Bear Attacks in Yellowstone Park!! What are YOUR odds of getting attacked???

In this shortened podcast, we discuss 4 bear attacks that have recently happened. We also go over what the odds are of YOU getting attacked by a bear in Yellowstone park. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, everybody. This is Teddy Garland, author of the number one selling guidebook for Yellowstone and Granteeton National Parks, explore Yellowstone like a local, and your host and narrator for one of the top driving apps for the park, Yellowstone Drive Guide. And this is our Yellowstone Weekly, somewhat weekly series. And this is actually designed to be watched on YouTube. So if you guys want to watch a YouTube video of the things we're getting ready to talk about here, and we're getting ready to talk about bear attacks, a lot of the bear attacks that have happened in Yellowstone, Glacier, and the surrounding areas real recently because a lot of people have been asking questions about that to us and on social media. So we're going to talk about bear attacks. So if you want to listen to this podcast, that's great. We're going to talk about everything and then we're going to play the video recording that we shot at my place up just outside of West Yellowstone, overlooking Yellowstone Park. And since we shot it outdoors and all that stuff, the audio is not going to be great. But you'll get the gist of everything we're talking about. But if you guys want to see a video of everything we're talking about, the places we're talking about, and everything else, we're not going to show a bear attack. Anyone getting attacked by a bear. So get your mind together on that one. But we will show some interesting things about bears and everything else. So if you guys want to watch the video of us talking right there with the Yellowstone Park in the background, the Madison River kind of swinging out behind Yellowstone Park, then that would be great. And also, on this podcast that's not going to be on the video, I'm going to talk about one more bear attack that happened about six or seven years ago. If you guys watch that video, you'll see the Madison River right behind us, right there, as it was exits Yellowstone Park. And this attack happened just about a mile and a half, two miles upstream from right where we are talking about six or seven years ago. So, anyway, let's get started with this podcast version, and then I'll tell you guys when the audio version starts, and you'll hear the quick drop in audio quality as we get along there. So, this first story I'm going to tell you about, and we're going to talk about four bear attacks in this podcast. And we also go over in the video portion of this, you know, your odds of being attacked, da da da da, and all this kind of stuff, and where you're more likely to get attacked, least likely to get attacked in the park, blah, blah, blah, and all that kind of stuff. You know, but basically in a nutshell, let me just, you have a 10,000 times more chance of getting in a fatal car crash driving through Yellowstone Park than you do of getting attacked by a bear. You know, and it doesn't stop anybody from driving their car through Yellowstone Park, I promise you. But yeah, here your odds of getting attacked by a bear in Yellowstone Park are virtually slim and none. But we'll go over all the numbers and everything when we get to the video portion. All right, so let's get to this first bear attack that happened about six or seven years ago, literally about a mile and a half, two miles upstream from where we shot the video in my backyard at my house that overlooks Yellowstone National Park. And this attack occurred on a local in the area who is a seasoned hiker. This guy knows his stuff. He's a guide, he's a fishing guide, he's a hunting guide. This guy knows what he is doing. And he was up fishing on the Madison River in March, about six or seven years ago or so. And in March, you know, there's still eight or 10, 15 feet of snow on the ground during March up there in the town of West Yellowstone. But you know, everybody's got, you know, cabin fever. They want to get out and do something. And what happens is in March is the rainbow trout run up out of Lake Hebgen to the Madison River, basically right behind my house and back up into Yellowstone Park a little bit to spawn. And this happens in March of every year, but there's very few fishermen that are willing to put forth, put on snowshoes, walk two miles across, you know, five, six, ten foot, you know, snow drifts and everything else to go, you know, fishing. It's you know, but everybody in town, these guides and all this stuff, they want to get out of their house and go do some fishing. So that's what this guy was doing. And I'm not gonna name his name or anything else, or you know, so we're not gonna get into any of that. And so he's up fishing a couple miles upstream from where we shot that video, and he comes across a big grizzly bear. And unbeknownst to him, this grizzly bear had snaked out a dead moose carcass, a moose that didn't make it through the winter, and he was feeding on that carcass, just came out of hibernation, was feeding on that carcass. And lo and behold, you know, he came around a corner walking through the snow or anything out there, fishing in the river, and he got attacked. He got attacked by that big grizzly bear because it was protecting that carcass. And, you know, it didn't, you know, wasn't a bear with cubs or anything else. That just big grizzly bear was doing hungry, coming out of hibernation and wanted to protect that carcass. So it attacked this guy, and he actually bear sprays the thing, doesn't even come close to do anything to it. He whips out a big buoy knife off his hip, and literally that bear's got him down on the ground, and he is stabbing that bear with this giant buoy knife to get it off of him. He eventually survives the attack. He gets that bear off of him by stabbing that thing with a giant buoy knife, and he, you know, crawls his ass out of there about a mile and a half, two miles through the snow before he can get a signal on his phone to call and get help. And so, yeah, it was nuts. He reports it obviously to the rangers and everything else. And they go out there and find all this stuff, find the grizzly bear, find the moose carcass and everything else. And they tried for a week to get that bear off of that carcass so they could go get the carcass and move it, move it somewhere safer because this area is real close to Bakers Hole campground, and nobody's there in March, but they're gonna be there starting about the Memorial Weekend until the Labor Day. They wanted to get just that bear out of the vicinity before anybody showed up up there to start camping out. I mean, there's hundreds of people camp out in this Baker's Hole campground just north of West Yellowstone, and they just wanted that big grizzly out of them. They had to get that carcass out of there, too, because that bear was gonna feed on that carcass for a long time. And so they could not get that bear off that carcass for a week. I mean, they had air horns firing big guns over its head and everything else. Finally, they got it off of there far enough, and they went out there and dynamited that moose carcass into a million little pieces. And after a couple days later, that bear finally gave up. And that's that they could not get that bear off that moose carcass. So I wanted to tell you guys about that attack, you know, because I kind of thought of it after we shot that video behind my house back there. But in that video, and we're gonna ready to start the recording for that video on this podcast, and we're gonna discuss three bear attacks. One occurred as these two boys were hiking to Mystic Falls, and then the second one occurred up in Glacier, which ended up being a fatality. And the third one, which nobody seemed to have heard about, actually found it in the Island Park newspaper, occurred right outside the southwest corner of Yellowstone Park where two hunters almost got killed by a big grizzly bear. I mean, this bear charged for over a hundred yards and they shot at it and shot at it and shot it and hit it, hit it, hit it. Finally had to pull out a big enough rifle to do the damage and kill the and stop 12 feet in front of them. I mean, this bear was gonna kill those guys. But we'll discuss all three of those, and we'll also have to go over the numbers, like I said earlier, about your chances of getting attacked by a bear and where your chances increase and where they decrease and all that stuff. So and I'm sorry, I apologize about the audio quality going down. And if you guys want to watch a video of it, just go to the YouTube and put in Teddy Garland's Yellowstone Weekly and it will, amongst many others, will pop right up and they're really fun. We talk about taking your pet to Yellowstone Park, we talk about how old Faithful works and all kinds of fun stuff. You guys can watch videos and see pictures and everything of those on those YouTube videos. If you guys want to listen to the podcast and you guys are set, so here we go. Let's get started with the audio from the video recording we shot behind my house. And while I'm thinking about it, if there's a topic you would like me to cover, then simply send your request to explore Yellowstone like a local at yahoo.com and we kind of go over those and kind of pick a couple out, and that's how we come up for the ideas for these Yellowstone Weekly podcasts and the Yellowstone Weekly YouTube videos. So send them in and we will go over them and we might just publish the one you are after. So let's get started. Here we go, and you guys have a wonderful time in Yellowstone National Park. And again, I apologize for the poor sound quality, but here we go. All right, I'm Teddy Garland, and this is Lisa from Explore Yellowstone like a local, and this is our little sub-podcast and YouTube video called Yellowstone Weekly, and it's kind of Yellowstone Monthly almost. That's about as fast as we get these things done. But uh anyway, we are gonna talk about bear attacks in Yellowstone National Park because there have been a few of them recently.

