Following the 2023 deaths of two Albertans in a grizzly attack, experts are urging Albertans re-learn their bear smarts as spring arrives
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When the mother grizzly began charging at him, Peter Graham thought the animal was bluffing.
It took only moments for the Canmore man to realize she wasn’t.
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“In an instant, she was in a full gallop…I did have my bear spray out but it was a deer-in-the-headlights moment,” said Graham, 41, adding it took only a few seconds for the grizzly to cover the 10 metres between them.
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“By the time she was 10 feet away from me, I knew it was going to hurt.”
Graham had been doing what he’d enjoyed countless times, solo hiking in the Rockies, this time in the early afternoon of Sept. 26, 2021 near Highwood Pass in the south Kananaskis.
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He’d followed a trail used by animals and hunters until it disappeared into a gully where sight lines were restricted in the bush, he recalls.
That’s where he surprised the female grizzly and her two cubs but even then, he wasn’t overly afraid initially because he’d had many bear encounters without incident.
But within seconds, the mother bear’s brute strength had him convinced he was breathing his last.
“She clamped her jaws down on my head, where her lower lip was at the height of my skull,” said Graham.
“When she made that first bite, I heard her tooth scrape against my skull. I thought that was the moment, that was it. It was truly terrifying – you’re at the mercy of the bear.”
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But after 30 seconds of terror, the grizzly ended her attack just as abruptly as it began, apparently satisfied her cubs were no longer threatened.
A dazed and bloodied Graham was able to activate a GPS device and text rescuers on his cell phone while applying a gauze bandage to his head.
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An hour later, he was slung from the forest floor by a helicopter-borne crew and ultimately taken by ground ambulance to the Foothills Medical Centre.
There, he was patched up with 46 staples to his head, three to a knee and 29 stitches to his forehead and nose ridge.
Graham said he counts himself not only lucky to be alive but to have avoided disfigurement.
“The wounds on my head healed as fully as you could expect so it wasn’t like every time you looked in the mirror you’d be reminded of it,” he said.
“But it’s always going to be with me.”
After telling Alberta Fish and Wildlife officials the attack wasn’t predatory but defensive, the decision was made to spare the grizzly’s life, said Graham.
Those officials collected the bruin’s DNA samples from his body and determined the bear was unknown to them.
A thankful Graham briefly recalled another victim of a grizzly attack whose fate wasn’t so kind – fellow Canmoreite Isabelle Dube, who died 16 years before his nearly-fatal encounter.
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“I met her at Sunshine ski hill three or four weeks before her death – she lived up the street from me and I’ve walked by the site where she was killed,” he said.
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A connection to that tragedy is shared, even more concretely, by John Clarke.
The then-provincial fish and wildlife officer was monitoring a radio-collared grizzly known as number 99 which had been acting stubbornly towards people – and were closing in on it when they saw two women exiting a Canmore wooded area.
He and a colleague had found their grizzly and more than they’d bargained for.
Clarke recalls approaching the bear lingering over a woman it had just killed, and quickly realizing the danger they were in.
“It gave us this tilted head like ‘you’re next,’” said the veteran bear safety expert.
What then happened unfolded rapidly and violently, with their bear dog fighting the animal while both men leveled their rifles.
“The dog attacked the bear, the bear stopped, the dog stopped and (my colleague) shot the bear with a 30-06 rifle,” said Clarke.
Clarke recalls holding the dying woman’s hand and saying a prayer.
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The horrifying, gruesome encounter played out on June 5, 2005 after Isabelle Dube, 36, had been out jogging with friends near the SilverTip Golf Course and crossed the path of a grizzly.
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Her friends ran for help and Dube sought refuge by scaling a tree.
“If you can climb a tree, a bear can climb a tree, and this one climbed up 40 feet and dragged her down and killed her,” said Clarke.
It was his job to attend the scene of incidents and attacks involving bears and the Canmore encounter was hardly his only one.
“I’ve had three bears that wanted to kill me – two black bears and one grizzly – and a moose,” said Clarke, 61, who’s attended 14 bear maulings.
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In one close call, the presence of his bear dog was the difference between life and death – or at least a severe mauling, he said.
“The dog saved my life,” said Clarke, recalling an instance where he tried coaxing the bear to make an escape.
“He looked at me as if ‘I’m not leaving’…I gave him escape routes to leave,” he said, adding he ultimately shot the animal.
“If it had met (an unarmed) hiker – who knows?”
But the man who performed outdoor tasks for the province for more than three decades and now operates his own bear safety consultancy said he’s not in favour of people heading into the woods with firearms to ward off bruins.
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It’s a recipe for false complacency and disaster, said Clarke, since most people lack the perceptive, emotional, firearms and motor skills to gun down a charging bear.
“People don’t practise enough to be good at guns – they go hunting a week out of their lives,” said Clarke, who’s held sessions to test the ability of people to defend themselves from moving targets.
“You roll a tire down a hill and shoot at it, many people can’t hit it,” he said.
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Nine out of ten times, when acting the part of a bear, “I can beat them even when they know I’m coming.”
When out in the woods and surprised by a bear, “they don’t even remember their gun’s loaded or their brain forgets a cub was there…they’re still trying to comprehend what’s happening, they’re fiddling with the safety or the scope.”
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“There’s all that happening within seconds.”
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Even if they do manage to shoot a bear, the animal still poses a raging threat because it’ll often take time to die from loss of blood, said Clarke.
“Handguns will only help you when the bear’s on top of you and if you’ve got your head on you,” he said.
