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I ran into a black bear hiking a few weeks ago in NY; it was absolutely terrifying. It moved slowly closer when I turned to pick up a club, then moved off when I moved forward a little bit yelling (with a club in one hand, spray in the other, and a turd at my sphincter about to let loose). Last fall a foreign college student had been killed nearby (on the NJ side of the border), though I think they were taking selfies with the bear then scattered when it got closer. In any case, I wasn’t about to go out like that (and was probably lucky). The best way to describe the feeling is that I could literally “hear” my heart pounding; in the end the scariest thing was how silent the bear was (both watching me approach before I was aware of it and then when it turned and loped away). If I was hiking later in the year when more brush was grown in, I would have walked right into it without ever seeing it (and would have still had my map in one hand and GPS in the other).