So.... What was the point in Eric Balfour's character?

His character was ridiculous. He basically played Depp's useless, unecessary character from Tusk. The accent made no sense and his character made even less sense. Had nothing to do with what little of a plot there was.

The point was to make the audience think it's him stalking the couple, but turns out to be a bear

Red Herring

To point out that the relationship between the two main characters wasn't as good as the male wanted/thought it was.

Two main reasons for his character. The first, as said, was essentially as a red herring who the audience (who had not seen the poster or read certain synopses) could imagine as an antagonist. The other purpose of the character was to challenge Alex, show he was in over his head, that the couple's relationship was not as strong as we thought and for some background on the power dynamic of their relationship as well. After being challenged by the guide, he over compensates with a false sense of bravado and lack of experience and it got him killed. Personally, I loved that scene as being challenged like that is a good measure of a man.

The only thing that didn't really make sense was why they made the character Irish, lol. It is not like Balfour is actually Irish irl. Strange choice by the director (or whomever) and almost seemed like an anti-Irish bias or something.

Brad the outdoor guide did three things:
1) He and the park ranger challenged Alex's competency several times. "Do you need a map?" "Do you need a guide?" It's a shame that two men were needed to validate Jenn's instincts. Otherwise, she would have looked like a complaining bitch. Instead, she shut down her own questions about Alex's supposed backwoods skills and followed him off-trail into danger.

2) Brad played Greek chorus about the highlights in the park, particularly the waterfall that Jenn would eventually try to descend. The film cuts directly from the waterfall to the woods after sunset and does not show it, but apparently she found the trail back to the lake, leading straight to the canoe.

3) Brad was a red herring, which took Jenn's mind off worrying about the real dangers in the woods. This woman, a successful lawyer, was reduced to apologizing to her boyfriend about inviting someone to dinner. Alex constantly deflected attention from obvious bear signs, his lack of skill, etc. As Jenn said, he did a poor job at trying to impress her.

in addition to a lot of good observations already made:

he
is a gateway into the predatory wild. a semi-savage man. probing, insinuating, testing.
provides a demonstration that the girlfriend's instincts were also dangerous, heedless, ambiguous.
at the end, illustrates that survivors aren't always the nice people.

As other people have commented, he was added to give a sense of conflict to the narrative. I agree, he was pretty much redundant in the grand scheme of things but he did serve to make the audience think that he was stalking them while they camped at night. I thought this was a pretty good movie, but it wasn't particularly well written.

"And what about the sh*t weasels, the ones that blast out the basement door?" - Col. Curtis