| 1 | Italian boy stays calm (2020) |
12 year old Italian boy Alessandro became an overnight internet legend two years ago, as his calm approach to a wild brown bear outshone even the professionals. On May 24th 2020, he and his father were hiking in the north Italian region of Trentino, which is heavily advertised on TV as a holiday area. Heading to a thick bush to collect some pine cones, he came face to face with a huge brown bear just 2 meters away.
Instead of screaming, he asked his mother’s partner to start filming. As it happened, Alessandro had been a fan of bear videos on youtube for months. He knew exactly what to do: back off slowly and calmly, while talking at an even volume. The video shows the bear staying a consistent 2 metres behind Alessandro. The boy has a huge smile on his face, only panicking slightly when he turns around to notice the bear standing on its hind legs. The step-father implores Alessandro to stay calm, which he does, even saying “this is so cool”. Throughout the video, the bear stays calm, but seems to be on the precipice, uncertain whether the boy 2 metres in front of him is prey or a threat. It takes a whole minute of quietly descending before the bear begins to lose interest.
As Alessandro reaches the cameraman and disappears, the great brown bear walks down the mountainside, but the family isn’t out of the woods yet: it keeps turning its head back every so often, like it’s still debating whether to charge. It takes 2 minutes for the coast to be clear. If Alessandro hadn’t had such nerves of steel, he could have easily become a bear meal that day.
| 2 | Man wields pocket knife (2019) |
The legend goes that to defeat a bear in close quarters combat, you only need to punch it in the nose. Now, there’s another method, which made headlines around the world. In August 2019, Colin Dowler was cycling through the British Columbia wilderness, 185 miles north of Vancouver, searching for new hiking trails.
Zipping round a bend, he noticed a grumpy looking bear emerge from the woods. He wasn’t concerned, as this bear seemed to be acting normally. It wandered slowly towards his now parked bicycle, but calmly, and not at a frantic pace. Nevertheless, Dowler felt his anxiety rising. As the bear reached the front of his bike, Dowler decided it was time for a short, sharp warning poke with his hiking stick. That was all the excuse Brian Bear needed; after a brief tug of war, it launched a heavy swat on Dowler. He tried to throw the bicycle at the bear, only to make it angrier.
This time, the bear picked him up like a ragdoll and commenced mauling. Dowler’s next trick was the old play dead manoeuvre, which failed. The bear dropped Dowler in a ditch, but refused to leave. Dowler was in incredible agony, but managed to retrieve his 2 inch blade pocket knife. As the bear’s jaws descended, potentially for the final time, Dowler jammed the blade into the bear’s neck. With a howl and a great spurt of blood, the 800 pound bear fled the scene. After stemming the blood loss with a makeshift tourniquet (cut from his clothes with the same knife), Dowler staggered off, and finally got lucky: he encountered 5 men at a campsite with expert training in first aid. Hours later he was in a Vancouver hospital.
| 3 | Climbing excursion goes awry (2018) |
One October day in 2018, while hiking with his father and brother in the Spanish Pyrenees, Lucas Meurlet diverted down the challenging GR211 path, planning to rejoin his family members. Little did he know that this detour would take him into the heart of bear country. After reaching the top of a rocky ridge between 10:30am and 11:00am, he immediately saw a mother and her cubs 10 metres away. Excitement turned to panic, and Meurlet started to run, but the bear almost instantly gave chase.
According to Meurlet “My legs were shaking. I started to see my life pass before my eyes”. Changing strategy, he turned and spread his arms as wide as possible. Still the bear charged twice more, and on the third charge, its mouth was wide open. Meurlet took the only option left to him: he screamed as loudly as possible while maintaining his wide stance. Spooked, the bear did a 180 and returned to its cubs, and Meurlet hid behind a bush.
Soon, Meurlet made contact with his father, and a helicopter descended onto the rocky ridge and transported Meurlet away to Refuge d’Eylie in Seintein, Ariège. It turned out that father Henri and brother Arthur had seen everything. In fact, they had spotted the bear and cubs on the hillside from a distance before Lucas had even ascended the ridge, and frantically shouted warnings, which failed to reach Lucas over the long, empty distance between them.
| 4 | Bear spray saves the day (2017) |
On September 11th 2017, Tom Sommer and his hunting partner were patrolling their stomping grounds of Gravelly Ridge, Montana. They were searching for a large male elk they had been stalking two days earlier, and turning a corner, they discovered a large brown bear feeding on an elk carcass. Problem solved. But suddenly, the bear was charging.
