‘A rough and tumble with a grizzly’/Sketches of Hudson Bay Life, 1874-1880

The Big (too) Wild Life

With the Chugach Mountain foothills above Anchorage averaging a bear mauling a month in this, the summer of 2026, some seem to be getting a little edgy about enjoying the wilderness at the back door of the city that once promoted the “Big Wild Life™” of the long-gone American frontier.

Along Basher Drive, near the area of the latest attack, parking lots usually full of after-work walkers, runners and mountain bikers were strangely empty last week. Outdoor activities seemed to be shifting closer to town, as if some were unaware there have been bear attacks there in the past as well.

On Thursday, for instance, young runners were being led on the trail between the South Bivouac Trailhead off Basher and the Hilltop Ski Area to the south.  The route took them over a Campbell Creek bridge near where then 45-year-old bike commuter Sean Berkey was attacked by a bear in 2010 and close to the Rover’s Run Trailhead where a bear almost killed then 15-year-old mountain biker Petra Davis in 2008.

In the years that followed, bear attacks, which had been uncommon in the Anchorage area in the 20th Century, became a not uncommon Anchorage occurrence as a bear population that had been depressed by heavy hunting and indiscriminate shootings began to rebuild.

The situation reached something of a peak in 2018 when a brown/grizzly bear sow and cubs killed and partially consumed 44-year-old hiker Mike Soltis on the outskirts of Eagle River, a suburb north of the city. The death of Soltis was one of the rare deaths in a bear attack in the Anchorage area.

No one attacked this year has died, and Soltis is one of only three people killed by bears in the Anchorage area in this century.

Scared away? A near-empty North Bivouac Trailhead along Basher Drive last week/Craig Medred photo

Three deaths in 26 years

Thirty-year-old U.S. Army paratrooper Seth Michael Plant was the third to die in the new millennium. He was killed by a sow grizzly in the backcountry wilds of the Joint Base Elmondorf Richardson in May 2022 after he and two other soldiers stumbled upon the den of a brown/grizzly sow with two tiny cubs.

The sow instinctively attacked the men to defend those cubs. All three were injured. The physical injuries to two were considered minor, which is the norm. But Plant was mortally wounded and died. 

The first to die was 16-year-old Patrick Cooper, a young man small for his age, who fell victim to a predatory black bear on Bird Ridge in 2017. Predatory black bears – those that have decided people are prey – are the rarest bear anyone will ever meet, but they were implicated in 63 deaths in North America, many of those in Canada, over a more than 100-year time span from 1900 to 2009. 

The only thing one can do when confronted by this sort of bear is fight it off with whatever weapon is in hand or can be found at hand. Cooper was unaware of this and ended up being killed. It was a tragic death for which he cannot be faulted.

Even for those aware of the danger posed by a predatory black bear, fending the animal off can prove difficult. Canadian biologist Rob Foster tells a harrowing tale of a 45-minute running battle with one such bear as he tried to retreat to his truck.

Foster repeatedly repulsed the bear with a shot of pepper spray, but it kept coming back. Several times the two danced around trees. At one point, Foster said, “we were like two feet away. He’d stick his head out one side of the jack pine, and I’d threaten to spray and he’d stick his head on the other side of the tree. It was almost comical, if the stakes hadn’t been so high.”

Foster, fortunately, lived to tell the story. Most people attacked by bears, the author included, do.

Bear attacks themselves are rare, no matter what the situation might seem like in Anchorage this year, and deaths from bear attacks are even rarer.

The latest warning at the Basher Drive trailhead/Craig Medred photo

Survival odds are high

A global team of scientists in 2019 reported that of the 664 people attacked by brown bears, the deadliest of the bear species, between 2000 and 2015, 85.7 percent survived. The peer-reviewed study they published in Nature – Scientific Reports also concluded that only 15 of these attacks – nine in Russia and six in the U.S. – appeared to be predatory. 

The numbers clearly illustrate how rare it is to be attacked by a bear that is actually trying to kill you. Usually, a brown bear that attacks appears to believe it needs to do so to defend itself or its young.

It attacks, neutralizes the threat and then flees.

