After a glorious week of watching herds of migrating caribou in the wild mountains of Alaska's Brooks Range, Jo Ann Staples was in her tent packing her bags to head home to Kentucky when a grizzly bear jumped on her back and nearly killed her, Gates of the Arctic National Park superintendent Greg Dudgeon said Friday.

Dudgeon had just returned to his Fairbanks office from visiting Staples at the local hospital and talking to the guides who were with her on an all-woman, wildlife- watching trip to the remote Okokmilaga River about 500 miles almost due north from Anchorage.

otion brought Dellenbaugh out of her tent. She "saw the bear with its head essentially in the tent of Jo Ann, and the tent was in a different place than where it had been staked,'' Gudgeon said.

"She did a very brave thing, the lead guide, and ran in the direction of the bear.''

The bear dropped the tent containing Staples, stood up on its hind legs to get a better look at Dellenbaugh, then dropped to all fours and approached the guide. Dellenbaugh estimated the animal came to within seven or eight feet, Dudgeon said.

Dellenbaugh stood firm. Down on all fours, the bear's head came up to near her chest, she told Dudgeon. Dudgeon noted Dellenbaugh stands near 6 feet tall. "This was not a scrawny bear,'' he said. As Dellenbaugh - an ordained member of the Order of Interbeing - faced off with the bear, she was joined by Sandstrum, who normally teaches cooking at the Rising Tide Market in Damariscotta, Maine. Sandstrum brought the bear spray.

"It was just the two women standing shoulder to shoulder against the bear,'' Dudgeon said. They decided to use the bear spray to drive off the animal, but instead of spraying the bear in the face as recommended, they sprayed to either side of it. Dudgeon wasn't sure why. Dellenbach couldn't be reached Friday.

Whatever the case, the sound of the bear spray going off and the orange cloud it spread across the tundra was enough to send the bear packing, Dudgeon said.

"It turned around and started making its way out of camp,'' he said.

Joined by the four other women along on the Alaska caribou-viewing trip, Dellenbach and Sandstrum then went to Staples' tent and "cut it away from the victim. She was fully conscious,'' Dudgeon said, "but she knew she'd been badly hurt.''

As Dellenbaugh, who is trained as wilderness first responder, began providing first aid, other members of the party got on a satellite phone and called Coyote Air, an air taxi based out of the remote truck stop of Coldfoot on the Dalton Highway.

A single-engine plane landed on a gravel bar along the Okokmilaga not long after. A bench seat was stripped from the aircraft for use as a backboard, and Staples was strapped to it. She was then loaded and flown to Coldfoot. Guardian Flight, a medical evacuation service, ferried her from there to the Fairbanks hospital. Her husband, a State Department employee, and daughter were on the way to the hospital Friday, Dudgeon said.

An initial Park Service assessment of the incident has concluded there was little the group could have done to avoid the attack.

"This was a base camp,'' Dudgeon said. "They had been out there a week, had not seen any bears at all.''

The camp was clean, he added. Food and waste were stored in bear-proof containers the Park Service had provided. Those containers were, in turn, stored in another tent more than a hundred feet from where the women camped. The bear apparently entered the food tent first, Dudgeon said, and destroyed it during a futile attempt to get into the bear barrels.

Why it attacked will never been known. Attacks on humans in tents are so extraordinarily rare scientists can't even posit a guess as to what triggers them. Starving bears have on occasion appeared to be going after people as last-ditch prey, but Dudgeon said, "this was not a scrawny bear.'' Park rangers patrolling in the Okokmilaga drainage on Friday were on the lookout for the animal, but didn't really expect to find it.

Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.

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