Mighty outdoorsman felled by a small can of bear repellant

As I ran a couple of weeks ago from the widening circle of bear spray I’d just detonated on myself, I had time to consider my standing as my family’s expert outdoorsman.

It was a slow-motion disaster as painful as it was embarrassing, marked by a horrifying red cloud that grew in fits and started from a tiny puncture near the base of what I was coming to see as an unnecessarily large can.

Bear spray, for my friends who haven’t had to familiarize themselves with the stuff, is almost the same as the pepper spray that some people carry for self-defense.

The key differences in what I was running from were that, drop for drop, bear spray is said to sting twice as bad as common self-defense spray, and my can was discharging 12 times as much of it as those key-ring pepper spray canisters hold.

Park rangers in Yellowstone, where about three dozen of my relatives had joined up for a few days, say spray comes in handy if a bear wants to get too familiar. And carrying it made me feel like I knew what I was doing — even after I heard the joke about recognizing grizzly scat by its faint aroma of pepper.

In fact, until the moment I dropped it in a gravel parking lot, that can was one of the things that had everyone at my little family reunion thinking I knew what I was doing.

That’s one of those “secrets” that everyone’s heard but is still surprising to watch play out: Dress the part and act confident, and folks assume you have the savvy to back it up.

It’s why, hours before my disaster, a crowd of relatives ranging from guys with hangovers to an expectant mother with a toddler — including more than a few who thought my plan to hike every day was a waste of a rare chance to sit on my butt all week — ended up following me down a trail for more than four hours.

After all, I had the spray, a trail guide and a full backpack that, if you didn’t open to check, you might assume had everything you’d need to get into and out of the most dangerous wilderness.

I did actually happen to have a good idea what I was doing on the morning we all set out because my wife and I had hiked the same trail by ourselves two days earlier.

We’d started out on a wide path full of tourists from around the world, all of us making our way to one of the park’s most famous postcard views.

Nearly everyone turned back to the congested parking lot after the half-mile trek to that must-see lookout.

This meant the two of us had the trail mostly to ourselves as we pushed on for lunch under a 200-foot waterfall and farther past the orange runoff of a thermal pool, then stepped carefully around an erupting geyser and bubbling mud pots, and finally lurched up a steep path over a rise to a hidden pond blooming with golden waterlilies.

When we met up with the crowds again on our way back to the car, a man looking for advice pointed to my gear and spoke a line that I’d hear verbatim twice from strangers in as many days: “Hey, you look like you know what you’re doing…”

He couldn’t tell I’d almost stepped on a snake crossing logs over a creek a couple hours earlier when I didn’t notice that another pair of hikers was warning me to hold up. And he had no idea that I was fated to be brought low soon by one piece of my impressive gear.

It took three days and more soap than you’d imagine for the bear spray to stop burning.

A week and a half and a thorough laundering further along, it still stings a little if I put my nose right on a vest that took a direct hit from the spray and inhale.

I hope it’s stuck in the fabric for a long time. I could use a reminder from time to time that the “expert” I’m following down the trail might be as lost as me.