Like an Olympic athlete, the bear closed the 9 meter distance between them in 3 or 4 seconds. Sommer’s hunting partner let off a cloud of bear spray, which slowed the bear’s charge, but Sommer fumbled for his own can, failing to disengage the safety. He ran round a tree twice to buy time, but then dropped the can entirely. The bear was closing in, and Sommer reached for his trusty pistol and aimed it at the bear’s head, before a paw came down at the last second and swatted the pistol away.
Then the bear was on him in full-throttle maul mode. It used the standard predator manoeuvre of targeting the head for a quick kill, after which Sommer felt “bones crunching”, just like the stories of old. The bear kept biting and ripping into his thigh, but after 25 seconds, the ferocious grizzly inexplicably gave up, and slinked off into the woods. What happened? It’s believed that the bear spray cloud had a delay factor, meaning that the quick reflexes of Sommer’s hunting partner saved both of them.
Ultimately, Tom Sommer required ninety stiches, but didn’t hold a grudge against the bear: “he was just doing what bears do”.
| 5 | Grizzly bear double strike (2016) |
On May 5th 2016, Bill Orr was struck by lightning twice, or the equivalent: he was assaulted by a grizzly bear twice within the hour, and survived.
He was walking through the notoriously bear-heavy Madison valley in southwest Montana, taking sensible precautions like yelling “hey bear” every 30 seconds to alert the grizzlies of his presence, to soften their surprise. He wasn’t particularly worried when he noticed a female bear with two cubs standing at the upper edge of a meadow he was in. At first, she wandered up a forest trail, but suddenly, she turned around and began to charge.
Orr stuck to regulations again and unleashed his bear spray, firing an orange cloud. No avail – the bear’s momentum propelled her through the gas, and Orr dropped to the ground in fetal position, protecting his neck. He later described the force of each bite as “like a sledgehammer with teeth”. The bear would bite, stop for several seconds, then start biting again. But then it stopped completely. Orr stood up, thanked the maker for his miraculous survival, and started down the trail to his truck 3 miles away.
But 5 minutes later, the mother bear charged from the wilderness again. How could this happen to the same guy twice, Orr thought. Back to the fetal position he went, and the mauling resumed. One of the bites pierced his arm and made a sickening crunch as it struck bone. Instantly, Orr’s arm went numb and useless. But suddenly, the mauling stopped. Had his play dead charade worked? Orr didn’t move a muscle.
2 minutes later, the bear seemed convinced and left. With his face and torso covered with blood, Orr managed to jog 45 minutes to the car, and then drive himself to the hospital.
| 6 | Kick it! (2016) |
George Knoll, aged 41, was an engineer working for a Vancouver logging company. At 8:30am, Knoll was exploring the undergrowth near Bella Bella, Canada, identifying the perfect trees to be logged, when he came face to face with a mother bear. Knoll had a stroke of bad luck: he was exploring next to a raging river, whose loud gushing sounds prevented both he and the bear from recognising each other’s presence until they were a mere 6 metres apart.
Knoll noticed a small cub, and knew instantly that he was in trouble. He tried to run backwards and sideways, but the ferocious bear launched into a tackle which knocked him to the floor. His next move was playing dead, curling into a ball, but he soon felt the bear’s teeth tearing into his upper arm. He could feel the stench of the bear’s breath, a stench of rotten fish. Soon, Knoll realised that playing dead wasn’t working, so he did the logical thing: he kicked the bear in the face. Then he kicked the bear again, using his hard caulk boots, spiked boots favoured by loggers. He could see blood on the bear’s snout, but wasn’t even sure who it belonged to.
The bear charged again, but after a final kick, the mother and its cubs fled into the undergrowth. Knoll forced himself into action, bandaging his arm using his clothes as a tourniquet, and radioing for help. In a semi-delirious state, George made it to the helicopter 200 meters away, where he phoned his wife to tell her he loved her.
After treatment in Vancouver hospital, George Knoll lived to tell the tale. So did the bear – it was deemed to be a mother defending her cubs, and not a predator that required execution.
| 7 | Justin Bieber to the rescue (2014) |
On February 4th 2014, fisherman Igor Vorozhbitsyn thought it would be just another morning hauling catches. He drove to a bountiful fishing spot in Russia’s icy Yakutia Republic, parked his car, and started walking over to his favourite perch. Suddenly, he felt a tremendous impact on his back, and was knocked down by 600 pounds of brown fur. Diagnosis: brown bear attack.
Igor was convinced that death was imminent, but as the bear made its first few slashes, Igor’s mobile went off. Suddenly, the bay was filled with the high pitched voice of Justin Bieber singing his 2010 song “Baby”. Igor later said that his grandfather had installed the ringtone as a practical joke.
