A 55-year-old man hiking solo less than two miles from the Eielson Visitor Center in Alaska’s Denali National Park suffered injuries in a grizzly bear attack Monday night.
The Eielson Visitor Center in Denali National Park.
The unidentified man was hiking through dense fog in the Thoroughfare Pass area of the park south of Park Road when the grizzly with two cubs nearby charged him from bushes about 100 feet away and knocked him down, the park reported.
The man managed to go on the offensive by deploying bear spray, and the momma grizzly and her 1- or 2-year-old cubs quickly departed the area.
Also on FTW Outdoors: Videos show Katmai brown bears getting too close for comfort
The man hiked 1½ miles to the visitor center where he boarded a park transit bus that transported him out of the park. On the bus, he was treated for puncture wounds to his calf, left ribs and left shoulder by tourists who happened to be medical personnel.
The bus driver called 911 for an ambulance around 8:19 p.m., and the man was eventually transported to Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, where he was reported in stable condition Tuesday morning.
“Due to the apparent defensive nature of this attack, there are no plans to locate the bear involved,” park spokesman Paul Ollig stated. “Female bears with cubs are naturally defensive of their young, especially when surprised. There is no indication that this bear is unusually dangerous.”
The area the man was hiking is above 3,500-feet elevation and features “open tundra, with rolling landscape and large stands of willows and alders,” Ollig told the Anchorage Daily News.
Also on FTW Outdoors: Madison River in Montana is a fly-fishing mecca, photos help prove it
The National Park Service closed backcountry units 11 and 12 for a week as a cooling-off period, Ollig told ADN, adding that a “separation of bears and people following a natural defensive attack helps achieve the objective of keeping people safe and bears wild.”
It was the first bear attack reported in Denali this year.
Photos courtesy of the National Park Service and Wikipedia Commons.
Credit: Source link
