Here is how you know if it was a bluff charge or not; If the bear turns away, it was a bluff charge. If it keeps on coming, hit it with your empty pepper spray bottle! (Just before it makes you into a food cache.)
In the blink of an eye, a defensive grizzly bear sow was rolling like a freight train through the willows along Peters Creek.
Then the brush was bathed in an orange-gray mist.
And in that instant, hiker Carl Ramm saw the sow’s eye go wide “and it was gone,” he said.
Neither Ramm nor his wife, Susan Alexander, clearly saw the bear leave. They heard it crashing through the brush as it beat a retreat with a cub trailing behind.
“It sounded like a small cub,” Ramm said.
The couple hadn’t known until almost the last moment that they had somehow walked between a grizzly sow and her cub along the Peters Creek Trail, eight or nine miles into Chugach State Park last weekend.
Similar situations have prompted nasty encounters with brown bears. Grizzly sows are extremely protective of their young. Statistics on bear attacks show a predominance of sows with cubs ripping into people, though they don’t often kill.
Read more: http://www.adn.com/2003/06/08/147318/bear-spray-stops-charging-sow.html#ixzz1T8j38gPO