Wildlife scientist Clayton Lamb agrees, saying most outdoors enthusiasts aren’t proficient enough with firearms and noted hunters have often fallen prey to bears.
“Guns are effective if the bear is charging across the length of a football field but that’s never the situation,” said Lamb, who’s with the University of British Columbia.
“People armed with firearms have been known to harm their companions due to panic.”
By contrast, bear spray has been proven an effective defence and is inexpensive and easy to carry, he said.
And it’s time for hikers to be prepared for the return of bears who are now slowly emerging from hibernation, said Lamb, who’ll be boarding a helicopter in mid-May to do a bruin head count in the Elk Valley of southeastern B.C.
As of the second week of April, he said, only one of eight collared grizzlies being monitored by Lamb was out on the landscape.
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First to be seen are the larger males “and sometimes we can’t get a cub count because they’re still in the den,” he said.
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Bears shaking off their winter torpor, said Lamb, are often desperately in need of protein and will descend from their still-snowy refuges into valley bottoms where there’s food such as livestock carcasses – and people.
“Some are quite fat but the ones that aren’t will take risks,” he said, adding during his duties he’s been charged once – by a black bear.
“The amount of food on the valley bottoms is actually quite small but that’s where the people are and you end up with a conflict-prone couple of weeks.”
In some places like the Elk Valley, bears will emerge more quickly due to this year’s early spring accented by “such a low snowpack, it’s melted so fast,” said Lamb.
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Just before the latest hibernation, the worst Alberta bear attack in memory occurred northwest of Calgary in Banff National Park’s Panther Valley where 62-year-olds Doug Inglis and his common-law wife, Jenny Gusse of Lethbridge and their border collie were fatally mauled by a 27-year-old, emaciated grizzly last September 29.
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The pair had made camp for the night when they were accosted while in their tent by the bear, which was undeterred by their bear spray.
Hours later, a bear attack specialist team arrived on the scene and destroyed the grizzly as it charged them.
Former wildlife officer Clarke’s business, Canadian Bear Safety Authority had seen a quick client uptick in response to the deaths.
What he tells them in interactive instruction, which includes him dressing up to play the part of a bear, is to widen their visual outlook while in the woods.
“You’ve got to scan, you can’t have tunnel vision and never scream when there’s cubs – it increases (a bear’s) predatory behaviour,” said Clarke.
“Retreat always the way you came because you don’t know if you’re going over a cliff or over logs.”
Being part of a group with each person equipped with bear spray is also a good idea, said Clarke while other advice includes staying away from animal carcasses and vacating areas when spotting bear scat.
Bear spray, he said, should be discharged towards the face of the animal that’s closed within 19 feet.
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“It comes as a stream and starts clouding but you’ve got to get them in their nose and eyes…it knocks them down and gives you a lot of time to get out of there,” he said.
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“But it’s a last resort.”
Ideally, those heading into the woods would take a course on using bear spray which not only imparts vital technique, but confidence, said Clarke.
Severely injured survivor Graham said he still heads into the mountains solo but now pays far keener attention to his surroundings.
And he now makes more noise and keeps his can of bear spray closer at hand instead of in the side pocket of his backpack.
“I learned the hard way it has to be instantly accessible,” said Graham.
“I’m more alert – you can be in your own little world and however impossible the event might seem, it can always happen.”
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Wildlife biologists say only five per cent of human-grizzly encounters are predatory but that too many people poorly versed on safety are flocking to mountain trails.
A moratorium on hunting grizzlies was followed by the bears being designated a threatened species in 2010, after a status assessment that also informed the Alberta Bear Recovery Plan.
The province is reviewing the threatened species designation, though officials say changes in ministries overseeing that work have caused delays in its completion.
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That review’s been driven by the apparent success of the recovery plan that’s seen the grizzly bear population grow from between 700 and 800 in 2010 to between 900 and 1,150 now, including those in the national parks.
The threshold for threatened status is fewer than 1,000 mature or breeding-age individuals. Provincial officials believe 52 per cent of the province’s grizzlies are currently of that age but that the province isn’t considering reinstating the grizzly hunt.
A growing bear population and human encroachment is leading to more confrontations between the animals and people, say wildlife experts and lawmakers.
There’s no need for any policies that would represent a culling of the grizzly population, said Clarke.
“There’s enough grizzlies that die or are killed every year that wouldn’t warrant a hunt,” adding there’s little mercy shown to male grizzlies that have run afoul of humans.
“If you’re a young male grizzly that’s done something wrong, you’re dead, there’ll be no relocation.”
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Nearly seven months after his nephew Doug Inglis and his partner Jenny Gusse were killed by a grizzly in a remote corner of Banff National Park, Colin Inglis is still haunted by the tragedy.
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He was in touch with the couple as they made their way into the backcountry just before their deaths and kept apprised by their would-be rescuers as the grim news became clearer.
“You hope for the best but sometimes that doesn’t happen,” said Inglis.
The pair – both skilled and conscientious outdoors enthusiasts – were attacked amid windy, snowy conditions that might have rendered the bear spray they deployed ineffective, he said.
It shows that, once in the woods, there are no guarantees regardless of the precautions taken.
“They were captive in their tent,” said Inglis, who then echoed the words Parks Canada officials have told him.
“In reality, there was nothing they could have done differently, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
In memory of the two scientific researchers, an endowment has been established in their names at the University of Lethbridge to annually fund two students interested in research.
X (Twitter) @BillKaufmannjrn
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