Like many humans, the bear ran away almost as soon as Justin Bieber started singing. It vanished into the forest, leaving Igor with severe cuts and bruises to his chest and face, but alive. He later recovered nicely.
Baby climbed to 5 in the US charts back in 2010, but apparently the bear had a different opinion. Wildlife experts deemed it to be a perfect bear deterrent, a short, sharp noise similar to a bear horn or the shouts recommended by rangers, with the added advantage that Justin Bieber was singing, supposedly proving that his music is truly “un-bear-able”.
At least we know one thing – Bieber himself is probably invincible against bears!
| 8 | Hunted bear gets its revenge (2013) |
Our next tale from the book of impossibly narrow bear escapes concerns John O. Matson Jr, son of a former Rhode Island congressional candidate. In September 2013, Matson was prowling the slopes of Beaver Mountain, approximately 40 miles southwest of the Alaskan town of McGrath, when he saw a grizzly bear feeding on a berry bush one mile away. He aimed his gun, and shot the bear, which rolled over and thrashed around for one minute, before dashing off into the distance.
Matson and his hunter companion waited for 90 minutes with no sight of the bear. A disappointed Matson thought that his prey had eluded him. Apparently not! The bear was hiding in a bush, plotting revenge, and in an epic twist that nobody could have seen coming (well, maybe a few people), Matson became the prey himself. From 30 metres away, the assistant guide heard a cry and span around to witness Matson struggling with the 8 foot bear. After firing a shot, the bear fled once more, having learnt to associate the sound of gunfire with pain.
Blood was pouring profusely from a wound in Matson’s head, which the guides quickly bandaged up. Things went from bad to worse when poor weather prevented the rescue helicopters from landing. Finally, Matson was airlifted 225 miles to Anchorage hospital, and several days later, John Matson Sr reported that his son was responding well to surgery. The end result was bite marks on his head and leg.
In case you were wondering: the bear survived the ordeal, and was never seen again.
| 9 | Man escapes up tree (2012) |
In February 2012, Ben Radakovich was hiking alone along the Bird Creek Trail just south of Anchorage. After venturing 3 miles from the official trail, he quickly stumbled across a mother bear and her cubs.
Ben knew that he was in trouble, particularly when he accidentally spooked the cub. Suddenly, mama bear was charging. Unable to grab his bear spray, Ben Radakovich followed the old instructions and curled up into a foetal position, to play dead and protect his internal organs. There was no let up, so Ben started swiping with the only tool he had: his ski poles, used as makeshift hiking sticks. Miraculously, the bear stopped the mauling briefly. Ben seized his chance, and quickly scampered 30 feet up a tall tree, fuelled by a “pure adrenaline rush”.
At 7:45am, a battle-weary Ben dialled 911 with his cell phone and told the operator “I’m bleeding a quite a bit”. “Are you injured sir?” Ben was asked in return, who could still hear the bear prowling the wilderness below. Rescuers only reached him at 9.20am, still clinging to the tree. Radakovich had a line of puncture wounds stretching down his back, and scratch marks lining his armpit. His back wasn’t intact, but thanks to quick thinking, his life was.
This story has sequel potential: the bear escaped, and was not located.
| 10 | Creek carnage (2011) |
In 2011, 3 instructors and 14 students were taking part in the National Outdoor Leadership School, camped out for days in the Alaskan wilderness. On the final day, 7 students went hiking after dinner, and lined up single file to cross a river. Suddenly, the kids at the back heard a cry of “bear”. The next thing Samuel Gottsegen, 17, saw was a speeding ball of brown fur taking a swipe at his friends.
Samuel remembered thinking ” I’m going to die, I’m not going to live through this”. The bear was 8 feet tall, “a huge snarling thing”. The bear moved so quickly that the hikers had no chance of whipping their bear spray out. Samuel later described how he heard the bear’s running behind him and felt the jaws close around his head.
The bear ran between the 4 people in round robin style, attacking Samuel and returning once it had dealt a fresh blow to the other three. Death seemed certain, until the bear grabbed the leg of Victor Martin, 18. In desperation, he delivered a well-timed kick to its face, and then, the bear suddenly galloped away, as though it had made its point.
The chopper was activated at 9:30pm, and only discovered the huddled group in their tents at 2:30am. Several people had minor injuries, but Joshua was said to have a “candy bar sized” chunk missing from his forehead, while Samuel had a punctured lung, broken ribs, and deep bite marks to the chest. Nevertheless, they both survived without lifechanging injuries, although they might be slightly less fond of bears.
Leave a Reply