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More info. re: bear attacks. Note the .45-'70 lever action wasn't quick enough into action. This is just part of the article.
Kathy and Rich Huffman had been eagerly anticipating their own paddling trip, a romantic, ten-day kayaking run down the Hulahula, timed to beat the mosquitoes and, more importantly, to coincide with their 16th wedding anniversary. Rich, 61, a utilities lawyer, and Kathy, 58, a retired schoolteacher, both from Anchorage, were careful and experienced backcountry travelers. Bush pilot Tom Johnston of Alaska Flyers in Kaktovik, an Inupiat village on the shores of the Beaufort Sea, said he had never had a passenger grill him as Kathy did about his experience, his flight hours, and his airplane's emergency equipment. She insisted that Johnston show her where everything was stowed, and made a point of asking for both his dispatcher's and the state trooper's phone numbers.
While loading the Huffmans' gear into his wheeled Cessna 206, Johnston saw an EPIRB (emergency position indicating radio beacon), two pepper spray canisters, bearproof food containers, drybags that were worn but in good repair, and a rifle packed in a soft case. The only concern Kathy expressed openly was for the Hulahula's rapids, which, after a flyover, she felt confident she could handle.
On June 23, eight days into their trip, they landed their inflatable kayaks and made camp on the edge of the refuge's coastal plain. As was their habit, they cooked miles upriver of camp and meticulously stowed their food and toothpaste away from their tent in bearproof containers. And, like most savvy Alaskans, they went to sleep that night next to their insurance policy: a 45-70 lever action CoPilot rifle. They never had a chance to use it.
In the predawn darkness, a 300-pound, blond male grizzly happened upon the camp. It could probably sense that this was a small group. (According to Stephen Herrero's seminal work, Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, bears will rarely attack a group of three or more. A group of six or more has never been attacked.) The grizzly may have curiously swiped at the tent with its daggered claws and then reacted to the inevitable commotion inside. Or, even more disturbingly, it may have intended to kill and eat the Huffmans from the beginning.
Although genetically identical to the eight-foot, 900-pound coastal brown bears of southern Alaska, the barren ground grizzly rarely tops six feet and 500 pounds. A scarcity of food in northern Alaska makes these grizzlies smaller, and they behave very differently from coastal brown bears. Well-fed brown bears sleep a lot and shamble around a ten-square-mile territory. In contrast, hungry barren ground grizzlies can prowl 5,000-square-mile territories, constantly sniffing the air for scent. In the Arctic—where there are no streams filled with fat salmon, no forests to provide shade or cover, and food gathering is cut short by the long winters—the omnivorous barren ground's mission is simple: relentlessly hunt down and consume every available scrap of food.
Roots and sedges help them fend off starvation, but for thousands of years these grizzlies have preferred meat, found in fresh supply at the movable feasts that are Alaska's legendary caribou herd migrations. Each June on the refuge's coastal plain, caribou herds birth up to 60,000 calves, and bears can kill up to six newborns a day. But this meat supply has been dwindling as the effects of climate change become manifest in the Arctic, and the habitually famished grizzlies are finding themselves in even more desperate straits.
According to a 2002 U.S. Geological Survey report, increased spring snow and ice—a paradoxical result of global warming trends—is burying the coastal plain plants essential to caribou and grizzly diets. The caribou are decreasing in number or seeking grazing land elsewhere, and the barren ground grizzlies, bereft of this supplemental protein, have been stalking the tundra for alternatives. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Patricia Reynolds notes that over the past five or six years, the refuge's musk ox population has dwindled from around 300 to no more than 50. As human traffic increases in the refuge, one can only wonder if grizzlies might test them as new prey.
"That grizzly is more aggressive than the coastal brown bear," says Will Troyer, who began live-trapping bears in Alaska in the 1950s. "When I first went up there, you never saw anybody in that country except for the Eskimos. Now the climate is getting warmer, and there's more human activity."
Fran Mauer, a recently retired USFWS wildlife biologist, is one of many experts who say that bears could easily kill a lot more people, but don't. From 1900 to 2000, brown bears killed 42 humans in Alaska (polar bears have killed one person in that time; black bears, six). But with more people visiting the North, it will only get more difficult for the emboldened barren ground grizzly to avoid human encounters. A day before the Huffmans were discovered, the bush pilot who dropped Mauer off in the refuge asked if he was packing a gun because the bears were acting up.
