Gold & Silver Forum - Alone in the Wilderness

a friend of mine, Gary, has a cabin over at twin lakes where dick proennecke lived.
http://uppertwinlake.com/tripinfo.html

some years back Gary was cutting out a trail with a chainsaw from the mountains down to a remote cabin of mine which is on a different lake...a float plane had dropped him off at a upper mountain lake to begin the trail cutting.

i heard the chainsaw as he cut up the down timber that had fallen across the trail when he got within earshot. he's a backcountry ranger and a fellow local historian. anyway the trail he was cutting out comes right by my place and he stopped in and visited me since i was there. a float plane eventually picked him up and he flew over to his place on twin lakes...

he then went hiking up in the mountains above twin lakes when he got attacked by brown bear. the bear chewed his foot up pretty good but after a couple years he was moving again...

he punched the bear in the nose...too fricken cool, huh ?

By CRAIG MEDRED
Anchorage Daily News

A hiker bushwacking through thick brush near Lake Clark in Western Alaska was seriously mauled by a grizzly bear Wednesday after attacking the animal to free a companion.
Lake Clark National Park and Preserve officials said Gary Titus, 47, of Soldotna hit the bear on the nose to make it let go of 47-year-old Ellen Snoeyenbos from Gardiner, Mont. His action saved Snoeyenbos from any serious injury. Park officials said she was emotionally shaken but physically suffered only a sore ankle.
TX: "Amazingly, she just kind of bruised a foot,'' said ranger Dennis Knuckles.
But Titus underwent extensive surgery at Alaska Regional Hospital on Thursday to repair a badly ripped-up leg. He was sedated and unable to talk.
Titus and Snoeyenbos had been hiking amid the spectacular peaks near Twin Lakes, about 150 miles west of Anchorage. Titus owns the Windsong Wilderness Retreat at Upper Twin Lake.
The pair were returning to the lodge around 4:30 p.m. Wednesday when they met one or more bears, Snoeyenbos said. She said the pair had just come down out of open tundra into brush when an animal appeared.
She said the attack was sudden and unexpected.
But before the surgery, Titus told ranger Knuckles that the pair were following a faint trail of some sort through a thicket of willows and dwarf birch when the bear suddenly appeared.
Titus believes it was a sow with a cub or cubs. It reacted to the people so quickly that there was nothing to do, Titus told Knuckles.
The bear grabbed Titus first by the left leg and pulled him to the ground. It quickly let go, however, to pursue Snoeyenbos, grabbing her by the boot. The bear then started dragging her away down a slope, rangers said.
Titus responded by attacking the bear, forcing it to let go of Snoeyenbos. The bear turned on him again but quickly gave up the attack and fled.
Titus told Knuckles he then saw a cub.
Titus suffered severe injuries to his leg and bites in his hand, but he and Snoeyenbos were able to drag themselves back to his cabin on Upper Twin Lake.
Once there, they took a boat across the lake to a National Park Service patrol cabin at Hope Creek to get help. A park volunteer radioed ranger Jana Walker at Lower Twin Lake, and Walker arranged with park headquarters in Port Alsworth to send ranger pilots Leon Alsworth and Knuckles to the scene along with ranger Dan Young.
Knuckles said the bear attack appears simply to have resulted from a chance encounter gone bad between humans and bears.
"Sometimes it happens,'' he said. In a press release, park superintendent Deb Liggett categorized the incident as "a sudden attack in dense brush and windy conditions. The bear was protecting its cub, and Mr. Titus did what he had to in order to survive.''