re bears--I see it just like risk in motorsport (or as I said riding a bike in a city) nearly all times you can have incidents and nothing happens, but like crashes in motorsport, once in a while stuff just goes weird and bad stuff happens. Yesterday and today I was watching the 24 hours of Lemans race, and an early crash had photogs being lucky as fricken hell with a crash that nearly took a bunch of them out--it so could have been very tragic.
You can run into bears many times and no issue, then a situation could happen where you surprise a bear with a kill, or with cubs, or its in a pissy mood, or its in a "human stalking" mood--you know what I mean, 9 times out of 10 its ok, its that 1 time where things can get dicey.

touch wood

flares--I always remember being at a friends in Vancouver, he was going through old hiking stuff and there was a flare gun and a "shell" that was super old, he decided to get some new flares anyway, so was curious to see if it was still fireable (it might have over 10 yrs old, I dont recall, just that it was old) He leveled the gun at his back fence maybe 30 ft from us, fired, it shot out, hit the fence, bounced back at us and into the neighbors garden where it immediately set a fire. After jumping out of its way on the return trip, we put it out, dont remember with what, but was impressed how hot it must have been. It wasnt that easy to put out if I recall too.

given that, Id sure as heck be careful with them in a forest setting, as with a signal fire, but smokey fires are easy to handle as there generally isnt that much open flame and the goal would be to make lots of smoke anyway in the day wouldnt it?