I was raised near Wheatland, but still have a couple of bear stories. A local farmer heard his cattle in a feed lot bawling one morning. Went out and there was a black bear up a utility pole. He called the Game Warden to come and get the body.
I went elk hunting by Pinedale in about 1965 with my dad and a friend of his who had lost an arm in WW2. The friend came back to our little camp one day and started packing. He told my dad that a bear had followed him all day. He would walk and the bear would walk. He would stop and the bear would stop. The bear would loop around some and be waiting for him to pass through an area. He said that a man with two arms had little to no chance against a bear so what chance did a one armed man have? We did not get an elk that year.
35 years ago my husband and I were backpacking the continental divide and were in southern Colorado when we came upon sheepherder and his sheep. He told us some of what we already knew - that there were black bears in the area and that we should hang our food in the trees. He also told us that we would probably be okay because we had a dog with us. We thought that was pretty funny since our dog was a dachshund (although a 30 pound one) but he said it wasn’t the size of the dog but his smell. He had a sheep dog who sat calmly at his side and hardly even looked at our dog. Anyway, we heard the sheep through that night but by morning they had moved on. We never encountered any bear. Years later, camping in the boundary waters with our kids, we smelled bear - no mistaking it - large predator poop. And a friend who lives close to Yellowstone up on the side of a mountain, has had a grizzle leave claw marks on the outside of her bedroom window on the second floor. She sleeps with a gun and pepper spray now.