It's the middle of the night in remote Alaska and ya have to pee.

What's a girl to do? Well, head to the outhouse of course.

That's just what Shannon Stevens of Haines, Alaska, did while on a camping trip with her brother and a friend at Chilkat Lake this past weekend.

Normally, she yells, "Hey, bear! Hey bear!" all the way to the throne. But it's February. The dead of winter. Bears are sleeping. Right?

Wrong! Black bears can often be active in winter. "Some bears will stay out a long time if there is food, maybe almost never den up," said Carl Koch of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

So back to Shannon and her need to pee.

"I got in there and sat down on the toilet seat, and something just immediately bit me in the butt. I jumped up and screamed."

Her brother Erik came running and decided to investigate.

"Right at the level of the toilet seat, maybe an inch or two below, is a gigantic bear face looking right back up at me."

That's when he grabbed his sis and they ran like lightening back to the safety of their yurt, where they bandaged Shannon's bear bitten bare bottom (thankfully it was more like a nip than a maul) and hunkered down till morning.

The tracks they found the next day showed it was a big ‘un!

So how the [flowerbed] did that big ‘ol bear get into that pot in the first place? Erik thinks he knows.

"There's a way out in the back of the outhouse, there's a rock wall and there's a way for a creature to get in through that rock wall. He probably just pushed the rocks over and got down into the hole."

Moral of this story? When camping in the Alaskan wilderness, don't bear your bare bottom until you check the head for the head of a bear.

Meanwhile, bears be thinkin' ...