The Bulldog Trail and the bear sign commonly seen along its length/Craig Medred photo
Anchorage’s rewarding and risky cycling
A news analysis
Friday was a great day for a gravel-bike ride on the backroads of Anchorage’s Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, where it is common to see more bears than people.
This is arguably the best gravel riding in the 49th state, given that the roads south and east of the Glenn Highway are gated off, ensuring little or no traffic accompanied by the lung-smothering dust from drivers not about to slow down because of the plume they are kicking up.
It’s rare to see a vehicle here, other than another bike, and not all that common to encounter hikers or runners. On this day, the people count was zero, or four less than the bear count in an area that has become something of a lowland refugium for bears since humans took over the Anchorage Bowl.
One could count the four bears are more like two, however, given that the first was a healthy looking black bear sow with two, tiny cubs of the year in tow. Momma stood up to get a good look at whatever it was coming fast down what the military calls the Bulldog Trail, couldn’t make up her mind for sure what it was, and when I stopped to wrestle the phone out of a pocket in the hopes of getting a photo, she hurried the cubs back into the safety of the spruce.
The young brown bear was even more cautious. It took off like a bat out-of-hell when it saw a bike coming down the road at 20 mph.
Bike speed in bear country became an issue in Anchorage last week after an unidentified cyclist had a confrontation with a brown bear that left him with what the Alaska Department of Fish and Game first described as “minor injuries.”
Major minor
This was the version of the “news” picked up KTUU-TV in Anchorage and then spread across the country by YahooNews and a variety of other news organizations. The story changed, at least locally, as word spread about the cyclist calling his wife after being attacked and asking her to come give him a ride to the hospital.
Gone from that report was any of the earlier suggestion of speed being an issue that Yahoo reported this way: “Bikers could be at greater risk of attack due to the speed at which they travel and the possibility of startling animals like bears on the trail.”
This could definitely be true in some cases and not in others. Whether it had anything to do with what happened in this case, no one in the public knows because how fast pr slow the cyclist was going on the Dome Trail is unknown.
Well, maybe Fish and Game knows, but they’re not sharing.
A biologist there offered assurances that the agency spends “a lot of time now investigating these encounters, both at the scene and in the ER,” and “we know a lot more than has been put into any press report.”
What the agency doesn’t seem to get is that knowledge kept secret is worthless knowledge. Nobody outside the agency can learn anything from what is kept within the agency, and there were likely things to learn from this bear attack, as there have been from other bear attacks.
The incident on the Dome Trail could well have involved speed. The trail has some fairly steep hills. There is one with an 18 percent grade less than half a mile from the trailhead on Basher Road, and from a mile and a half on the grades generally stay above 10 percent and increase to as much 30 percent.
The Dome Trail/All Trails
For those unfamiliar with what this means, Toilsome Hill Road – the access to the popular Flattop Mountain recreation area above the city – has an average grade of about 10 percent, with the very steepest sections of the road hitting 15 percent.
Even pro cyclists are going to be going pretty slow climbing up that grade, but descending on Toilsome is another story. It’s easy to hit 20 mph on a bike or 30 mph or more in places if you want. But the road has smooth pavement.
The Dome Trail has a much rougher service, which forces most riders to slow down to 10 mph or significantly less in some places.
All that is known about the speed is what area wildlife biologist Cory Stantorf revealed to Alaska Public Media: The cyclist was coming downhill when he saw the bear walking up the trail, and “he was able to stop before he got right to the bear, and he yelled at the bear, made himself look big, and then the bear charged. He was able to get his bike in front of them. The bear hit the bike once, knocked it down, then knocked the victim down.”
This account differs in a couple of key details from what Stantof told KTUU. In that account, he said the cyclist stopped and “was able to get off his bike, talk to the bear and the bear charged….”
Whether it is better to “talk” to a bear in a situation like this or “yell” at it is debatable. If this was a black bear, trying to intimidate it by yelling is not a bad idea. As the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources recommends, “If the bear walks toward you, act boldly, yelling and throwing something at it.”
But this was reported to be a “brown” bear, or what the rest of the world calls a grizzly. Telling brown bears from black bears can, however, get a little confusing in the Anchorage area becuase there are a fair number of what are called “cinnamon black bears” around.
