Teen Survives Bear Attack After Waking To Animal 'Crunching' On His Head
A teen staffer at a Colorado camp said he fought off a bear on Sunday after he woke up to find the animal was biting his head and trying to drag him away.
Dylan, 19, was sleeping at Glacier View Ranch — 48 miles northwest of Denver — when he woke up to a crunching sound, and found his head inside the mouth of the bear. The bear was trying to pull him out of his sleeping bag. Colorado Parks and Wildlife spokeswoman Jennifer Churchill said the teen punched the animal, and other staffers nearby started yelling and hitting the bear with things around them. After this, the bear left. Dylan was then treated briefly at a hospital and released, reports said.
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The teen told ABC-affiliate KMGH-TV he was dragged to more than 10 feet before he was able to free himself. “The crunching noise, I guess, was the teeth scraping against the skull as it dug in,” Dylan said, who teaches wilderness survival at the camp. None of the other staffers or campers suffered injuries in the incident.
Churchill said even though unprovoked attack is not a common black bear behavior, the bear that attacked the teen would be removed from the park, CNN reported. Bears are known to paw and bite tents with food inside. However, after the Colorado attack, the officials did not find any food inside the tent that could have lured the bear. The officers have set a trap in the area and hounds were used to track the animal Sunday morning, letting them smell the teen’s sleeping bag to get the animal’s scent.
But as the temperature became too hot, the hounds were called off, reports said. “This is a bear we are very concerned about. This is definitely a dangerous bear,” Churchill said.
Bears are not known to be aggressive. However, a spike in the bear attacks has been reported in Western U.S. in the last few weeks. In the last one week, park and wildlife officials in the area have received more than 100 calls about bear sightings that qualify as conflict situations.
The Colorado attack comes four days after four bears were killed in the Durango area Wednesday. Two of the four bears were shot by the owners of the homes where the animals entered, while the other two bears were tracked by Wildlife Services and euthanized. One of the two bears that were euthanized had killed chickens in Pagosa Springs, and the other killed pigs and chickens, reports said.
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In June, two people were killed in Alaska in separate bear attacks. Another teenager was killed after he veered off a trail during a mountain race, south of Anchorage.
Among the other incidents of bear attacks reported in June, a mine contract worker, Erin Johnson, of Anchorage died and her co-worker was injured in a mauling, about 275 miles northeast of Anchorage. In another incident, a woman and her dogs were attacked by a bear and her cubs in Idaho Panhandle National Forests. Earlier this month, an 11-year-old boy shot a bear that was trying to attack his family on a fishing expedition in Alaska.
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