A Grizzly Encounter
A lone hiker crosses paths with a bear three times his size—and with one enormous appetite.
EEVER SINCE HE WAS A KID growing up on Quadra Island in western Canada, Colin Dowler had pushed himself to do more, go faster, and scale bigger heights, despite having a small physique and a nagging congenital knee disease. When he skied, he raced the double-black diamonds. When he rode his mountain bike, it was on the bumpiest terrain. If he wasn’t a little scared doing something, he didn’t think he was doing it right. Jenifer Dowler, his wife of 16 years, often found herself telling him to slow down.
To celebrate his 45th birthday in July 2019, Colin took a week off from his job as manager at a health-care facility in Campbell River, a small town on Vancouver Island’s east coast, where he lived with Jenifer and their youngest daughter, Sadie. He planned to spend two days on his own, scouting a route he planned to use later to summit Mount Doogie Dowler with his older brother, Paul. The peak, which rises to about 6,500 feet in the Coast Mountains of southwest British Columbia, was named after Colin’s late grandfather. It had always been a point of pride for their family that Grandpa Doogie, a prominent community member who once owned the Heriot Bay Store, a local hub, was immortalized in nature. But none of the Dowlers had ever climbed to its summit. Colin had tried once in his 20s and made it within a thousand feet of the peak before getting rained out.
Jenifer didn’t like the sound of her husband’s latest plan. She was used to Colin going on solo adventures, but this time he’d be boating to an obscure bay, biking an unpopulated road, hiking through grizzly country, and camping overnight alone. There was too much room for disaster.
“If I’m not home by eight o’clock Monday evening, you should start to worry,” he said.
Jenifer laughed. It was practically her husband’s motto.
Technically, he said, she’d have to wait until the morning if she wanted search and rescue to take his disappearance seriously.
“So,” she said, “I should just sit all night worrying until I can call authorities and say my husband is missing.” He shrugged. Pretty much.
The night before his journey, Colin packed sparingly. He ditched his usual tent to experiment with a bivy
bag—a person-sized portable shelter. He filled the remaining pockets of his bag with a handheld GPS, hiking poles, his homemade venison pepperoni, and a few other essentials. Instead of his usual Swiss Army knife, he took a three-inch stainless steel pocketknife given to him by his dad.
JENIFER AND SADIE were still in bed when Colin left at 7 a.m., his bike and boat in tow.
Colin had intended to stop at a tackle shop for bear spray, but the gorgeous weather meant the parking spots at the city’s boat launch would fill up fast. So as he added up the minutes, he drove past the store, deciding the small likelihood of a bear attack wasn’t worth delaying his mission. He recognized he couldn’t completely rule out the possibility, though. He’d had two grizzly sightings and countless black bear encounters in the area in the past, but he’d always escaped unscathed.
Colin pulled into the Campbell River port and quickly set off in his motorboat. More than an hour later, he arrived at Ramsay Arm, an inlet on the mainland, and found a spot to tie the vessel near a logging camp.
As a former worker in the logging industry, Colin knew it was good practice to check in at the mess hall. “Is there anything you need?” Vito Giannandrea, the camp cook, asked him.
“Bear spray,” said Colin.
After finding a can, Giannandrea offered him a ride. They trucked along an overgrown logging road until the forest got too thick. As Colin leaned his mountain bike against a bush to retrieve on the way back, Giannandrea took a picture of him with his phone. “So we have something to put on the milk cartons if you don’t come home,” he joked.
With Giannandrea’s bear spray in one pocket and the knife from his dad in the other, Colin started hiking. After traversing steep terrain and thick forest for about an hour, he started marking his trail with blue ribbons. He made lots of noise to ward off any curious creatures. Near the end of the
day, he realized the canister of bear spray was gone. It must have slipped out of his pocket when he rested during a navigation stop.
