BEAR TRAP
The bear in question … just outside of camp, before finally chasing Steve and Michael away.
Early during the podcast with Aaron Mulkey (Ep. 189) we spoke briefly about him visiting the Alaska Range to climb Mount Huntington. Landing the plane on the upper Tokositna Glacier, right below the face represents a very convenient form of "car camping" in Alaska, and is quite safe vis-a-vis glacier travel, avalanche, etc. I joked about how a couple of friends encountered a bear up there in the early-90s and told that story as well as my memory had held onto it. I mistakenly identified the bear as a grizzly (because for a lower-48er all bears in Alaska are grizzlies), which, if true, probably would have had a different outcome. After the conversation I contacted one of the guys, Michael Dimitri, and asked him to refresh my memory, which he was kind enough to do. This is his account of that event.
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Steve Mascioli and I went to climb the "Moonflower" on Mount Hunter year before you and Scott did "Deprivation", so 1993, I believe (I’m in same memory haze as you).
It was the first of what has become a more typical season up there weather-wise; super warm, with a lot of stuff falling down the route. I got us to the top of Twin Runnels where we decided that too much shit was falling on our heads and we should retreat. We hid out until it began to refreeze then rappelled off and skied back to camp, which we reached early in the morning.
When Jay Hudson landed at Kahiltna Base on the first of his daily runs Steve asked if he could hop us over to the Tokositna as our Plan B. Jay said he’d be back in a couple hours so we packed up. As per the AK usual, the "couple of hours" turned into evening and by then, other then napping on our duffel bags we had been awake for ~72 hours. Jay did eventually get us in around 2100 and placated us with pizza and beer then moved us and our gear, landing us below the west face of Mount Huntington. We set up our tents where Michael Kennedy and Greg Child had camped couple weeks prior. They had stamped out platforms and a kitchen area so we had minimal work, which was great as we were exhausted. We set up two Bibler tents, had some whiskey went to bed.
A couple hours later I heard what I presumed to be Steve digging into the food bag for midnight snacks. I turned on some music, leaned against the tent wall to read and then heard Steve wandering in the snow. "Bathroom break," I thought, but we hadn’t probed for crevasses much past the perimeter of our camp and I remember thinking I should say something but nodded off before doing so.
I awakened to “Steve” swatting me from outside the tent. I went from, "Hey, what's up?" to "What the fuck?" When he didn't answer but instead I could hear him breathing heavily outside of the tent fabric. Finally, I unzipped the tent door to discover a huge furry face, with big teeth and bad breath. I screamed holy hell and the bear took off.
Steve scrambled out of his tent to join me. The bear had destroyed two large duffel bags of food, and rearranged the kitchen. At first we were amused, then slowly we began to wonder, "How the fuck did a bear get up here?" It’s got to be miles and miles of glacier and icefall. It dawned on us that the bear was probably starving and we were the only game in town.
So started several hours of the bear feinting into camp and us trying to scare it off. We brandished our ice tools and shouted. We dug a trench between us so the bear would lose its height advantage if he stepped into it and deliberated whether to hit it with the hammer end of the ice tool or the (sharper) pick. We hung the stove from an extendable ski pole, lit it, and tried to use it as a torch. The bear actually got close enough to touch its chest with the ski pole/stove device once. Eventually, the bear drove us out of camp, which was super scary because we were unroped, and ill-prepared to move around on the untracked glacier. Once the bear pushed us to what he deemed a safe distance, it retreated to our camp, leveled it, made it into a huge pile, and gorged itself on our food. Once sated he curled up on top of everything and took a nap.
Fortunately, Jay insisted I take a CB radio, which, despite limited power, could bounce a signal around well enough that after a while, someone at Kahiltna base camp heard my pleas for a rescue. Jay assured them that weren’t lunatics and it was unlikely we were hallucinating bears. A pilot from K2 Aviation was in the air and dropped over the ridge to make a radio relay as we could not hear any transmissions from Kahiltna base. The bear stood up from its nap and resumed screaming and waving its paws at us - the pilot saw this and concurred we needed out right fucking now.
Jay heard this, tossed a French team's shit out of the Super Cub, grabbed his .308 and flew over to us. Once on site he chased the bear down-glacier, landed and skied the plane across the snow to us — we were not psyched for another hike across the glacier with no rope. With the engine revving, we stood on the skids and he skied us back to camp. There was nothing but feathers, nylon, climbing gear and chewed-up food wrappers — everything in a snarled mess. Jay stood on the wing of the aircraft with his rifle while we pushed our stuff by the armload into the plane, cleaning up what we could, and then bailed. Jay, the consummate Alaskan pilot, handed us a partial bottle of whiskey for the flight out.
Once we got back to Talkeetna, Jay took the door off the plane and Steve, who had crawled into the back with piles of our gear that appeared to have been customized by a wood chipper, started pushing it onto the tarmac with his feet. Feathers and scraps of stuff started blowing around while the French team who had reassembled their gear into neat piles were sitting on their bags watching this performance. A cute French girl came over and, in her lovely French accent, asked me in shocked tones what route had we been on. All we could do was laugh.
We got to be celebrities for two days, were guests on local radio, and at the bar where we stayed, we ate and drank for free. During an interview with the wildlife biologist from National Park Service we were informed that, fortunately, black bears have much shorter claws than grizzlies and I would not have survived the first swat from one of their paws. He also informed that grizzlies may or may not continue to be aggressive after an initial encounter but, once engaged, black bears most certainly will. Finally, to settle the question of hammer or pick, he said, "a bear's skull is so thick, and its brain so small the distinction would not have mattered at all."
Because of how much gear had been destroyed, and that we had had plenty of excitement, we quit Talkeetna and headed home. Once there, I sorted through the gear we salvaged and discovered a bear's tooth the size of my little finger. Somewhere I have a couple of photos that Steve took — the only jacket he grabbed as I held off the bear was his, and it still had a camera in the pocket from our attempt on the “Moonflower”.
I haven’t thought about it in a while but that sure scared the shit outta me. Amusing huh?
