Origins: The basic story here is true, although some of the details are wrong, perhaps because two different recent incidents of very large bear killings in Alaska have been conflated into one.
The bear pictured above was killed in November 2001 by a hunter (not a Forest Service employee) who came across it while he was deer-hunting in Alaska. As he described the event on the message board at HuntingNet.com:
My partner and I ran into the unexpected . . . "BIG ARSE URSUS"! The bear was shot 10 yards away (no zeros missing in that figure my friends) in the head with a .338 Remington Winnie, using 250 grain Nosler handloads, followed up with two shots to the vitals. A very quick clean death.
We were working up a creek, headed for the mountains to hunt blacktail. He was coming down the creek, hunting for the last of the spawning Coho in the creek. We initially spotted him from 40 yds off. As a matter of fact we were glassing the bear over the high brush just behind the bear when we spotted him.
The pictures of the November 2001 shooting became confused with a later account of a killing, also in Alaska, of another very large bear. This incident, as described by the Associated Press, took place on 21 April 2002 in Anchorage:
Sigfredo Casiano, 28, was hiking to a camp site near Swanson River Road Sunday morning when he heard a noise in nearby woods. Initially, Casiano thought a moose was making the noise but he removed the safety from his rifle as a precaution, troopers said.
Soon after, a brown bear appeared about 10 feet away and began moving toward him.
Casiano fired one shot with his rifle, striking the bear behind the skull. The bear collapsed and Casiano man fired several more shots.
The bear was described as a male between eight and nine feet tall.
A moose carcass was found nearby and the bear was probably protecting the find, troopers said.
The pictures shown above (and the others displayed at HuntingNet.com) are from November 2001; none of them is a photo of the bear killed by Sigfredo Casiano in April 2002.
