Anchorage Daily News

Much of the detail surrounding the grizzly bear attack that left 52-year-old Joanne Saunders with a ripped-up leg and a broken nose is largely a blur in memory, but the Virginia tourist does recall the speed of the animal that grabbed her just above the ankle Monday in Denali National Park and Preserve.

"They're fast,'' she said. "I had no idea they could be so fast. They're just there."

Saunders and her husband, James, 54, were atop an 8- to 9-foot rock outcropping near Savage River looking for a hiking route back to the park road when the bear materialized out of thick brush below them.

"We weren't on that rock very long when he came running down and then came running back up," she said. "I didn't see him go by (the first time). My husband saw him go by. When I saw him, he was charging at me. He came right at the rock."

Both people started screaming at the bear to stop. It didn't. It kept coming, jumped up, grabbed Joanne's leg and pulled her down.

Her husband, she said, heard her body thump twice when she hit the ground, and he told her the bear tried to drag her off. That, she thinks, is when most of the damage was done to her leg. Doctors at the Fairbanks hospital spent several hours sewing up her wounds Monday night into early Tuesday morning.

"The doctor said I might need plastic surgery," she said.

She didn't know how many stitches it took to close the wound. She said she didn't want to know. Her first visit to Alaska had already proved eventful enough without that information, she said, adding: "I'm doing fine right now."

Park officials said they have no idea what might have sparked the bear attack. Park rangers who went back looking for the bear after the incident couldn't find any aggressive animals.

"They did see a couple bears," park spokeswoman Kris Fister said, but none that showed any inclination to charge humans.

Wildlife technicians think there is an outside possibility the bear involved in the attack is the same animal that charged someone near the entrance to the park last fall, but they have not been able to confirm that.

"We haven't gotten any positive identification on the bear," Fister said.

It is identified only as a "single, adult-sized bear."

The confrontation with the Saunders took place in the early afternoon on the west side of the Savage River not far from where a footbridge crosses the water about a mile and a half from the park road.

The couple had wandered away from a popular trail to hike onto a nearby ridge. They were heading back toward the trail when they found themselves in heavy brush.

"We didn't think we were really off the trail," Joanne Saunders said. "There's all sort of (animal) trails. But it was the wrong one, because we were getting into the brush.

"We didn't go through that much of it, though, because we could see the rock."

The couple figured the rock offered the perfect platform from which to get a view to determine where to go next. So they plunged ahead. Joanne now believes they might have woken the bear in the thicket.

"They say that it's rare a bear goes after someone," she said. "We must have really scared him."

She believes that might be what sparked the bear to charge, grab her and pull her off the rock. Her husband responded by yelling at the bear and jumping down to his wife's aid. He sprained his ankle in the jump but managed to drive the bear off.

"I just curled up into a ball," Joanne said. The so-called "fetal position" is one of the recommended self-defense postures for people attacked by a grizzly bear. She said she stayed curled up in fear until her husband told her the bear was gone.

"You lay there and you think of all kinds of things," she said. "I was just thinking about all these stories you hear about people getting horribly mauled."

Fortunately, she added, she came out of the attack with relatively minor injuries and one scary story to tell about her second day in Alaska. First there was the bear attack, and then there was a long limp back to the road as the couple made wide detours to avoid any more brushy areas.

"It took us two hours to walk out,'' she said, "but we had to. I didn't look at (the leg). I was afraid to. My nose was bleeding. We wanted to stay in the open. We finally found the regular trail that comes down."

They contacted park officials at Savage River who helped them get medical assistance. They are planning to continue their Alaska vacation but don't expect to do much more hiking.

"Today we're limping around," Joanne Saunders said by telephone Tuesday. "We look like two 105-year-old people. We're in Anchorage right now. We're going to head down to the Kenai Peninsula tomorrow for some sightseeing and nice, safe fishing."

The Saunders' son, Jason, reached by telephone back home in Virginia on Tuesday, said his parents had yet to call to tell him about what had happened, but he said they are an adventuresome couple.

"That sounds like them to be going off the trail and getting lost," he said.

The Savage River drainage downstream of the park road has been temporarily closed while rangers investigate. Fister said rangers have also closed parking areas on both sides of the river and posted warning signs on area trails.

If an aggressive bear can be identified in the area, rangers douse it with pepper spray or punch it with rubber bullets in an attempt to teach it that humans are nothing but trouble. These "aversive conditioning methods," as park officials call them, have proved highly effective in minimizing bear attacks on tourists in the park over the years.

Daily News reporter Craig Medred can be reached at cmedred@adn.com.