Trent
On June 8, Brennan Gow, a forestry student working in Fort St John, got between a mother Grizzly Bear and it’s cub.
Gow survived the encounter through quick thinking, but he says he wasn’t sure that he was going to.
On June 8, he was hiking to Monkman Lake on a solo hike.
Gow says that he was planning on spending the night, so had a larger pack with camping gear in it.
“I drove to the Kinuseo Falls campground Friday night,” he says. “I slept in a little bit, so was running a little behind schedule. I had breakfast, then got my pack ready. I was thinking about packing a second can of bear spray, but decided against it. As I started up the trail I was cruising along doing a kilometer every 12 minutes or so. I was calling out into the bush at every corner or dip in the trail.”
At kilometre 5, about a km, before the suspension bridge over the Murray, he says he heard a snap in the bush. “I paused and shouted out ‘wayyyy-ooo.’ I didn’t hear anything else so I carried on.” He works in the bush five days a week, he says, and generally noises turn out to be small creatures like rabbits.
But he had only taken a few steps when he heard a rustle off to his left. “So I stopped again. ‘Way-ooo’.
This time, he says, he did get a response.
“A large spruce tree came crashing to the ground,” he says. “It was 12, 13 metres tall. I peered into the bush and I saw a large grizzly bear standing on her back legs looking down at me 20 or so meters away. I reached for my bear spray, but as I reached, I turned to my right and noticed a bear cub pop out of the bushes about 10 feet up the trail, looking at me.”
He says that at this moment, his heart sank. Grizzly bear mothers are famously protective of their cubs, and he was way too close for comfort.
He turned back to see where the mother was. It had been maybe two seconds, he says, but in the time it took him to look away and back, she had already covered most of the distance to Gow. “She was charging at me, snapping her jaw and huffing. She shredded through 4 metre high spruce trees like they were blades of grass.
“I was looking past her jagged teeth and down her throat and I decided in a split second not to spray her but to get down on the ground and protect myself.”
While he has taken a bear aware course and a dangerous animals course, he says he’s not sure it was the training kicking in. Instead, he says, his only thought was to get his pack between himself and the bear.
It was the right decision. He was barely on the ground when she got to him, pushing him across the forest floor about four feet, then placing both her front paws on his back and bouncing up and down.
“At this point I believed I wasn’t going to live much longer,” says Gow.
Still standing on his back, she began to nose his legs and head, sniffing him to figure out what he was. “The thought of her weight on my back and her warm breath on the nape of my neck still gives me the chills,” he says.
Deciding he wasn’t a threat, Gow says she got off his back, and moved away. Gow waited about 15 seconds before moving. “I took two looks and didn’t see her, so I stood up.”
He spotted her about 30 metres away. The bear turned and looked at him, and he sprayed his bear spray in her direction, but she was too far away for it to do any good. “She did nothing but watch me back away.”
After getting far enough away, he stopped to check for any wounds, but only had a few bruises and scrapes. “Mind you my pack is toast now,” he says. He pulled a small Swiss Army knife from his pack (“I was carrying a two foot saw and a hatchet, but the knife was the first thing I grabbed,” he says.)
Putting his pack back on, he began to run down the trail. After about a km, he bumped into two guys from Grande Prairie, heading up the trail. “They gave me such a big piece of mind,” he says. He told them about the bear, and they joined him in walking back to the vehicles. “I was in complete shock,” he says. “The biggest relief in my life came when I saw my 2008 Volkswagen sitting in the rain.”
Once in the vehicle, he did another self-inspection, looking for wounds, then just sat there for ten minutes.
Looking back, Gow says he did everything right, but didn’t compensate for the conditions. The rain, he believes, was loud enough to cover the noise of his coming down the trail, and, because it was raining, he had put on his rain gear, which was black. “I was a big black scary thing to the bear,” he says.
Rob Groeger, A Conservation Officer agrees that Gow handled the situation well. “He was doing everything right, from what I have been able to determine,” says Groeger. “She just didn’t hear him, and he wound up between her and her cub.”
This is one of five grizzly reports in the South Peace, from Tomslake to Tumbler Ridge. “Younger bears are getting kicked away from mom at this time of year,” he says. “It’s nothing unusual. Most of the reports are just sightings. A bear hanging around a well site. There was a sighting earlier this morning of grizzly hanging around a trailhead in Tumbler Ridge.”
Not every encounter ends quite so well. Four years ago, says Groeger, there was a fatality in Mackenzie, when a black bear attacked a man sleeping outside his tent. And last year a person suffered minor injuries at Peace Island Park, when Black bear—attracted to garbage in the area—gave a swat to a tent, and hit the person inside.
Gow says that as he was hiking, he picked up two granola bar wrappers on the trail. He’s not sure if that was perhaps another cause. “Maybe someone dropped other food along the trail. Maybe the bear was there because people have leave garbage along the trail. You never think if you drop an apple core into the bush, you might be endangering other hikers.”
He says that he has seen 31 bears so far this year, though usually not in quite such close proximity.
“I’m in the bush five days a week, 7-5. Every weekend I’m out hiking. I’ve been out in Tumbler Ridge, or around Williston Lake.”
He says the incident happened over an incredibly short time frame. “From me hearing the first snap to me getting away, was 2 minutes. While I have done a bear aware course, I’m not sure it helped. The only thought I had was to get the pack between me and the bear. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t perceived as a threat.”
This incident is one of nearly 200 run-ins that folks have had with Grizzlies in the province this year, more than double the annual average.
Most of those reports have been about bears getting into garbage or entering urban areas.
In the last two years, 50 people have been injured in bear-related conflicts.
Last month, a Prince George man out fishing also surprised a mother grizzly and her three cubs. He didn’t notice the bear until she was upon him. She bit his shoulder and tossed him into the bushes, then followed him back to his truck. He escaped with a single bite to the shoulder.
This has also led to a rise in the number of bears killed by the BC Conservation Service, with 97 bears being put down in May, up from 54 the previous year.
Much of this is due to a slow spring across the province, forcing bears into urban areas as they search for food.
Gow says when he got back to town, he reported the incident to the Visitor Information Centre, then called the Conservation Officer.
“It kind of took us by surprise,” admits Groeger. “It could have happened to anyone. It was just a matter of bad timing. He got of lucky. It could have been a lot different.”