SPEAKER_01 9:26

So there's been a rash of highly publicized bear attacks in Yellowstone National Park and Glacier over the last few weeks. So you might be wondering, what are our chances of being attacked on our trip to Yellowstone? Should we even go to Yellowstone? Because we might be bear food. Who knows?

SPEAKER_00 9:43

Yeah, there might be a bear right back behind us, and we don't know because we're talking to you guys. So, all right, so there have been only eight bear attacks ever in Grand Teton for some odd reason since the inception of the park all the way back in 1922. So we're gonna leave Grand Teton completely out of this equation. So let's go over the numbers for Yellowstone National Park. Five million or so people visit the park each year, and there's basically one attack for every year. So that tells you you've got about a one in five million chance of being attacked by a bear. However, the vast majority of these attacks occur in the backcountry while people hike where people are hiking on trails. And I'm not talking about like the main trails around Old Faithful or walking over to Sea Grand or in the canyon area going up to Artist Point or anything like that. I'm talking about hiking on a backcountry trail where you park your car, you see a trailhead marker, and you're walking to a destination back there. And hiking's my favorite thing to do in Yellowstone Park, and we've got all the top hikes listed for you guys in the guidebook. But, you know, we're so we're talking about people off trail on trail hiking to a designated spot back there, not around the main areas like Norris or Mammoth or Canyon or the Old Faithful area or anything like that. So trail hikers don't have that one in five million chance. Trail hikers have a one in two hundred and seventy-five thousand chance of being attacked by a bear. So you hikers are 80 times more likely to be attacked by a bear on a trail than in a developed area. Okay, so for all of you that are just seeing the main attractions in the park, like Old Faithful and all that, just stopping at the main areas and staying in the developed areas, you have a 1 in 30 million chance of being attacked by a bear. While your odds of getting in an injury car crash are one in 10,000, and your odds of being in a fatal crash are only one in three point five million. So you've got ten times more chance of dying in a car crash driving through Yellowstone Park than you do getting attacked by a bear. And I promise you, it's not going to stop anybody from driving a car into Yellowstone National Park, even though your odds are three times higher than getting attacked by a bear. So that your odds of being attacked by a bear are are slim and none. You you you might as well go buy a bunch of lottery tickets. So, but anyway.