Nearly half the attacks in the Scientific Reports study – 47 percent, to be exact – involved brown bears lashing out at people to protect their young, and another 20 percent involved sudden encounters with bears that made a split-second choice of fight rather than flight.

The study did not document how many surprise encounters between people and bears end with the bear immediately fleeing, but almost anyone who spends much time in the Alaska wilderness, especially hunters who go sneaking around quietly, will eventually have a surprise encounter that scares the bear enough that it immediately bolts.

The study did implicate dogs in 17 percent of the human-bear encounters that went sideways, leaving a human injured or dead. But the study also noted that “in Alaska, dogs have been found to help terminate attacks in nearly half of the cases.”

One of the recent bear attacks in Anchorage involved dogs. Whether the dogs sparked the attack or saved the two women involved in that Bear Valley encounter, one of whom was injured, nobody knows.

It could be either. One of the dogs involved ran off after the attack started and was thought, at first, to have become a victim of the bear. But it later returned, and it’s possible that the bear took off after the dog, which led it away from the women hiking in the aptly named neighborhood.

Little is known about this attack because the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, which used to supply significant information as to what happened in bear attacks in Alaska, now says almost nothing.

Were Berkey or Davis or me to be attacked by a bear today, we’d surely join the nameless, faceless people attacked by bears in the Anchorage area. (Well, maybe not me, there are enough people at Fish and Game with whom I’ve had disagreements over the years that someone would probably try to leak my name and spin the bear attack as my fault.)

And there is a natural tendency toward victim-blaming in the aftermath of bear attacks because everyone wants to believe that the attack wouldn’t have happened to them because, well, the person who was attacked must have done something wrong.

Sometimes this is the case. Sometimes it’s not.

There are no absolutes in encounters between bears and people. There are two organisms making decisions. What happens is the outcome of this interaction.

Some people do everything that is considered ‘wrong’ and avoid injury. Others do everything ‘right’ and get mauled.

Some who know nothing escape without a scratch. Some who think they know everything get killed. Self-styled bear whisperer Timothy Treadwell for years played with the brown bears in Katmai National Park and Preserve. He befriended bears, petted bears, sang to bears, even kissed a few, and then one killed and ate him and his girlfriend.

The most common bear advice handed out by the authorities on bear behavior is to never run from a bear, and I would never advise anyone to run from a bear unless they are near a quick entry into a house or motor vehicle or happen to stumble upon a bear on a kill.

But in a lifetime in Alaska, I’ve talked to plenty of people – including a neighbor kid who came out of the alders one day with a face as white as a ghost – who have run from bears without any bad consequences.

That said, there have also been bears that gave chase when a human ran, quickly caught them, and mauled them, which is why every authority on bears recommends against running. Fish and Game offers good advice on this subject and what else to do if you meet a bear. Go here to read it:  https://www.adfg.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=hunting.bearsafety

Having had a bear run over me, claw me in the face, and latch on to my lower leg before I shot it, I’m a little more proactive than Fish and Game would suggest in dealing with bears, but I’m not about to suggest that others pursue the idea that the best defense is a good offense. You can get yourself into a lot of trouble that way.

Black hole

As to what exactly happened in the three maulings this year, the public knows precious little other than that they involved a mountain biker, two dog walkers and a runner. All suffered “non-life threatening injuries,” according to officialdom.

What the latter means is also impossible to say. You can get really messed up from injuries that don’t actually threaten your life, or you can get scratched. A Fish and Game biologist claimed the agency can’t say much about what happened in any of these attacks because of “HIPAA,” the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.

But that’s nonsense. HIPAA only applies to insurance companies, health plans, health care clearinghouses, and health care providers.  It doesn’t apply to law enforcement or similar agencies.

And the names of those involved in state investigations of any kind, and the same biologist claimed Fish and Game now thoroughly investigates all bear attacks, are clearly public under Alaska’s liberal public records law, which specifies no exemption for bear attack victims.

Kenai Peninsula resident Scott MacInnes was twice mauled by bears, first when he was a teenager in 1967 and again in 2005, when he was 51. He was identified and made the news both times.

