Teenage Girl Has Scary Close Encounter With Curious California Black Bear

A viral video is making the rounds of a 17-year-old girl who was hiking in the Mammoth Lakes area of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California when she stumbled upon a black bear who evidently wanted to find a new friend. With apologies for the strange possible meme-style voiceover in the following TikTok, you can see the bear put his paw on the girl's leg, which leads to a good fright but thankfully no further damage. As is widely known, the California state flag rocks a grizzly bear at its center, so while it's not unexpected to encounter one of these big mammals out in the wild, it nevertheless has to be horrifying when it actually happens to you. Bears don't seem to bother humans or present imminent threats to them unless they feel like their young are being threatened. Whether it's a stray bear wandering through a neighborhood to break up a driveway basketball game in Connecticut, or a big 'un just chilling on the golf tee box watching some weekend warrior spank a drive, there don't seem to be many bears with ill intentions. Their massive frames might be scary, but as long as we humans mind our own business, they don't seem particularly interested in attacking us. In the rare instance where you do encounter a bear who might be "seeing red" for lack of better phrasing, the go-to advice is always to make yourself bigger by raising your arms in the air. Don't ask me how that works, but it allegedly does. Good thing I haven't had to deploy that in real life. I learned from covering that bear driveway basketball story that some of them can accelerate up to 30 to 35 mph. That's freaking booking it . So I guess the "flight" instinct when encountering an angry bear is perhaps the worst way to go, because if they want to, they can chase you down with ease. Anyway, back to the 17-year-old composed, brave soul from this latest video, Kimberly Mendoza, said it was a " pretty scary moment " according to Veuer (h/t USA Today 's FTW ). Just glad to see everyone wound up safe. Too bad the bear couldn't make a new pal, but hey, probably best for everyone involved to go their separate ways.