Not me, but my father told me this story about his encounter with a grizzly bear cave.
When my dad was young, he worked as a laborer (?) not sure of his title, for the US Forest Service in Alaska, a long ass time ago, like in the 60s (I'm old af). The way he described his duties was that there were random cabins kind of spread out throughout the Alaskan wilderness that the Service maintained for either lost hikers, or rangers working in the area, whatever. He said they were very rough, but would keep you dry and warm during a bad weather bout.
My dad was one of the dudes that would go maintain them, he only did it for like a year or two. He would build them, fix them, stock them with supplies, etc... The catch was, there are no roads to these cabins, they are all walking in and out only, and some are 100s of miles from roadways, at least back then, and so the only way you could get relatively close was to hop on a float plane and have it "puddle jump" from one body of water to another.
Sometimes, when you puddle jump like that, you have to be wary of your fuel on those planes because the heavier the load, the more fuel you burn and you can't load down the plane too much because they are small, etc... So the cabins were made of wood harvested nearby and built by hand. Tools were about the only thing that could be flown in. You're not fitting plywood and shingles on a float plane.
Anyways, this would require many trips, and depending on where the cabins were, you may not be right next to a lake, or you may need to hike a while to get to them.
What I'm trying to say is that the cabins weren't built out of convenience, they were built in a specific location because of a specific purpose (seismic reading stations, radio towers on top of a peak, etc...) ease of access for a lot of them was not the point.
So my Dad was having to hike to one of these remote cabins because the last person there reported that it had been damaged the previous winter or whatever. He wasn't carrying very much, like a tool box, a flare gun, and some other stuff. He'd been to the cabin before he said, but didn't remember the easy way to get to it, so he tried to go an easy route up and come back down.
Well, the way he tells it, he had lost sight of the peak in the dense trees at the base, and the cabin was near the peak he was trying to reach. He decided to walk around to the base side of the peak because he remembered approaching it before with the main mountain on his right.
While he was trying to get there he started to smell this awful smell. He described at as a mixture of sweet cotton candy and rotten flesh all in the same. He immediately thought of bears, and thought one was close, so he stopped got low and listened out for one.
He says he stayed put for like 5 minutes and didn't hear anything, just this god awful aroma and it was coming from all around him. He could not discern which direction it was coming from so he could go away from it. He began to get panicked and decided to go back the way he had come.
And that's when he heard it. A very loud snap. He looked up and thought a tree branch broke, or something, but as he looked up, the ground fell out from under him and he fell about 7 feet to solid ground.
It was pitch black, the smell was so intense that he could feel his eyes watering and could not catch his breath. He got to his feet and was just scared to death. He had fallen into a cave, and it was one used by a bear to hibernate.
Fortunately, he only worked from spring to fall, which is like 4-5 months, and so the bear was not at home. he made his way out of the cave and was covered in bear shit and nastiness of all kinds. It was inside his boots squishing into his socks, and just everywhere.
He had to hike ALL the way back down to the only source of water around, where a plane was waiting and the pilot was completely shocked. According to the pilot, apparently there were only Grizzlies sighted in this particular area at that time, so he's 100% convinced it was a Grizzly cave he fell in. My dad was so lucky no bear happened to be in there at the time.
He had to bathe in the lake and decided not to work for the service shortly thereafter. He always asks if you've ever smelled a grizzly, because they are filthy awful smelly creatures.
Username: Anadyne