The second time, he was jogging near his home when attacked, but managed to fight the bear off. The first time, he was saved by the heroic action of young friend Mike Moerlein, who shot the bear with a slingshot to get it off MacInnes, only to be attacked by the bear himself.

Moerlein, who later drowned in Cook Inlet, was then run over by the bear, bitten in the left hip and head, but beat the bear off with MacInnes’ walking stick. Both boys recovered.

As is often the case, the best defense against a bear is whatever weapon you have, and it helps to have very brave friends. We know about what happened to MacInnes and Moerlein because it was reported at the time. We wouldn’t know today.

Of the three people attacked in Anchorage this year, only one has self-identified. That would be professional trail runner Klaire Rhodes, sponsored by The North Face, who turned to Instagram to reveal she was attacked while “running in the Chugach” and “came out of the situation with relatively minor injuries, with the most severe being a deep puncture wound to my left hip and claw and teeth marks on my body.”

She offered no information as to what exactly happened because, as she wrote, “the internet is a weird place with a lot of unsolicited opinions.” There is no doubt that.

She then went on to claim, “yes, bear spray works.”

But how well it worked in her case is unclear. The idea behind bear spray is that you spray it in the bear’s face, and the bear runs off, so that you don’t get mauled.

People who claim to have heard Rhodes tell more of her story (she didn’t respond to a request for an interview) say that she met a sow with cubs, the sow charged, Rhodes sprayed, the sow kept coming, knocked her down and grabbed her.

The bear is then reported to have departed, with Rhodes sending it on its way with another spray. It is possible, depending on how close the bear, that she missed it with the first spray, if this account is accurate. As with spray paint, the spray comes out of s pressurized can as a narrow stream that broadens with distance.

The one important thing that can be said about this, if the report is accurate, is that spray didn’t make anything worse.

There have been cases where people using firearms for defense have wounded bears that subsequently mauled and killed them. This is the main reason that spray is now widely promoted as the ‘best’ protection against grizzly bears.

Whether it actually worked for Rhodes is hard to say. She believes it did, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it did.

The first person to be attacked, a mountain biker who was not identified, used his bike to fend off a charging bear and also suffered non-life-threatening injuries. As with Rhodes, the bear fled after the initial attack, and – again as with Rhodes – he was able to walk out of the woods and call his wife to take him to the hospital.

He could fairly get on Instagram and claim “yes, bike frames work.”

The reality is that a lot of surprise encounters with brown bears end the way these two did, no matter what people do. The bear knocks the person down, bites them, decides the threat has been neutralized and flees.

This behavior is why it has long been recommended that the best thing to do when attacked by a brown bear – if you have no weapon for self-defense – is to hit the ground, protect the back of your neck and play dead.

Here it must be added that you should never do this with a black bear for the simple reason that black bears rarely attack, and those that do are likely predatory. They should be fought like your life depends on it, because it likely does.

Because of this, one of the things anyone venturing off the roads in the Anchorage area should be able to do is tell the difference between black bears and brown/grizzly bears because the area is home to a fair number of “cinammon” colored black bears that look a lot like small brown/grizzly bears.

Arguably, the best identification guide that can be found was put together by the Greater Yellowstone Foundation. It can be viewed here: https://greateryellowstone.org/grizzly-bear-vs-black-bear

Fundamental safety

Long debates can these days be had about the safety of running and cycling in bear country or, for that matter, taking your dog with you into bear country. How safe or unsafe these activities is largely all about judgment.

The big factor that comes into play is sight distance. If you can spot bears a long way off, you can avoid them, and especially avoid surprising them.

After Tom S. Smith and Stephen Herrero, two noted authorities on bears, examined Alaska bear attacks from 1880 to 2015, they reported that hunters and hikers made up about half of all those involved in serious bear incidents or attacks, followed in diminishing order by fishermen, researchers, joggers, trappers, cyclists, photographers, people butchering fish or game, and berry pickers.

Hunters are intentionally trying to be quiet when moving through the wilderness, and hikers, especially those hiking alone, often are also quiet. Fishermen pop up in the data because they are often hanging out where salmon-hungry bears hang out.

