Tourist's Serene Woodland Hike Turns Into 30 Seconds of Terror

By DAVID FOSTER

Aug. 18, 1996 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS

GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, Mont. — Night after night it returned, a fearsome thing just out of sight, and no matter where he ran, Ken Larson could not escape.

“Why can’t I get out of the woods?” he’d panic. “Why can’t I get out of the park?”

He’d wake up, relieved it was just a dream. Then he’d look around the hospital room and feel the throb of his wounds--a gash in his scalp, a trail of holes down his back, a broken bone in his leg--and, with a shudder, he’d remember.

The morning of June 5, Larson went for a walk in Glacier National Park and was attacked by a grizzly bear.

Thirty seconds of terror transformed him from an anonymous tourist into the most talked-about man in the park, a bloody example of what can go wrong when people and predators mix.

And not just in this bear-laden corner of Montana. Across the West, some of America’s biggest and scariest carnivores--grizzlies, mountain lions and wolves--are making comebacks, aided by the public’s new fondness for predators once reviled and driven nearly to extinction.

Wolves have been returned to Yellowstone National Park, and other reintroductions are proposed: grizzlies to Idaho, wolves to Arizona and New Mexico. In March, California voters retained their state’s ban on hunting mountain lions, despite two fatal attacks on people in 1994.

By popular demand, fear is back in the wild, and Ken Larson has felt its bite.

Seventy years old going on 40, Larson was trim and athletic, a retiree who liked to start each day at 6 a.m. with a brisk, four-mile walk.

That was his routine back home in Murrells Inlet, S.C., and he resolved to stick to it while on vacation. He and his wife, Bonnie, arrived in Glacier on June 3, and the next day he asked a park naturalist to suggest a four-mile hike.

Try the Avalanche Lake Trail, the naturalist said. Any grizzlies spotted there, Larson asked. Not recently, the naturalist said. Good, Larson said. He had read a park newsletter warning visitors to keep their distance from bears, and he decided he’d rather not see one.

The next morning, most guests at the Lake McDonald Lodge, including Bonnie, were still in bed when Larson set out. He drove 10 miles to the trail head, arriving about 6:30 a.m.

“Entering Grizzly Country,” warned a sign. “There is no guarantee of your safety.”

Larson pressed on, regularly calling out “YO HO!” and “HELLO!” He’d read in the newsletter about making noise to avoid surprising a grizzly.

About 45 minutes out, he realized that he wasn’t on the Avalanche Lake Trail. This was the Johns Lake Trail, a less-traveled path branching off the Avalanche. But no matter. This trail was pretty too, and no bears had been seen here either. Besides, it was time to head back.

Larson turned and relaxed again into the rhythm of the hike, reciting bear calls and entertaining random thoughts: Where will Bonnie and I go today? “HELLO!” I wonder what kind of bird that is? “YO HO!”

The morning air was crisp, the forest as peaceful as a church. Sunbeams slanted through the cedars, and Larson walked through columns of shadow and light. He was enchanted.

By the time he saw the grizzly, it was 20 feet away, rushing toward him on the trail, mouth open, teeth bared.

“Oh, my God!” Larson cried. “He’s going to get me!”

He jumped off the trail to his left, seeking shelter amid the ferns. He got 10 feet. The bear swatted the back of his head, its knifelike claw slicing a six-inch furrow across his scalp. Larson screamed and crumpled to the ground.

Play dead if a grizzly attacks, the park newsletter said, so Larson curled into a fetal position, his face grinding into hemlock needles as the bear batted him like a rag doll.

Claws and teeth sank into Larson’s neck, shoulder and stomach. He tried to keep quiet, but couldn’t help moaning. He thought he was going to die.

With one last crunch, the bear clamped onto Larson’s left calf, breaking his tibia and ripping out a chunk of flesh bigger than a golf ball. He heard the bear sniff, and then it was gone.

The attack had lasted no more than half a minute.

Larson lay there a minute, maybe two, listening for the bear. Then he staggered to his feet and hobbled down the trail, dragging his left leg and glancing back every few seconds, fearful that the bear would return.

He covered the half a mile to his car in 20 minutes, only to discover that his keys had dropped out of his pocket during the attack.

Luckily, another car soon pulled up. In it were Kim and Tori Ziemann, sisters on a day off from summer park jobs. They wrapped a shirt around Larson’s bloody head and helped him into their car, then barreled down the road at 65 mph.

By the time they reached the nurse’s station at the lodge, Larson was shivering and very quiet. The nurse laid him on a sleeping bag and snipped open his bloody clothes.

Medics loaded Larson into a helicopter and, as he lay there breathing oxygen through a mask, he felt himself being lifted up and away. At last, he was out of the park.

To Larson, the grizzly attack was a hellish surprise, a bolt from the shadowy wild. To park rangers, it was Incident No. 960124, one of the three or four bear maulings they’ve come to expect each year in Glacier.

As medics tended Larson, rangers converged on the attack site. Their orders, spelled out in the park’s 47-page Bear Management Guidelines, were to close the area to hikers and start a detailed investigation.

Was this a “bad” bear that must be killed? Or did the blame lie with Larson?