A cinnamon cub with her black bear mother in Anchorage earlier this month/Priscila Sheppard, Facebook
The existence of these brownish black bears makes it important for anyone cycling, hiking or running in the undeveloped wild lands surrounding Alaska’s largest city to learn how to identify grizzlies from black bears. The former have big, blocky heads with seemingly small ears, a humped back and a facial profile that has been described as “dish-shaped.”
Brown/grizzly bear (left) versus brownish, big-eared black bear (right)
Yelling at brown bears is generally not recommended, but general rules don’t always apply in bear encounters. I have personally yelled at young grizzlies that wanted to follow me around like dogs. They eventually left with no harm done.
But they did illustrate the big problem with bear encounters. They are all situational, and what works in one case might not in another because while people are making decisions as to how to behave, the bear is making similar decisions.
And these decisions might not always sync.
It’s impossible to fault someone for yelling at a bear instead of talking to it, especially if the bear had already started running toward – rather than walking toward – the cyclist. And a running bear might help explain the real tragedy in this encounter.
Both of Stantorf’s accounts of what happened agree that the cyclist was carrying bear spray but didn’t have time to use it. This is the big lesson to be learned from this encounter.
If you are carrying bear spray for protection, it needs to be readily accessible in the event of an encounter. The same applies if you choose to carry a firearm. A weapon you can’t get in your hand the second you need it is worthless.
This latest incident is not the first time someone who was carrying spray has been seriously injured by a bear in Alaska because he, she or they couldn’t get to the spray in time.
Five years earlier, there’d been a similar situation when a grizzly bear attacked a group of National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) students hiking in the Talkeetna Mountains of Central Alaska. Three of the seven students were carrying bear spray, but couldn’t get to it when the attack started because they were all carrying their canisters in backpacks.
Unanswered question
Why the cyclists involved in the latest attack couldn’t get to his spray is a big unknown. There could be lots of reasons. It could have fallen off his bike when he stopped. It could have been in a backpack. His first thought might have been that he could deal with the bear without it.
The latter is not some wild idea. People standing up to bears, making themselves as big as possible, and intimidating the animals was a protective measure used long before pepper spray arrived on the scene. And that tactic still works, most especially for groups.
Or the cyclist could simply have been of the belief that the bear wasn’t going to attack, until the bear decided otherwise and charged. I have some experience here. I once pretty much believed that if people held their ground and acted as if they meant to stay, all bear attacks would end as bluffs.
The bear that ran over me put that idea to rest. And when she grabbed me by the lower leg, I shot her.
Whether spray would have worked to repel her, I do not know. Spray wasn’t in widespread use back when I was attacked, and it’s not foolproof. Statistically, however, it has proven more effective than firearms, but that’s in large part because greater skill is required to stop a bear with the smallish bullet from a gun than the plume of pepper spraying out of a pressurized can.
Neither firearms nor bear spray are guaranteed to work.
Because he was dead, however, there was no way of finding out what had happened. Just as no one can be 100 percent certain that the latest incident would have turned out any differently if the cyclist had been able to grab his spray.
All that can be said for certain is that the cyclist would have improved his odds because bears are a lot like people. They are predictable right until they are not. The data says bear spray, a powerful irritant, is generally effective and works to drive bears away the bears that make bad decisions.
But you could get unlucky and run into the bear that only gets mad about being sprayed. Bears, as the Alaska Zoo learned earlier this month, don’t always do what people expect them to do. The Zoo was thrown into a bit of a tizzy when Izzy, a longtime resident brown bear, jumped on Kitty, a relatively new arrival and ripped into her in front of visitors, including one who filmed the violent attack and posted it on social media.
Needless to say, social media erupted, with some blaming the zoo for the attack.
All righty then. So the Alaska Zoo has been lucky for 57 years, because what happened there on the afternoon of June 13 was that a bear did what bears sometimes do. It happens.
Just over 20 years ago, a whacky, bear-loving Californian named Timothy Treadwell, along with his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were killed and eaten by a bear in Katmai National Park and Preserve in Southwest Alaska. Treadwell, who the mainstream media declared a bear “expert” in the days after his death, had by then been coming to bear-filled Kaflia Bay on the park’s Alaska Gulf coast for 13 years and thought he knew bears better than anyone.
He befriended many. petted some, professed his love for others, and then one killed and ate him. He was lucky for 13 years, and then his luck ran out.
