This has been my experience as well. Same goes for all the predators. Even Grizzly. I've only seen grizzly 4 times, while I spent some time in Montana mapping geology. One base was in a KOA where the manager was an avid hunter I befriended. Him and his pals were very much into hunting grizzly with .44 Mag, and he told me they KNOW where they are protected and where they are not. Sure enough, when we ran into griz on 3 separate occasions in the forest, they took off quickly. The other time we ran into one in Glacier. Completely different...it was obvious that WE needed to back out of there calmly and quickly. At the time I was there, we were all armed with handguns (except in the Parks) and many of the locals were armed as well.

Most of my black bear encounters fall into these categories;

1) from a distance and they fade into the forest.

2) in camp at night looking for food. Usually this is in an area of heavily used camp sites and I am woke up by the sound of clanging pots and pans.

My policy now is to carry bear spray where there are brown bear. Up to this point, I have carried nothing for black bear, but I look into bear activity to see what kind of problems are occurring before I head into an area.

As an aside, there was an incident of a black bear shooting after it broke into his house in the June Lake area about a year ago. Using a handgun (something like a 9 mm) the guy was familiar with, it took 6 shots to finish the bear off. And that was just a Sierra black bear. Accuracy is probably the biggest factor in having success using rifles or handguns as a defense against bears. Practice, practice, practice or leave the gun at home.