SPEAKER_01 12:05

So let's talk about the most recent three attacks.

SPEAKER_00 12:09

Okay, so the first one, this one was really highly publicized, was on May 4th, and a gentleman named Craig Lerman from Baltimore was hiking to Mystic Falls, which is a highly recommended trail in the guidebook for you guys because it gets Mystic Falls as a close, easy hike. It's right there by Old Faithful. Gets you to a beautiful Mystic Falls, and there's a little hot pot to swim in the bottom of and the warm water coming off Mystic Falls right there. It's really great. It's one of my favorite hikes in the park, and it's quick and easy to get to. And he when he was going down the trail, he first saw bear prints in the mud, and then he came across a bloody hat, and then he came up across a torn-up watch, and then he heard somebody in the trees going, help me, help me. And he first thought it was kids playing a prank. And uh, but then he got a little further up the trail and is enough to see that uh quote unquote he was torn up pretty bad. And the boy was cold due to loss of blood, so he took off his shirt to cover him up. And you never saw the other boy's 14-year-old brother who got dragged into the trees by the bear, who happened to be talking to his mom on the phone, and then they were airlifted to Idaho Falls after that he called the ranger, and the ranger showed up over there.

SPEAKER_01 13:19

So, what did they do wrong?

SPEAKER_00 13:20

They did nothing wrong. So they were hiking in pairs, and as reported, they were talking and making plenty of noise, which is what you're supposed to do. They just ran into a bear with cubs, and I've said this a million times over it. You know, and I've seen hundreds of bears in the backcountry hiking on trails just like this. But if it's a bear with cubs, if you see a bear or a cub, you turn around, you don't get your phone out, you don't do anything. You turn and walk out of there as fast as your feet will take you and get out of that area because a bear with cubs will take a keen interest very quickly. I don't care if you've got bear spray, a gun, or anything else, that bear is gonna come after you and protect those cubs. That nothing is gonna stop her. If you see a bear with cubs, you vacate that area immediately. And it's interesting to note that the boy where the where these boys got injured used to be in a bear management area of a BMA. And a lot of people don't know what a BMA is, but it's a bear management area where the park will close off a big quadrant of areas, and you have to get the Nat Geo hiking maps to see the boundaries of these things, and they're scattered all over the park, and they open and close on certain dates. But this BMA near Old Faithful was really, really unpopular because it didn't end until about the Memorial Weekend, which is right now while we're recording this video, and this attack obviously occurred a few weeks prior to this. And so these BMAs, this BMA was closed, it closed that entire area off. You couldn't go to Mystic Falls, you couldn't go see Grand Prismatic, which is what a lot of people wanted to go do. You couldn't see any of that stuff because all of that stuff was closed because it fell inside this bear management area. But they had so many complaints from people wanting to go see Grand Prismatic and all that kind of stuff, which is one of the main sites in all of Yellowstone Park, Grand Prismatic's most photographed pool on planet Earth. But people coming up before you know over the Memorial Weekend and before the Memorial Weekend couldn't go see it because it fell inside this BMA. And so they pulled it out about uh two or three years ago. This is 2026. About 2023, they removed that BMA. And so if they if they'd kept that BMA in place, this wouldn't have happened because Mystic Falls would have fallen into that BMA. By the time most people get here after Memorial Weekend, those BMAs are all gone and they're all eliminated and everything else. There's a couple of them that pop up in the Hayden Valley in the summertime because those bears funnel and they're going they're going back east to get in the absorker range. So they can kind of keep a little funnel of bears that go through the Hayden Valley over there, and that BMA takes place during the summer. And we've got all that information in the guide, but in case you guys wanted to do some hiking in that area. We tell you when that BMA starts and ends so you can plan your hiking adventures.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

Okay, so what about the attack at Glacier about the same time?