In the wake of Treadwell’s death, Joel Bennett – a former member of the wildlife-regulating Board of Game, a filmmaker with considerable experience around bears, and an acquaintance of Treadwell’s – expressed shock at the Californian’s death and described Treadwell as the best ever at observing bears and predicting how the animals would behave based on their posture, facial expressions and all the other clues.
Others were of the opinion that Treadwell was simply ignorant of how bear behavior changes in the fall when hyperhagia sets in, and one thing is certain, Treadwell hadn’t bothered to surround his tent with an electric fence to protect it, as was becoming the norm on the Gulf Coast of Katmai.
Even the late Charlie Vandergaw, a retired Anchorage science teacher who shared Treadwell’s vision of making friends of the bears and cultivated them with treats of dog food at his remote Yentna River retreat, put an electric fence around his cabin there, because he understood that sometimes the only way to be safe around bears was to get away from them.
Vandergaw lived to the ripe, old age of 86 and died at home in Anchorage after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. In his obituary, his family confessed that “Charlie’s life with the bears wasn’t without its dangers, and he had the scars and stories to prove it.”
Vandergaw thought Treadwell an idiot for not taking precautions to provide himself a safe place if the worst happened with a bear, or to arm himself with something, given that Treadwell understood aggression was sometimes a necessary defense against bears.
Treadwell died yelling at the bear that killed him and pleading with his girlfriend to “hit him with a pan,” the couple’s only weapon. The weapon proved ineffective, but weapons other than guns and spray have on occasion worked.
Most people do survive bear attacks, as did the latest to be attacked in Anchorage, but being mauled is not a fun experience as Petra Davis, a cyclist ripped up by an Anchorage area brown-grizzly in 2007 when she was 15 years old, can explain. Davis is thought to have collided with the bear in the dark before an attack that came during a 24-hour bike race being staged on the Anchorage Hillside.
There have been no night bike races on the Hillside since, though the odds of a similar thing happening again are low. That said, night riding in the Anchorage area still presents some risks in that it limits visibility, and the same can be said for the high grass that grows along some Anchorage trails in the summer.
Being able to see and avoid bears before you meet them is usually the safest way to deal with bears. Thus, as visibility goes down, risks go up, though, the risks are never all that great. If you’re a cyclist in Anchorage, you need to worry more about motor vehicles any time you are on or near a road, but sight distances off-road are something you should keep in mind.
It’s one thing to roar down the roads of JBER, where you can see far ahead and to either side of the gravel, than to do the same down the South Fork Rim Trail in Chugach State Park above Anchorage once the grass gets above bear height, because there’s no telling what happens if you actually collide with a bear.
Some collision history
If you’re lucky and it’s a black bear, the bear likely runs away. Just days ago, a California cyclist collided with a black bear while doing an estimated 25 mph on a steep road leading to a weekend retreat near Yosemite. Sixty-seven-year-old Don Terres went down hard, cracking three ribs and separating a shoulder.
The bear fled the scene.
The consequences of running into a black bear and crashing a bike in the process appear as if they might be greater than any threat of being attacked by the bear involved. Grizzlies are a different story.
The newspaper said that a rider 20 to 25 yards behind Treat reported hearing the impact and the bear making a sound bear “like it was hurt.” That cyclist then came around the corner to find the bear standing over Treat.
Lacking any weapon to use to get the bear away from Tate, the second cyclist decided to go for help. When would-be rescuers eventually arrived at the scene, they found Treat dead with a bitten-to-pieces helmet nearby. Treat’s death was a first in Montana, and led a Board of Review to offer some advice to cyclists that makes as much sense here in Alaska as it does in that state:
“Stay vigilant, slow down, carry bear spray, make noise, don’t ride alone, never ride at dusk, dawn or night, don’t think ‘it won’t happen to me,” and remember bears live there….”
The vigilance thing struck me as I came off JBER onto the old Tank Trail that connects to Anchorage’s Basher Drive. But it wasn’t a bear that caught my attention. It was a man in the trail with a pack on his back who was bent over fiddling with a water bottle. I thought he’d surely heard me clattering down the trail toward him on the bike, but when I got within 10 feet and put on the brakes, he jumped up in shock, and I apologized for scaring him.
But what I was thinking was about in that moment was not really the need for an apology but how amazing it is that we don’t have more bear maulings in the Anchorage area than we do, because it’s pretty obvious the bears spend more time looking out for people than the people do looking out for bears.
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