John Wood of Blairsville downed this B&C all-time record book bear in Union County during the 2003 season. Photo courtesy of Deborah Wood

The conversation at hand led me through my hunting memories to a black bear I spied a few years earlier with its nose pushed down deep into a yellow-jacket hive in the sandy soil of a wildlife clearing on Coopers Creek Wildlife Management Area in Union County. Its huge presence -- I guessed some 350 pounds or more -- weighed on my mind while talking about bear hunting in the North Georgia mountains with Sherman Graham of Hall County. Graham works as a sales associate for Outdoor Traditions in Dawsonville, where he shares his expertise in bear hunting with the sportsmen who use Georgia Highway 400 as their access route into the southern reach of the Appalachian Mountains.

"That was a big bear, for sure, and an example of just how big black bears can grow in Georgia. But I'm guessing it was still smaller than that Boone and Crockett bear you've got a picture of," Graham retorted. "I heard about that bear when it was killed."

Graham was referring to a photograph of bear hunter John Wood of Blairsville. Wood was no stranger to trophy bear hunting. He had several trophy black-bear skulls measured by Jerry Bearden for submission to the B&C Club record books. Among his other trophies is a White County bear he killed in 1995. The skull measured 21 13/16 inches on the B&C scale and placed second on that club's all-time list for Georgia black bears.

According to the B&C score sheet that accompanied the photo of his latest trophy, Wood's black bear was killed in 2003 in Union County, a rugged area of high ridges and deep bottoms dominated by the Blue Ridge -- the geographic divide that separates the Tennessee River Valley from the southern slopes of the Appalachian Mountains. With a final score of 21 6/16 total inches, the bear exceeds the "awards" minimum score of 20 inches (total skull measurements of length plus width), as well as the "all-time" minimum score of 21 inches. It measured just 1/2 inch short of the highest B&C score for Georgia black bears -- 21 14/16 inches.

The weight of Wood's Union County bear is unknown, but you can bet it tipped the scales to somewhere near the heaviest bear on the big-game record books maintained by the Georgia Wildlife Resources Division. That list is headed by a 581-pound bruin killed in 2002 in Union County, which topped the previous record of 560 pounds for a bear taken in 2001 in Gilmer County. According to senior wildlife biologist Jay Cantrell of the WRD, only two or three are taken each year that weigh more than 500 pounds. In fact, since bear-kill records were first maintained in 1979, the WRD has listed only 10 bears that have topped the 500-pound benchmark of truly heavyweight animals.

THE LATEST NUMBERS
The key to the North Georgia bear harvest revolves around the rugged and remote mountains, as well as the availability of public lands on which they are found. According to the latest report available from the WRD, some 2,200 bears are estimated in the Georgia population. In the North Georgia counties that support bear, bruin densities fall in the range of one bear for every 500 to 2,500 acres. That figure applies to an area of approximately 1,623,809 acres.

Bear hunting in North Georgia is permitted in 18 counties and on 19 WMAs within the Blue Ridge Mountain, Ridge and Valley, or Upper Piedmont physiographic regions. Those WMAs comprise 398,000 acres of available hunting land. The Chattahoochee National Forest not in WMAs also offers a patchwork of tracts open to bear hunts.