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Black bear looking at a can of bear spray
Bear spray is one of a few things in life that you buy while hoping you’ll never actually have to use it, and one man in California proved why it’s a good idea to have it on hand after he was caught off-guard by an animal that treated him to an unnerving encounter at his home in Tahoe.
Most people would prefer not to come face-to-face with a bear in the wild, and while they may not usually pose any real threat to humans, it’s kind of difficult to take solace in that fact when you find yourself in close proximity to one.
I feel like advice concerning what you should do if you encounter one of those animals was as ubiquitous as tips for how to survive an encounter with quicksand when I was growing up, but if you need a refresher, the National Park Service says you should stand your ground, make yourself as large as possible, and slowly back away.
That advice is applicable to encounters with brown and black bears, although that isn’t the case if they decide to attack you: you should play dead if the former is responsible and do everything in your power to fight back if you’re targeted by the latter.
If you know you’re going to be in Bear Country, it never hurts to have a can of bear spray on hand, and a video that was recently captured in California is a ringing endorsement for that method of defense.
A guy in California showed why it’s a good idea to have bear spray on hand during a scary encounter in Tahoe
California is basically tied with Maine for second place when it comes to the states with the highest number of bears in America, as each one is home to approximately 35,000 of the black variety (Alaska leads the way with 135,000, a total that also includes grizzlies and polar bears).
Those bears primarily reside in mountainous areas in The Golden State, and there are plenty to be found in the region surrounding Lake Tahoe. That includes Tahoma, the tiny town located on the western shore of that body of water, which is the site of a cabin owned by Courtlandt Koerwitz.
According to ABC10, Koerwitz headed there for the Fourth of July, and his daughters were packing a cooler with ice to prepare for a boat day on Lake Tahoe when they informed him they’d encountered a bear inside the garage that started making its way toward them after it spotted them.
He grabbed a can of bear spray and went outside to investigate, and a surveillance camera captured the moment he spun and deployed the deterrent after catching the charging animal out of the corner of his eye.
A man used bear-spray to defend himself against a bear that charged at him in Tahoe. He said on social media that the bear had gotten into their garbage and was aggressive toward his daughter and her friends when they startled it. pic.twitter.com/3dkeDulypT
— ABC7 News (@abc7newsbayarea) July 9, 2026
Koerwitz said he also got a taste of the spray (adding it “was hard to breathe”), but it worked as intended after the bear fled the scene.
He acknowledged the animal may have started charging at him to try to scare him off as opposed to mounting an attack (it did look like it stopped before the spray was used), but he still credited the can for diffusing the situation better than he would have been able to without it.