The grizzly was still there when North Slope Borough Search and Rescue pilot Bob Mercier hovered his helicopter over the Huffmans' camp. It was lingering near the couple's remains, which were tangled up in their ruined tent. As the rotor blades churned overhead, the bear ran off but sat a quarter mile away, unwilling to give up his kill. Because there were human fatalities, the pilot flew straight to Kaktovik and picked up Officer Richard Holschen of the North Slope Borough Police Department. On their return, the helicopter again scared the bear away from the bodies, and Mercier was able to touch down so Holschen could investigate.
An initial examination of the scene revealed that Rich Huffman had tried to fend off the bear. He'd released the lever action of his rifle, but never had a chance to pull it back and chamber a round. The couple was likely startled awake and trapped inside their tent with mere seconds to defend themselves. In the three years Holschen had worked in Kaktovik, he had frequently driven polar bears out of town and away from whale carcasses, and they had always run far away. But when he looked up, he was unnerved to see the Hulahula grizzly lumbering back toward the campsite.
Holschen, armed with a shotgun, waited for the bear to come closer. Mercier, meanwhile, revved the Bell 412 into the air, and his co-captain, Randy Crosby, chambered a round in his rifle and dropped the grizzly with four bullets.
The next day, Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist Dick Shideler arrived to inspect the scene himself. The bear containers had been scuffed and thrown around. Nearly every piece of gear, including the two inflatable kayaks, had been bitten or torn apart. A raw east wind had been blowing the past few evenings, so it seemed likely that the couple had chosen this spot along the river because it sat below a ten-foot-high tundra bluff. Even if the Huffmans weren't in their tent, they likely would not have seen the bear coming. "It was a site I would've picked as an experienced camper," Shideler said, "but as a bear person, I would've walked around and looked for fresh diggings." On the bench above the campsite, where the tents and bodies had been dragged, claw marks showed where a hungry grizzly had repeatedly raked the tundra for bear roots; several ground squirrel holes had been dug up. The tracks matched the dead bear's.
The following week, Shideler performed a necropsy on the bear. It was seven years old and in remarkably good health. It had no scars, no old wounds, not even the expected broken canine from sparring with other males.
For weeks after the mauling, villagers in Kaktovik kept asking Officer Holschen what the Huffmans had done wrong. "The freaky thing," Holschen said, "is that they did most everything right."
Kathy and Rich Huffman had been eagerly anticipating their own paddling trip, a romantic, ten-day kayaking run down the Hulahula, timed to beat the mosquitoes and, more importantly, to coincide with their 16th wedding anniversary. Rich, 61, a utilities lawyer, and Kathy, 58, a retired schoolteacher, both from Anchorage, were careful and experienced backcountry travelers. Bush pilot Tom Johnston of Alaska Flyers in Kaktovik, an Inupiat village on the shores of the Beaufort Sea, said he had never had a passenger grill him as Kathy did about his experience, his flight hours, and his airplane's emergency equipment. She insisted that Johnston show her where everything was stowed, and made a point of asking for both his dispatcher's and the state trooper's phone numbers.
While loading the Huffmans' gear into his wheeled Cessna 206, Johnston saw an EPIRB (emergency position indicating radio beacon), two pepper spray canisters, bearproof food containers, drybags that were worn but in good repair, and a rifle packed in a soft case. The only concern Kathy expressed openly was for the Hulahula's rapids, which, after a flyover, she felt confident she could handle.
On June 23, eight days into their trip, they landed their inflatable kayaks and made camp on the edge of the refuge's coastal plain. As was their habit, they cooked miles upriver of camp and meticulously stowed their food and toothpaste away from their tent in bearproof containers. And, like most savvy Alaskans, they went to sleep that night next to their insurance policy: a 45-70 lever action CoPilot rifle. They never had a chance to use it.
In the predawn darkness, a 300-pound, blond male grizzly happened upon the camp. It could probably sense that this was a small group. (According to Stephen Herrero's seminal work, Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, bears will rarely attack a group of three or more. A group of six or more has never been attacked.) The grizzly may have curiously swiped at the tent with its daggered claws and then reacted to the inevitable commotion inside. Or, even more disturbingly, it may have intended to kill and eat the Huffmans from the beginning.