SPEAKER_00 16:18

Yeah, so just uh the opposite of Grand Teton, Glacier has far more frequent attacks with ten fatalities since only 1967, and only eight in Yellowstone Park since 1872 and the inception of the park. And so here what happened. On May 3rd, Anthony Paleo of Florida was killed by a grizzly and he was solo hiking, and his body was found badly damaged the next day when he didn't go back to his hotel that night and his friends reported him missing.

SPEAKER_01 16:48

So, what did he do wrong?

SPEAKER_00 16:49

Uh he was hiking by himself, but he was prepared, and by all reports, he used his bear spray, but it was no not did not work. If you hike alone, your best defense is to make a lot of noise. You yell, hey bear, hey bear, just all the time. You know, just get sick of yelling it, but you yell, hey bear, and alert that bear of your presence.

SPEAKER_01 17:10

Their most um when they're surprised is when they get on attack a lot of times. So by doing this, it alerts them to your presence. So, where did the third attack take place and when?

SPEAKER_00 17:23

Okay, so even though this attack was far less publicized than the others, this apply this attack took place on the southwest corner of Yellowstone National Park on May 16th, just a couple of weeks ago, just south of Cave Falls, right outside the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park. And two hunters were sitting in a meadow when they saw a huge grizzly enter the meadow, which quickly caught their scent and started walking right towards them. Once the bear caught sight of them, it quickly charged and they started yelling at it, trying to alert the bear to their presence, but it was not gonna stop. The first shot they first shot at it with a pistol and hit it numerous times. But you guys got to remember a pistol's not gonna do anything to the bear. Those bullets are gonna bounce right off its skull. Its skull is thick. And so they finally had to pick up a high caliber rifle and after two shots drop the bear which was charging at them full speed ten feet right in front of them. I mean, can you imagine? And so uh bears are protected even outside park boundaries, and they immediately call it in and were of course not found liable as they were defending themselves from the bear.

SPEAKER_01 18:31

So, in conclusion, what does everybody need to do to keep themselves protected and not get attacked?

SPEAKER_00 18:37

You have to remember that feeding bears of all kinds and sizes was completely legal until the mid-1970s in Yellowstone Park. People would feed bears from their cars and from picnic tables like they had like they had lunch throughout the parks, just tossing a bear a sandwich over there. It was nuts. It seems crazy now, but that was the norm for over 100 years in Yellowstone Park. Today it is obviously completely different. In my 50 plus years of hiking in the parks, I've run across hundreds of bears in the backcountry, and in general, they they want nothing to do with you. They're over there turning over rocks, looking for stuff underneath rocks and stuff like that. You just give them a huge wide berth. It's supposed to be a hundred yards. I make it about 250 or 300. So you get away away from that bear. But if it's a bear with cubs, like I said earlier, they're gonna take a keen interest in you and very quickly. You you just get out of the area as quickly as possible, go straight back to where you came from and get out of there because mom is not far away. No phone, no taking pictures, no nothing. Just get out of the area as quickly as possible. And while you guys are hiking, before you get in that situation, make noise. That mom will, if they hear you coming, that mom will gather up those cubs because she hears something coming and she'll get them out of that area before you get there. Make noise. I hike alone a lot and I yell that hay bear all the time, especially if I'm coming up to a blind corner up ahead on the trail. Let them know you're coming, and that mom will take precautions to get those cubs gathered up and get them up in a tree or get them out of that area before you guys even get there.

SPEAKER_01 20:17

Always carry bear spray. You can get it in multiple places throughout the park. Remember, you can't take it on the airplane, so don't buy it beforehand and bring it with you because it's not allowed. Um, and then you can return it after you rent it, or you can leave it for the next guest at your Airbnb or hotel or at the hotel check-in desk. Uh, one thing to do though is to make sure you know how to use it. See, it's just a little canister, but it's not gonna help you if you don't know that you have to take the clip off. You know where to spray it. Get your bear spray, carry it with you everywhere you go. It's just like insurance. You don't need it till you need it, but if you do need it, you'll be glad you have it.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

All right, and all the information about the uh best hiking trails in Yellowstone and Grand Teton are in the guidebooks. You guys get on the best trails and have a lot of fun, and all the safety information is in there as well about how to reserve uh backcountry campsites is in there and everything else. All you need to do is read the hiking chapter in the guidebook, and we have a hiking podcast as well. So you guys have a great time in the Yellowstone Park.

SPEAKER_01 21:15

Get your guidebook at www.exploreyellowstone like a local dot com.

SPEAKER_00 21:22

All right, so that's the end of the video portion of that thing. So sorry for the sound quality. When we shoot those outdoors, it's hard to get real good sound quality. So, all right, you guys have a great time in Yellowstone Park. Don't get attacked by a bear. And if you guys have any topic you want us to cover on these Yellowstone weekly video podcasts and videos on YouTube, just send us a note to explore Yellowstone like a local at Yahoo.com and we will take a look at it. All right, thanks much. See you guys in the park.