What's it like to come face-to-face with a bear?

Canada's Yukon is one of the most remote places Bob Simon has ever visited. While on location for this week's story on the Yukon's second gold rush, Simon, who's been to every continent, was impressed by its wild and sometimes merciless terrain.

"There was the mythology of going to the Yukon, the place of the gold rush," Simon tells 60 Minutes Overtime. "It's something we've all know about since we were children."

While reporting the story, the 60 Minutes team also traveled north to the Peel Watershed, where the government recently took the first steps to open most of the area to gold mining.

Such a move has many environmentalists and locals furious, including wilderness entrepreneur and hunting guide Chris Widrig.

"He's a guy who loves the wilderness, totally fearless," Simon says. "And because he's fearless, he got into trouble, and he was attacked by a bear."

It happened in August of 1999, while Widrig was leading a party of hunters through the forest and saw a grizzly bear cub with its mother. Widrig was unarmed.

"She came right for me. And when a bear comes for you, she comes with her mouth, not her claws," Widrig says.

Given Widrig's remote location, 17 hours went by before he received proper medical care. In the meantime, all he had to relieve the pain was Motrin.

"If there'd been a hospital a half-hour away, I don't think he would've been on the critical list, because they would've been able to patch him up pretty quickly," Simon says. "But he was in desperate shape, and he's lost half his face. He's blind in one eye."

Widrig still hunts in the same location where he was nearly killed.

"When you fall in love with a place, you're going to stay there no matter what the danger is," Simon says.

Hundreds of miles away from the Peel Watershed, on a mountainside in Dawson, 60 Minutes soundman Eric Kerchner, who's been to Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, never thought a gold mining story would be just as risky.

"Out in the wilderness, in northern Canada, you just didn't think that your life would be in danger at any point in time," Kerchner says. "Apparently, that's not true."

Kerchner and 60 Minutes cameraman Chris Albert had their own close encounter while accompanying prospector Shawn Ryan and his team into the forest to mine for gold.

"These guys are working hard, there's big machines out there, they're doing core drilling, there's a lot of noise," Kerchner says. "So, the last thing on your mind is that a bear is going to come into this area, because there's so much going on. And sure enough, we're shooting, and bam, there it is."

Kerchner and Albert kept their equipment steady and managed to capture the entire incident on camera.

Luckily, the mining crew's dog scared the grizzly away, but ten minutes later, the bear returned. Ryan kept his "bear spray" close, but that didn't stop the bear from propping up on its hind legs about 50 yards away.

"You could see it sniffing the wind," Kerchner says. "It was interested in coming back."

The dog scared the bear away for a second time, but upon closer look, Kerchner says the team realized they had accidentally positioned themselves in the middle of the bear's path.

"We didn't see the bear again, but [Shawn Ryan] was sure that the bear was coming back," Kerchner says. "It was an interesting day.

The above video was produced for 60 Minutes Overtime by Magalie Laguerre-Wilkinson and Lisa Orlando.