Although genetically identical to the eight-foot, 900-pound coastal brown bears of southern Alaska, the barren ground grizzly rarely tops six feet and 500 pounds. A scarcity of food in northern Alaska makes these grizzlies smaller, and they behave very differently from coastal brown bears. Well-fed brown bears sleep a lot and shamble around a ten-square-mile territory. In contrast, hungry barren ground grizzlies can prowl 5,000-square-mile territories, constantly sniffing the air for scent. In the Arctic—where there are no streams filled with fat salmon, no forests to provide shade or cover, and food gathering is cut short by the long winters—the omnivorous barren ground's mission is simple: relentlessly hunt down and consume every available scrap of food.
Roots and sedges help them fend off starvation, but for thousands of years these grizzlies have preferred meat, found in fresh supply at the movable feasts that are Alaska's legendary caribou herd migrations. Each June on the refuge's coastal plain, caribou herds birth up to 60,000 calves, and bears can kill up to six newborns a day. But this meat supply has been dwindling as the effects of climate change become manifest in the Arctic, and the habitually famished grizzlies are finding themselves in even more desperate straits.
According to a 2002 U.S. Geological Survey report, increased spring snow and ice—a paradoxical result of global warming trends—is burying the coastal plain plants essential to caribou and grizzly diets. The caribou are decreasing in number or seeking grazing land elsewhere, and the barren ground grizzlies, bereft of this supplemental protein, have been stalking the tundra for alternatives. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Patricia Reynolds notes that over the past five or six years, the refuge's musk ox population has dwindled from around 300 to no more than 50. As human traffic increases in the refuge, one can only wonder if grizzlies might test them as new prey.
"That grizzly is more aggressive than the coastal brown bear," says Will Troyer, who began live-trapping bears in Alaska in the 1950s. "When I first went up there, you never saw anybody in that country except for the Eskimos. Now the climate is getting warmer, and there's more human activity."
Fran Mauer, a recently retired USFWS wildlife biologist, is one of many experts who say that bears could easily kill a lot more people, but don't. From 1900 to 2000, brown bears killed 42 humans in Alaska (polar bears have killed one person in that time; black bears, six). But with more people visiting the North, it will only get more difficult for the emboldened barren ground grizzly to avoid human encounters. A day before the Huffmans were discovered, the bush pilot who dropped Mauer off in the refuge asked if he was packing a gun because the bears were acting up.
The grizzly was still there when North Slope Borough Search and Rescue pilot Bob Mercier hovered his helicopter over the Huffmans' camp. It was lingering near the couple's remains, which were tangled up in their ruined tent. As the rotor blades churned overhead, the bear ran off but sat a quarter mile away, unwilling to give up his kill. Because there were human fatalities, the pilot flew straight to Kaktovik and picked up Officer Richard Holschen of the North Slope Borough Police Department. On their return, the helicopter again scared the bear away from the bodies, and Mercier was able to touch down so Holschen could investigate.
An initial examination of the scene revealed that Rich Huffman had tried to fend off the bear. He'd released the lever action of his rifle, but never had a chance to pull it back and chamber a round. The couple was likely startled awake and trapped inside their tent with mere seconds to defend themselves. In the three years Holschen had worked in Kaktovik, he had frequently driven polar bears out of town and away from whale carcasses, and they had always run far away. But when he looked up, he was unnerved to see the Hulahula grizzly lumbering back toward the campsite.
Holschen, armed with a shotgun, waited for the bear to come closer. Mercier, meanwhile, revved the Bell 412 into the air, and his co-captain, Randy Crosby, chambered a round in his rifle and dropped the grizzly with four bullets.
The next day, Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist Dick Shideler arrived to inspect the scene himself. The bear containers had been scuffed and thrown around. Nearly every piece of gear, including the two inflatable kayaks, had been bitten or torn apart. A raw east wind had been blowing the past few evenings, so it seemed likely that the couple had chosen this spot along the river because it sat below a ten-foot-high tundra bluff. Even if the Huffmans weren't in their tent, they likely would not have seen the bear coming. "It was a site I would've picked as an experienced camper," Shideler said, "but as a bear person, I would've walked around and looked for fresh diggings." On the bench above the campsite, where the tents and bodies had been dragged, claw marks showed where a hungry grizzly had repeatedly raked the tundra for bear roots; several ground squirrel holes had been dug up. The tracks matched the dead bear's.
The following week, Shideler performed a necropsy on the bear. It was seven years old and in remarkably good health. It had no scars, no old wounds, not even the expected broken canine from sparring with other males.
For weeks after the mauling, villagers in Kaktovik kept asking Officer Holschen what the Huffmans had done wrong. "The freaky thing," Holschen said, "is that they did most everything right."
