Bear Redeem

This is Fred Bear's own 1969 latch takedown, still built with the signature heel-down horn grip and still commanding heirloom money — about $750 for the riser and $470 for limbs, or roughly $1,220 complete at 3Rivers. Instead of ILF hardware it uses Bear's proprietary flush latch system: pop the lever, seat the limb, done, with no bolts to lose. The A riser builds a 56-60" bow with #1-#3 limbs; the B riser builds 60-64", letting one set of Dymondwood/Fascor-core limbs serve multiple lengths. Forum consensus (TradTalk, ArcheryTalk, Rokslide) is that these draw remarkably smoothly — owners report no stack past 29" — and they're fast and quiet with the heavy arrows a hunter should shoot anyway. Criticisms are real too: some latches develop small clicks and pops, and value opinions run about 50/50 given that $500 ILF setups shoot as well on paper. You're partly paying for Michigan-bred history, the bubinga and black maple woodwork, and limbs up to 70 lb, which almost no modern takedown offers. For traditional bowhunters who want the bow Fred himself hunted with, nothing else scratches the itch.

The 1959 Kodiak is arguably the most iconic recurve ever made — the bow that put Bear Archery on every bowhunter's wall and became Fred Bear's own choice after its launch. Bear's modern recreation, introduced for the model's 60th anniversary and still in the catalog in 2026, reproduces the look faithfully: a shedua riser with a purple heart I-beam running through it, green-and-white glass accents, maple-core limbs under Grayling-green fiberglass, and the signature feather arrow rest on a crowned, cut-on-center shelf with leather side plate. It's built in Gainesville, Florida and ships with a Dynaflight 97 Flemish string. On Trad Talk and Tradgang, owners praise it as smooth, quiet, and genuinely nimble for a 60-inch bow, with several comparing it favorably against semi-customs like the Toelke Chinook; the main gripes are the $730 price — Bear's most expensive one-piece — and scattered quality-control reports (finish blemishes, glass cracks) that Bear's customer service reportedly handles well. It carries 7 reviews at 3Rivers with no displayed average. If the Grizzly is the workhorse and the Super Kodiak the flagship, this is the heirloom: a hunting-ready piece of archery history rather than a budget tool.

Introduced in 1967 to succeed the original Kodiak, the Super Kodiak was Fred Bear's personal hunting bow for the last decades of his life — the bow in most of the famous photos from his later African and Alaskan hunts. That pedigree still drives its reputation: on Tradgang and ArcheryTalk it's routinely described as the smoothest-drawing production Bear, with a longer 60-inch AMO length that forgives sloppy releases and suits draws out to 29-30 inches better than the Grizzly. The two-piece shedua riser carries a black accent stripe and a full, palm-filling grip, and the crowned, cut-on-center shelf with bear hair rest and leather side plate shoots clean off the shelf. Unlike the Grizzly, its layered black-and-white glass tips take the included Dynaflight 97 Flemish string, so you get a modern low-stretch string's extra speed and quieter shot from the factory. The 3Rivers listing has accumulated 66 customer reviews, though no numeric average is displayed. Knocks are few: it costs $130 more than a Grizzly, left-hand weights are thin, and purists note today's Gainesville-made bow isn't hand-shaped like a Grayling original. As a do-everything hunting recurve, it's the flagship of Bear's one-piece line.