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| I found pictures of the one that almost ate me too. I have to emphasize that this is a very unusual bear. The first picture shows a sheep I was photographing down in the fall colors. It was maybe three hundred yards from the road, and Judy decided to take a short nap while I went up to the sheep. This was the last picture of the sheep I took. You can see the grass in her mouth. She is looking directly over the top of me, and she is alarmed. Immediately after tripping the shutter, she bolted up the mountainside. At that moment, I suspected that I might be in trouble. I looked around to see a very aggressive grizzly coming through the brush. I had been hunting them for a few years by then, and this bear was not like any other bear I had ever encountered. It really looked aggressive, and, I knew at that moment I was in trouble. I started talking loudly, and the bear stopped. I couldn't see it in the brush, but even though it stopped, I was spooked. I picked up my camera/tripod and light meter and quickly crossed a dry wash, went around a big rock bluff, and climbed quite aways up the mountain - stopping just under the ridge so that I would not be outlined in the sky. I should have kept going, but I wanted some pictures - remember - I was young! The bear had been distracted by a parka squirrel, and he was digging it out. In the next picture the bear can be seen jumping after the squirrel that was trying to make a get-away. The squirrel didn't make it, and in the next picture you can just barely see the bear with the squirrel in its mouth. The last picture shows the bear right after swallowing the squirrel - headed toward me. That's when I knew that I was really in trouble. Normally, bears are supposed to be near-sighted. This one, obviously, wasn't. I knew i had better not move while I was in his sight, and I knew that the bear had to go around the same bluff I did, so I waited until he went out of sight - and then I grabbed the camera and light meter and up over the ridge i went headed down to the road where the truck was. It was, as they say, steep as a cow's face - but I went down on a run. A broken leg didn't worry me too much at that point. When I hit the creek bed and ran fifty feet or so, I looked back. The bear was on the creek bed too - coming very fast. As soon as he had gone out of my sight, he must have broken into a run. I stopped, waved my arms wide, and let out a yell. The bear hesitated - and then kept coming. I yelled again, and he hesitated again, but then started my way again. By this time, we were facing each other at a distance of only about ten yards or so. Just then, a yellow school bus the park was using as a tour bus came down the mountain road and hit a real bad washboard. The driver saw me and he saw the bear, and he hit the brakes hard. Well, hitting the brakes right on that washboard made a whole lot of racket, and the bear stopped. The bear looked at the bus, then at me, then the bus, and finally back at me. I could actually see the aggressive look turn to a look of uncertainty and then one of resignation, and the bear slowly turned and walked back toward the mountain and into the brush. A big yellow school bus had just saved my life. I got back down to the truck, and my shouts had woke my wife up from her nap. I was laughing - couldn't stop - and she got a bit peeved that I could laugh about it. but that was my way, I guess, of dealing with the stress relief.
That's by far the closest I ever came to being eaten in Alaska. There is just something about obviously being the prey that was like no other feeling I've ever had.
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Pigpiggy - bears
