Wildlife

Photos: Claim of brush with hibernating bear goes viral

Mike Glidden's press release was amateurish and lacked for fancy letterhead, but it had a killer pitch: "I did not know the bear was there…" After that, the Anchorage hiker went on to outline what he said was a chance encounter with an invisible bear and explain how lucky he was to escape the meeting unharmed.

Attached to Glidden's emailed pitch were 13 photographs taken in and around Byron Glacier in the Portage Valley recreation area about 50 miles southeast of Anchorage, Alaska's largest city.

One of the photos showed the inside of an oft-visited Byron Glacier ice cave and more. In the right hand corner of one of three identical cave photos was what appeared to be a bear hide draped over a rock. In the second photo of the set, Glidden had superimposed a circle around that object and labeled it "sleeping black bear."

No one had ever before sent a photo of a black bear hibernating in a glacial ice cave to the media anywhere. There is, in fact, no documented record of a black bear -- or a bear of any sort -- hibernating in a glacial ice cave anywhere. And a study done on denning black bears on the Kenai Peninsula in the 1980s found all of them denning in holes dug in the ground.

Read more: Viral tale of brush with hibernating bear just doesn't add up

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