Grizzly mauls Russian River angler
CRITICAL: Bear-human encounters escalate, leave four bears dead.
By CRAIG MEDRED
and DOUG O'HARRA
Anchorage Daily News
(Published: July 16, 2003)
RUSSIAN RIVER -- A 25-year-old angler seriously mauled by a brown bear here early Tuesday was being treated at Anchorage's Providence Alaska Medical Center as state and federal officials tried to decide what to do about a growing bear crisis along the state's most popular salmon stream.
Daniel Bigley was just feet from a stairway that leads to the Grayling parking lot in the U.S. Forest Service's popular Russian River Campground when he was apparently jumped by a brown bear sow with two cubs, according to U.S. Forest Service officials.
He was in critical condition Tuesday night, having had part of his face torn off and losing at least one eye, according to witnesses.
Details of the attack were sketchy, but retired Col. Frank Valentine, a former member of the U.S. Army Rangers, said he and his wife, Celeste, were settling into bed in their trailer about 100 yards from the parking lot at 12:30 a.m. when a car horn started honking.
Moments later, he said, a young man and a young woman came pounding on his door.
"They were in shock,'' Valentine said. "They were very, very anxious and scared to death.''
They told him of the mauling and asked for help. Though it was still light enough to see, Valentine grabbed a flashlight and headed for the stairs.
He said the two young people told him they'd been standing near the top of the two-tiered stairway when they heard shouting below. Then three bears -- what appeared to be a sow grizzly and two cubs -- bounded up the steps.
The couple, Valentine said, turned, ran and dove through an open window into the back of a Chevrolet Blazer. The bears ran past and back into the woods. The couple started blowing the horn to attract attention before going for help.
When Valentine returned with the couple to the head of the stairway, he sent the woman to wait in a nearby restroom built of concrete blocks, while he and the young man headed toward the river.
About 20 to 30 feet from where the trail from Grayling meets a trails that runs along the water, they found Bigley and a friend down in tall grass and brush. The friend was trying to stop Bigley's head from bleeding. At first, Valentine thought Bigley was dead.
"He had severe trauma,'' said the Vietnam veteran on vacation here from his Georgia home. "I've been in combat, and I've never seen anyone with those type of injuries who has survived. It looked like he had been blasted in the face.''
But when Valentine checked on Bigley, he found the man conscious, his pulse good and his airway clear. Valentine called 911 on his cell phone.
"There really wasn't anything we could do down there except wait to transport him,'' he said.
As Valentine and the others waited, more volunteers trickled in -- a man with a shotgun to keep watch in case the bears returned; another arrived with a first-aid kit started cutting off Bigley's waders. People with flashlights showed up to light the campground road for emergency crews.
By the time Cooper Landing Emergency Medical Technician Carrie Williams arrived, the community's volunteer firefighters, Alaska State Troopers and more than a half dozen others had gathered. She described the scene as "chaotic,'' but manageable.
"Thank God he was on the stair side'' of the Russian River, she said.
Williams helped stabilize Bigley. He was then lashed to a backboard. Volunteers carried him up the stairs to a waiting ambulance. The ambulance took him out of the campground and about a mile down the Sterling Highway to a wide spot in the road near the Resurrection Pass Trail head.
A Providence Lifeflight helicopter waited there to fly Bigley to Anchorage.
Friends described Bigley as a newcomer from Arizona with a yearning to discover America's last great wilderness. He had a degree in environmental sciences, said Girdwood neighbor Jennifer White, and was working as a counselor at Alaska Children's Services in Anchorage.
A co-worker there, Brad Precosky, the well-known Alaska mountain runner, said he'd just sold Bigley a plot of land with a cabin in Bear Valley above Anchorage. Precosky said Bigley was full of enthusiasm about living in the mountains and imagined skiing down some of the gullies near his new home.
"I had a good feeling about him," Precosky said.
"He's done quite a bit of guiding in river rafting and hiking," White said. "He's not the kind of guy who would have been out there causing a big ruckus.''
It appeared, according to authorities, that Bigley simply stumbled into trouble on his return from an evening of fishing. He was following a trail used by thousands of people every summer. Valentine had just come up the same trail, carrying a limit of three red salmon.
"I had walked that same path maybe 30 minutes before they did,'' he said, "I walked it alone, but I sang the whole way. Just for the grace of God, it could have happened to me.''
Bear problems along the river have escalated since the middle of last month when the first of two annual returns of red salmon arrived late. Kenai Peninsula area wildlife biologist Jeff Selinger with Fish and Game said that in recent days there have been reports of several grizzly bear sows with cubs in the area, as well as a number of black bears.
Problems grew serious a week ago when an angler was charged by a brown bear sow with three cubs. He shot at her to protect himself. The fate of that bear was unknown until two days later when the cubs were reported up a tree in the Russian River Campground.
The rotting carcass of their mother was found not far away. Alaska Department of Fish and Game regional wildlife supervisor Jeff Hughes said biologists subsequently decided to euthanize the less-than-50-pound cubs because no zoo or other wildlife facility could be found to take them.
It was not, Hughes added, an easy decision. Fish and Game, he noted, is in the middle of a program trying to preserve a Kenai brown bear population believed to be threatened by increasing development.
"We've got to do a better job,'' he said. "Maybe we need to provide the bears with a buffer.''
In the aftermath of the mauling, the U.S. Forest Service has closed the Russian River Trail and the banks of the river from the falls to the confluence from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. through July 25.
The Forest Service has no authority to prohibit fishing, so anglers could walk up the river and fish. Anglers will, however, be unable to drive to the Russian River Campground, get a parking space and walk down to fish.
Even with the sun high and hot on Tuesday afternoon, a trio of yearling grizzlies was busy making trouble in plain sight near the confluence of the Russian and Kenai rivers.
"We've got ourselves a messy situation,'' Selinger said, "a situation that has the potential for a lot of problems.''
Kenai refuge officer Kevin Shinn said one of the yearlings appeared particularly aggressive. It came out of the woods near the Kenai River ferry, he said, grabbed a backpack and then started looking for more.
"They continued to work downstream,'' he said, "working from stringer to cooler, whatever they could find.''
Anglers expressed varying degrees of concern. At the top of the Grayling stairs, Dave Howard, a superintendent at Costco in Anchorage, and his father, Dave Sr., were geared up to go fishing, bears or no bears.
Veterans of this river, they figured they could get along with the bears. The last time fishing, the younger Dave said, "we saw four grizzlies and a black. We stayed away and gave ground."
"Hey, this is their river,'' added Dave Sr. "These guys were here before we were here. It's their fish.''
