Welcome back to Scary Bear Attacks! Today’s episode takes us to the interior of northern British Columbia, Canada, near a small town called Gitanyow. The mountains tower to above a mile high at their peaks, and the valleys between them are broad and heavily forested. In most of these broad valleys, tangles of willow, alder and tall grasses screen deer, elk, moose and woodland caribou. You may even see American Bison browsing on grasses munching their way across meadows. Predators including cougars, wolves, coyotes and black and brown bears stalk the riparian zones to surprise their prey. It is in this setting that our episode today takes place.

On June 26th of 2019, fifty four year old Alex Woods was walking alone near Gitxsan Village just a few miles from his village Gitanyow. He was a forest pathologist and was going to check tree roots for a disease known as Armillaria Root Disease in old growth stands of forest. Alex was a lean built man who wore his silver beard trimmed short.

He had the GPS coordinates all entered into his device, but was an old school type of guy, so he just took a heading and hiked in the general direction. He had spent the last few decades in the deep woods and routinely hunted and floated the rivers.

As he walked through the foliage he noticed a freshly broken stem of a fireweed plant. Knowing this doesn’t happen unless a large animal has passed by, he took mental note to pay attention to his surroundings. He began yelling “Yo Bear!” repeatedly to let anything that was around him know he was there. He didn’t want to end up in a close range standoff with a moose, let alone a surprised bear.

A few hundred yards into his journey, Alex came up on a steep slope covered in hemlock and balsam fir, burned from a wildfire a year or two before and was open consequently. The small creek at the bottom babbled refreshed plants and animals alike, along its banks. Given the noise from the creek, Alex decided to raise his while yelling “Yo, bear” as he descended the bank.

Just beyond half way down the slope, he saw some morel mushrooms and plucked a couple for his dinner later. After he picked up the mushrooms and stood, he noticed a black bear running directly at him. It wasn’t grunting or growling. The bear didn’t have drool dripping from its lips. It simply sped toward him as if it was going to run right past him. It closed from 100 feet, when he first saw it, and quickly climbed the steep slope toward him so fast Alex wasn’t sure what he could do.

Alex quickly maneuvered himself behind a small tree with a tree laying at its trunk and began yelling at the bear. He reached his hand into his vest and pulled out his bear spray figuring that one blast from it would probably send the bear scampering in the other direction. The cap on the bear spray was stuck and he fumbled with it, trying to get to function as the bear approached him.

The next thing Alex knew, he saw a huge bear head with its mouth wide open and ready to bite into his abdomen. One thing Alex had working for him was the steep slope he was climbing down. As the bear labored up the slope, its head happened to line up for a perfect defensive strike from Alex. He yelled again, then mustered his bravery and kicked the bear as hard as he could right in the jaw. Between Alex’s kick and the steepness of the slope, the bear slid back down the slope several feet. It then began to run around the tree to get at him.

As the bear approached again, Alex yelled louder and kicked in the head as hard as he could one more time. This really rattled the bear, as it ran to a nearby tree and climbed several feet up and stared at Alex. The man was hoping that this encounter was coming to an end after the brief struggle, but in the world of bears, struggle is always part of survival.