What Does it Feel Like to Be Bear-Sprayed? These Hikers Found Out.

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It may not look like much, but one little can has the ability to stop a charging grizzly. Since its invention in the 1980s. Bear spray has become an essential tool for people recreating or working in bear country. It’s easy to use. It has a better success rate than any other deterrent, and it has saved countless lives, both human and bear.

But it got me wondering: if this stuff is so strong that it can convince some of the biggest terrestrial predators on Earth to pack up and go home, what does it feel like to take a shot of it to the face? I haven’t figured out how to talk to bears yet, despite my best efforts, so I did the next best thing and called up a few hikers who have firsthand experience being bear sprayed.

The following conversations have been edited for clarity.

Lee Trebotich

Lee “Natty” Trebotich is a chef and backpacker from North Carolina who runs Food For Adventures.

The year was 2013. It was September, and we were out in Yellowstone National Park.

We attended a bear safety program, ironically, at the Old Faithful visitor center, and it was held right outside the main visitor center lodge and hosted by, one Ranger who looked really young, you know, maybe kind of new to the scene.

She had bear spray on her, but it was mostly on her hip, and she was going over it and briefly talking about it. It was the last segment where she actually pulled the can out and started talking about the way to use it.

Well, lo and behold, there was this one gentleman asking to hold the bear spray. “I have never, had to pull the safety of mine. Can you show me how?” And she responded, that’s a good thing that you’ve never had to put safety off, and no, I’m not going to let you hold it.

This one male keeps on bugging her just to hold the spray. And during one conversation with another visitor, she just, I guess, had enough. She kind of nonchalantly hands this bear spray to this pedestrian. He’s to my right, my girlfriend [now wife,] is to the left. And as she hands this bear spray to him, I look over at my wife and I say, I really don’t think that’s a good idea.

And as I rolled my head back over, he’s standing shoulder to shoulder with me. I look over and he’s struggling with the safety clip. And by the time I look and make contact, the safety clip pops and point blank, the bear spray goes off in my face. All I remember is everybody scattering, everybody running. It got to the point where I’m screaming, I end up running into the visitor center.

I can’t see, I’m just making a loud noise. I had a couple of rangers trying to help me flush my eyes and the bathroom, and, you know, I’m going through this extreme pain.

A lot of the group got hit with second degree [spray], but I was the one that got direct contact. I come out, I look like hell, swollen, and people are still kind of around. As I’m coming out, this guy looks over to my girlfriend and he’s like, man, you’re boyfriend just took a shot in the face.

I had dreads at the time, too. And so for the next couple months, almost a year, that bear spray was stuck in my dreads. So any time, even after washing them, anytime my dreads would get near my eyes, my eyes would start lighting up with. I’d almost feel like [I was] pepper sprayed again.

The way I can describe it is as somebody that’s standing over your open eyelid with a cayenne pepper and a lemon and just squeezing it in there. You can’t blink.

I’m still an advocate. I’ve personally seen what it can do. It definitely works.

Chelsea Murphy

While Tretbotich’s experience was a worst-case scenario, even getting bear sprayed indirectly can be agonizing. Chelsea Murphy is the hiker and content creator behind the account @shecolorsnature. She had just gotten back to her home from an excursion with her toddler in north-central Washington when she accidentally triggered a can of bear spray in her pack’s external pocket.

I was actually out shooting content for a brand and getting outside with my toddler. We had just gone on a long bike ride, we had gotten out and done some wildflower identification. My mantra is just getting outside 30 minutes every day.

I had actually cut my finger on this hike-bike extravaganza with my son. And so I was kind of rushing. I had just pulled into my driveway and I had had my finger wrapped, because I was going to bandage it and get it all stitched up and ready to continue doing my mothering thing. I was reaching and looking for my cell phone, because I was going to try and get ahold of my husband, see if he could help me out.

In the process of reaching for my cell phone in the back of my Bronco, I yanked on my hiking pack, and it must’ve released the safety or pull pin that there is on the bear spray canister. And this bear spray canister, I will also say, has lived in the same place and the side of my hiking pack for the last, like 7 to 8 years. So it’s amazing that this was the first time that this has happened to me.

My first instinct when I heard the crash, the spray of the can, was to kind of stumble back and assess what just happened. So that’s what I did. I stumbled out, and I was just like, that was my bear spray. And then all of the terrible, horrible things start tracking through your brain I didn’t know at that point where it had gone and where it had landed on my body. So I called my husband, he was unavailable, and I sent a bunch of SOS messages out to him. I had already taken my toddler out of his car seat and put him in our little play area in the front yard, thankfully. So he was not in any danger.

