“It was rushing me,” Cortlandt Koerwitz said of the bear. The can of spray in his hand did the rest.
Koerwitz’s daughters were in the garage of the family’s vacation home near Lake Tahoe, packing coolers for a Fourth of July boat trip, when they saw a bear going through the garbage. A bear in that position normally bolts. This one walked toward them, the girls told their father.
He reached for the bear spray he keeps by the garage door. Video of the encounter shows him firing it as the animal closed in. The cloud drifted back at him, which he did not enjoy. “The bear spray worked, and it worked on me too,” Koerwitz said. “It definitely worked.” On the recording he can be heard coughing and saying, “Got to get a mask on.”
He told ABC7 he sees bears around the house often and has footage of an earlier visit from two years ago. This was the first time one had acted aggressively.
“Wasn’t a lot of options if I didn’t have that bear spray,” he said. His advice for anyone living where bears are common is to keep a can within easy reach. Without it, he said, he would have had almost no way to defend himself.
