The dangers of hunting where others have hunted were illustrated this week when an Interior Alaska grizzly bear mauled 65-year-old Donald "Skip" Sanford of Anchorage. Sanford hunting companion Monty Dyson said Thursday that the attack happened after Sanford went back to the site of an earlier moose kill along the Maclaren River, about 250 miles northeast of Alaska's largest city.
Sanford is still recovering from the attack in an Anchorage hospital, and is in no mood to talk.
Dyson said things went badly wrong for Sanford and the entire Sanford-Dyson hunting party on Monday, a day after things went perfectly right. On Sunday, Dyson said, his son -- 22-year-old Chad -- spotted a legal bull moose in a thicket of willows on the south side of the Alaska Range, north of the Denali Highway. He successfully stalked it, and then shot and killed it. Sanford and Monty rushed to the scene to help Chad with the rewarding but toilsome chore of dressing the animal and then packing out hundreds of pound of meat on backpacks.
While they were doing that, Monty said, Sanford spotted another moose in the area. It was not clear if the bull was legal. Hunters can only shoot animals with antlers 50-inches or wider, but this one was close enough to that standard that the Dysons told Sanford to give chase. He hurried to grab his backpack and gear, Monty said, and somewhere in the process dropped a radio he'd been carrying.
The missing radio was discovered later that day back at camp after Sanford's futile pursuit of the second moose. Sanford decided he'd go back to the kill site to find the radio the next morning -- Monday. What he did not know was that the scent of blood in the air was already drawing a dangerous predator toward the pile of guts and inedible body parts the hunting party left behind. Sanford ended up walking into an Alaska hunter's worst nightmare -- a bear defending what it had decided was its food.
"He could have probably shot this bear when he first saw it," Monty said, "but Skip didn't want a bear. He was up there to get moose for some meat. He even talked to that bear. He said, 'Mr. Bear, I don't want any trouble.'" The tactic didn't work.
"They don't listen very well," Monty said.
As Sanford tried to ease out of the area, the bear charged. Sanford "waited until it got about 10 feet from him, and he fired off his .30-06" caliber rifle," Monty said. The bullet hit the bear, but didn't stop it. The animal crashed into Sanford, knocking him to the ground. Then it began to maul him. Sanford was lucky to be still alive when the bear stopped and ran off.
He was even luckier that he'd taken a backup radio along when he went to the kill site.
Sanford was able to use that radio to call the Dysons, and his own 12-year-old son, John, for help. They came to his side to begin first aid and start a rescue in rough country with few trails. They decided the best way to get Sanford to safety was to load him into a small boat and float him downstream about five miles to the Maclaren River Lodge. Chad was steering the boat when he, luckily, ran into another group of hunters. One of them had a satellite phone and called Alaska State Troopers.
Troopers notified the lodge of what had happened and quickly summoned help from the Alaska Air National Guard. The Air Guard's 210th, 211th and 212th Rescue Squadrons at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson adjacent to Anchorage have helicopter pilots and medically trained pararescue jumpers standing watch 24 hours a day for emergencies just like this. The rescue squadron was scrambling even as volunteers from the lodge headed upstream in an outboard-powered riverboat to find Sanford and Chad.
That didn't take long. They had Sanford safely back at the lodge and were trying to stop the bleeding from his head wounds when an HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopter landed outside. A pair of pararescuemen took over from there, and it wasn't long before Sanford was being treated at the Providence Alaska Medical Center.
Monty said his friend is deeply thankful to all of the rescuers.
Monty himself went back to the site of the bear attack on Tuesday with a state trooper and "bear dog," a Bureau of Land Management ranger and others.
"We all rode four-wheelers in there to pick up Skip's pack," he said. "We found the pack and a blood trail. The dog started following the blood trail. It went up mountain to where the bear doubled back," and there the dog lost the trail. The group decided at that time to abandon the hunt for the injured animal.
Wildlife authorities say it's hard to know what happened to the bear in a case like this. Many wounded bears die, but many also survive. Bears are capable of taking huge amounts of punishment and still recovering.
The same might also be said for people. The bear tore Sanford's ear and tried to rip off his scalp, a common occurrence in bear attacks. It left deep wounds at the base of the man's skull and left him fearing for his life. But Sanford survived and is expected to fully recover, eventually.
Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com