I called my neighbor, she answered. I was like, are you home? Apparently I was really calm. I didn’t actually tell her I had just gotten sprayed in the face with bear spray. I just said, are you home? Can you please come over? And when she actually arrived, which is around the corner. I was just leaning over the garden hose, spraying my eyes and spitting on the gravel. And she was like, what is going on here? Are you okay? My son is off playing happily, not knowing at all what had gone on. And then I let her know I just got sprayed in the face with bear spray.

She started googling, and Google says stay calm, right? The most important thing, stay calm in the situation. You might feel the urge to panic once the sting starts to set in. By that time, a couple minutes had passed and my lips were on fire. I could tell that nothing had gotten in my mouth. I had kind of felt like [I was] breathing in really intense hot jalapeños or peppers or something. But it hadn’t really affected my mouth too much. It was all topical.

She’s like, if you have contacts and you should take those out. And that was a pivotal moment in the experience for me, because as soon as I took out my contacts, which were kind of acting as a barrier to my eyes at that point, I don’t know if it was on my hands, but it just lit everything up, like my whole my eyebrows, my forehead, my eyes were just hurting so much.

In the back of my head, I just kept thinking, the poor bears, or, you know, the people who accidentally get sprayed in the face with bear spray. It’s not a fun experience at all.

Matthew Keenan

Murphy and Trebotich got lucky in one key way: their bear spray incidents occurred near a bathroom where they could wash themselves off. But what about when you’re out in the backcountry? I asked my coworker Matthew Keenan, who had his own run-in with bear spray while hunting in Wyoming.

I was in Wyoming, elk hunting, with bear spray. We had just driven to some remote back spot where we were going to unload from the truck and hike into the woods a bit. And this is like the second or third stop that we’ve had.

I got my pack, got bear spray on the hip holster, everything was ready to go. So I just grabbed my pack out of the truck, walked around, checked my water bottle, and then threw my pack on. And as I was tightening my shoulder straps, I heard a hissing sound and was like, that’s weird. And then: splatter on my face, and this moment of panic, like, what is that? [There was] that sort of delay before pain sets in. What had happened was that in taking my pack out of the truck, the safety clip from the bear spray had popped off. It was still hanging on the string on the canister, but it had popped off. When I pulled my straps down to tighten those up, I just pressed right down onto it.

I’m not sure how the angle quite worked out, but it basically sprayed my whole arm, and that splattered up onto my face, so it wasn’t like I got sprayed directly in the face. But from how much that hurt, I’m incredibly glad that I didn’t do that.

I quickly realized what had happened and threw my pack off. My buddy who’d been driving the truck had been figuring out his own gear. He quickly jumped in the truck to find a different water bottle because he didn’t want to go next to my pack.

He’s coughing and feeling it just from it being in the air—it had stopped spraying. He’s running over to me with water, trying to help me get it out of my eyes. I’m grabbing snow and scrubbing my face as much as I can. It was an incredibly painful experience.

After all of that, I had one bar of service and called my friend who’s an optometrist to see [if I needed] to go to a hospital? Luckily, he answered and was like, no, if you can see, you’re probably fine. In a perfect world, you’d have, like, a saline solution and flush your eyes like. But I understand you’re in the middle of the woods.

We spent another 20 minutes or so scrubbing down our clothes and everything with snow. It’s amazing, it got everywhere. We found little droplets that were visible on our clothes on the side of his truck.Any plastic around, like the wheel well, or his mirror, had little drops that we tried to scrub off so that he wouldn’t have permanent bear spray damage.

When I got home [to] my wife, we told the story. She laughed at me because I was fine, because that’s what you do when people are okay, is you laugh at the stories. Then she kissed me on my head, on my hair, and she got tingling lips from the bear spray that was still in my hair.

It’s not like I got it full-on in the face, but, it was plenty to make me never want to do that again.

The three people we talked to each had vastly different experiences, but they all agreed on one thing: bear spray hurts, a lot. All three of our interviewees came away with an appreciation for the power that bear spray packs, and a new understanding of why it’s important to store it safely. So next time you’re out on the trail, bring your bear spray—but maybe check the safety first.

Find more bear stories in Bear Month 2025, running through June 15.