Montana bear attack puts hikers and campers on alert

In a sobering reminder that bears are the bosses of the backcountry, one person was killed and two others injured in a grizzly bear attack Wednesday at the heavily occupied Soda Butte campground just outside Yellowstone National Park.

A Canadian woman who was attacked in the middle of the night was bitten on her arm and leg before she instinctively played dead so the animal would leave her alone.

In this May 4, 2009 file photo, a Grizzly bear is seen in Yellowstone National Park near Mammoth Wyoming.CAPTIONBy David Grubbs, AP
"I screamed, he bit harder, I screamed harder, he continued to bite," said Deb Freele of London, Ontario, who woke up just before the bear attacked. The names and ages of the man killed and another man injured were not released.

Freele told interviewers that survival instinct kicked in, and she realized that the screaming wasn't working. "I told myself, play dead," she said. "I went totally limp. As soon as I went limp, I could feel his jaws get loose and then he let me go."

Last weekend, TV personality and zookeeper Jack Hanna followed his own advice to carry pepper spray while hiking - and used it to avoid a potential grizzly attack in Glacier National Park.

The Columbus Zoo keeper and frequent David Letterman guest says he was with his wife and other hikers when they saw the mother bear and two large cubs coming toward them, reports the Associated Press. The group moved slowly back up the trail to a clearing, and stood still while the mother and one cub passed by. But Hanna says the other cub, weighing about 125 pounds, charged toward them before he sprayed it in the face and it fled.

During my own visit to Glacier earlier this month, the frequent reminders of the potential for bear-related danger ranged from pepper spray on sale at lodge gift shops to ranger admonitions not to hike alone (I did, but kept singing an off-key Motown medley, just in case.) My closest encounter: Spotting a grizzly's backside through a tangle of trees just a few hundred yards from the West Glacier entrance.

While today's campers and hikers are warned to stay away from bears, the approach was far different a few decades ago - as a new documentary, "Glacier's Night of the Grizzlies," makes clear. The film revisits a 1967 incident in which two Glacier campers were killed the same night in different campsites. The attacks were a "deafening alarm telling national parks that humans and wildlife need to be separated," Glacier spokesman Amy Vanderbilt told the Flathead Beacon.

That attempted separation hasn't always gone smoothly: Earlier this month, a Yellowstone visitor was injured by a bison when, according to the Yellowstone Insider, a group of tourists got too close and the startled animal attacked.

Meanwhile, debate is intensifying over a new law that allows people to carry guns in national parks.

Wyoming, Idaho and Montana are home to roughly 1,300 grizzlies. Their numbers have rebounded since the 1970s and, although grizzlies still are listed as a threatened species, it's no longer rare for one lolling roadside to jam up tourist traffic (as they did during my Glacier trip). They've killed 10 people in Glacier and five in Yellowstone in the past century, and those parks average one grizzly attack with injuries a year.

Park rangers are still telling visitors that a pressurized can of hot-pepper oil — bear spray — is their best defense, says the Associated Press. Their reasoning? Studies show that in most cases, putting a cloud of bear spray in a grizzly's face works better than trying to stop a moving 400-pound animal with a perfectly placed bullet.