Those who rarely, to the point of almost never, get attacked are groups of people, especially noisy people. And it really doesn’t matter whether they are hiking, running, cycling, fishing or berry picking.

Bears do not like crowds, especially noisy crowds. Lone individuals or a couple of people far enough apart that the bear might see the first as alone present a different story.

The number of runners and cyclists attacked has notably been on the rise in recent years as more of them venture into the backcountry and bear numbers increase. In 2016, Brad Treat, a law enforcement officer for the U.S. Forest Service, became the first mountain biker known to have been attacked and killed by a bear. 

He was cycling in Glacier National Park near the Canada-Montana border when he encountered the bear. After a thorough investigation, the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks concluded that he collided with the bear while riding at high speed.

A speeding Treat was reported to be more than 25 yards in front of his wife’s cousin when he disappeared around a bend in a Glacier Park trail. According to the report, the cousin reported hearing Treat yell, “Oh God Bear. Then there was the sound of a collision; and then he heard the bear vocalize and make a sound like it was hurt, right after the sound of the collision. Kind of a thud then an argh sound.” 

The cousin came around the corner to find “the bear on top of Treat, up and
around Treat’s head. The cousin heard Treat yell his name twice. The bear was intent
and focused on Treat and never saw or turned towards him. The cousin then had to
decide if he was going to head towards the incident or head out and get help. He was
worried about what would happen if he tried to push the bear off Treat. Would it work
or what would the bear do to him since he had nothing to defend himself. The cousin
turned his mountain bike around and headed back up the trail [then] started
bushwhacking towards the highway [where] he flagged down a vehicle and they took
him to a phone so he could call for help.”

The incident sounds very similar to what is believed to have happened to Davis in Anchorage in 2008, with the exception being that the bear fled after attacking her, and another mountain biker, Peter Basinger, promptly arrived on the scene to start first aid and summon the help that saved her life.

This sort of thing could easily happen in Anchorage again and would suggest that it might be a good idea for Hillside mountain bikers to tell their riding companions to carry pepper spray, given what happened in the Treat incident. There are very few folks as brave as Moerlein who’d go after a brown bear with a slingshot or a club to save a friend.

Preparation here deserves special consideration given that the number of cyclists attacked is likely to go up in wild areas that allow the use of ebikes, which are giving increasing numbers of people the opportunity to go deeper into the backcountry.

Of course, in Anchorage, you don’t need to go deep into the backcountry to find bears. They can regularly be found running through people’s yards on the Hillside, in Eagle River, and near the Anchorage Coastal Wildlife Refuge in South Anchorage.

The danger these animals present waxes and wanes. It went down in 2018 after a record 41 bears were shot and killed in the Anchorage area – some by state and local officials, some by residents defending themselves or their property.

The bear attack deaths of Stoltis and Cooper were then still fresh in everyone’s thoughts, but times change.

After Fish and Game officials this year killed a grizzly sow and cubs that broke into a house in Eagle River, they took a social-media beating when the Anchorage Daily News set them up with a headline proclaiming “Fish and Game quietly killed a brown bear with cubs in Eagle River. Frustrated locals say the deaths were preventable.”

The post came complete with a photo of a seemingly friendly sow and three cute, little cubs. On Facebook, someone posted an additional photo of the bears looking harmless and playful in her yard. Hundreds weighed in to comment, most of them lamenting the shootings as a tragedy or even “murder,” with quite a few blaming the homeowner involved for owning two chickens, which she’d moved into her house to protect them from bears.

Those who understood the danger inherent in a brown bear that has become so fearless of humans that it will break into a house to get what it wants were in the minority. So, too, those who understood that what Fish and Game did to the bears was something bears regularly do to each other.

Researchers studying the protected bears of Denali National Park and Preserve decades ago documented bears regularly killing other bears. In the natural world, bears live in a war zone, with the young bears the most vulnerable of individuals.

But a lot of humans living amidst the chaos of the civilized world of today want to believe the wild world of nature is friendlier and nicer, even if it’s not. And some of them like to believe that as long as they’re nice to the bears, the bears will be nice to them.

The problem, as Treadwell discovered the hard way, is that the bears don’t give a rip.