The attack site became part crime scene, part biology lab. Five rangers and a biologist searched for bear tracks, paced off distances and made plaster casts of paw prints.

Combining wildlife science with some guesswork, they reconstructed the attack from the bear’s point of view.

It was a medium-size grizzly, about 300 pounds, probably a female since it was traveling with a smaller, 1- or 2-year-old bear.

The two animals apparently wandered onto the trail after Larson’s first pass, then walked about 600 feet. As they neared a blind corner by a rock outcropping, the bigger bear suddenly smelled or heard something ahead.

The young bear scooted off the trail, its tracks not to be seen again. The big one skidded in the mud three times within 15 feet, perhaps hesitating at the unseen threat. When Larson strode into view about 40 feet away, the bear charged.

After the attack, the grizzly kept running. Its tracks went about 800 feet down the trail, then vanished into the forest.

Bad bear or not? Even before park officials had made their determination, others were drawing conclusions. Around Glacier, news of a bear mauling spreads quickly, if not always accurately.

At an outdoor-supply store in Kalispell, a salesman at the fishing-license counter blamed the attack on the bears, saying they’ve lost their fear of humans. In the village of West Glacier, the word among a group of hikers was that Larson had done everything wrong, sneaking silently through the woods with his head down.

Park officials were slightly more charitable toward Larson.

“He picked up the literature on bears and read it,” said Ranger Gary Moses, lead investigator in the case. “He did a good job of getting off the trail and down in a fetal position. He kept his wits about him.

“On the other hand, he was hiking alone, which is not encouraged. And it was relatively early in the morning. I can’t say how much noise he was making. Perhaps more would have been advisable.”

As for the bear, if it had stalked or repeatedly attacked Larson, officials probably would have killed it. Instead, it had merely displayed the natural surliness of a grizzly whose personal space was invaded. Park officials’ verdict: The bear was free to go.

And free to maul again? It’s possible--though officials grow edgy at the suggestion, defensive about Glacier’s reputation as the most likely spot in the lower 48 states to get attacked by a grizzly.

Since 1990, there have been 17 maulings, one of them fatal, by Glacier’s grizzlies. That compares with five attacks, none fatal, by the better-known grizzlies of Yellowstone. Since Glacier’s creation in 1910, bears have killed nine people; Yellowstone’s death toll is five.

Glacier officials prefer to quote different numbers, such as death records that show park visitors are more likely to drown or fall off a cliff than be killed by a grizzly.

Or consider this, said chief ranger Steve Frye. More than 200 grizzlies live in the million-acre park, and 2 million people visit annually. Most visitors never see a bear. Of those who do, most are a safe distance away. And for every injury, there are perhaps a hundred close encounters from which all parties walk away unharmed.

The park takes pains to prevent bears from associating humans with food, Frye said. The bear-luring garbage dumps of Glacier and Yellowstone were closed in the early 1970s. Today, bears that nose around developed areas are chased away and, if they persist, may be relocated or killed. Visitors are warned to keep a clean camp and can be fined $500 for feeding wildlife.

None of this, however, keeps people and grizzlies from running into each other.

The season’s second attack occurred July 24, when two hikers were charged by a grizzly from about 20 yards. The hikers dropped to the ground, and the bear bit one of them on the wrist, then dashed away.

“National parks should not be portrayed or perceived as totally safe,” Frye said. “We’re well aware of the fact, as should be everyone who visits a national park where bears and people travel in the same areas, that the potential for injury or death always exists--either to the bear or human.”

This compromise between safety and wildness is not something the park concocted itself, Frye said. Every decision about grizzlies is informed by years of studies and contentious public hearings.

For every tourist like Larson who wants to avoid grizzlies, another wants to see them up close.

“To some, and, frankly, to me, the fact that there are grizzly bears in this park makes it very special,” Frye said. “They add tangible meaning to what wilderness is: unpredictable, majestic. . . .”

And scary?

“Absolutely. Certainly.”

For two weeks, nurses at Kalispell Regional Hospital gave Larson a twice-daily refresher course in pain, pulling antiseptic-soaked gauze from his 4-inch-deep puncture wounds and packing new gauze in.

It took three rounds of surgery to clean and suture his 20-plus injuries. Back home in South Carolina, a plastic surgeon grafted skin from Larson’s right thigh onto the hole in his left calf.

Now he lies all day in his sun room, left leg higher than his heart, reading and watching TV. His foot still is swollen, and even a light touch near the wound feels like a jolt of electricity.

The doctors told Larson he won’t be able to put weight on the leg for weeks. They also told him he was lucky to be alive. Some of the bites just missed his lungs and major arteries.

Larson doesn’t blame the grizzly: “I was an intruder, and she didn’t know how big a threat I was. If she could only talk, I would have told her.”

He won’t go back to Glacier National Park.

“If I know the environment includes bears, I probably won’t hike in the woods,” he said. “I don’t care what the odds are. I blew the odds this time. I could blow them again.”

The Johns Lake trail was reopened five days after Larson was mauled. “WARNING,” a new sign said. “Grizzly frequenting area traversed by this trail. Be alert.”

On a drizzly afternoon two weeks after the attack, dozens of hikers passed the sign. A few stopped to read it. Nobody turned back.