left. It was definitely stinky garbage bear smell, but I couldn’t smell it earlier so I’m wondering if he had circled around us again and was very close or it just took a bit of time to make it our way.

This is what my tent looked like today when I went to get it. He just ripped a giant hole in the side, poked his head in to look around and left it alone. There was zero food or anything with a scent in there, just clothes and sleeping gear. The only thing I can think is he was either looking to eat one of us, or he went into someone else’s tent at some point and found their food so he knew where to look. Either way I’m happy I wasn’t in there when that happened. So im out a gas can, a 40 pack of bottled water and a brand new luxe mega horn that’s never been slept in.