Colin didn’t want to risk getting caught in the dark looking for the spray. Instead, he spent an hour searching for a place to camp, eventually settling on a flat, dry spot with branches low enough to set up his bivy bag. He strung his food and clothes high up in a nearby tree and crawled into the bivy by 9:30 p.m., satisfied with what he’d accomplished that day. With his scouting done, he would return home after a night’s sleep.
THE NEXT MORNING, Colin tried without luck to locate the spray on his way down the mountain. He gave up by the time he recovered his bike, and as he pedaled, he daydreamed about getting home early to enjoy some family time and a beer or two.
As he passed a marker showing four miles to the logging camp, he came around a bend and suddenly hit his brakes—a mangy grizzly stood in the middle of the narrow road, a hundred feet away. Colin paused on his bike, calculating his chances of turning around for a quick escape. The bear could easily tackle him by the time he picked up speed. He opted to try to scare the bear away. “Hey, bear,” he bellowed.
It didn’t work. The animal looked from him to the bush, back and forth, and then began heading in his direction. Colin flung his backpack off his shoulders, snatched a hiking pole, and extended it in front of him. As the bear approached, Colin started to make out its features. About five years old and nine feet from tail to snout, it was nearly three times Colin’s body weight—and though it showed no signs of aggression, its curiosity was piqued.
The bear walked along the opposite side of the road, coming closer and closer. The gap between them closed to 30 feet. Colin carefully stepped off his bike, which seemed to startle the animal. It shuddered from its paws up to its rump and then continued to stalk nearer. Colin pivoted his bike, shielding himself with it. The bear passed by. Then, suddenly, it stopped, turned, and looked right at him.
Colin calmly raised the hiking pole and pushed it against the bear’s big forehead, right between the eyes. This seemed to hold the bear in place, until the rubber tip rolled off his muzzle. Before Colin could try again, the bear chomped on the pole. “Oh, come on now, we don’t need to do this,” he said, careful not to react aggressively with the animal so close. “I’m your friend.”
Colin let the pole drop. He tossed his backpack beside the bear, hoping the pepperoni scent would entice it away. The bear took one sniff and then turned back with his paw in the air and delivered a light swat
that Colin blocked with his bike. He dodged a second, heavier swat, and another and another, each stronger than the last.
When the bear raised another threatening paw high in the air, Colin threw the bike at it, but the creature barely stumbled. Instead, it lunged forward and snatched Colin up in its mouth with one swift chomp to his abdomen. Colin was flung sideways, draped across the bear’s muzzle. The animal’s canines sank deep as it carried him to the edge of the road. Colin felt no pain, just warmth. He didn’t resist, thinking only that if it carried him into the bush, he would be too incapacitated to get back to the road and would die before anyone found him.
The grizzly placed him by a ditch at the side of the road and lifted its head for another bite. There was no roar, no growl, just huffing while it chewed Colin’s flank. Colin tried to gouge its eyes, grabbing at the fur on its face and poking as hard as he could into the bear’s left eye. Agitated, the bear swung him 180 degrees, hoisted itself high, and chewed into his upper leg. Over and over, the bear lifted his head and bit into him.
Thoughts of leaving behind his family, of missing every part of his daughters’ lives, raced through Colin’s mind. He regretted that he’d put himself in such a dangerous position—and that he’d lost the bear spray.
As he tried to pry the animal’s jaws open, saliva trailed off its yellow teeth. It chomped through his hand. “Stop!” he screamed. “Why? Stop!” It didn’t make sense. He knew that grizzlies typically attack only briefly and then leave humans alone. When would this end?
The bear moved on to taste his other leg. As he heard the sound of his femur grating in its teeth, Colin remembered the knife in his pocket. He reached for it just as the grizzly hit a nerve. Colin arched and yelped. OK, he thought, I’ll play dead.
But then the bear hit another leg nerve, and Colin screamed even louder. I can’t play dead while I’m screaming; I have to get the knife, he said to himself.
The weight of the grizzly’s chest was on his stomach, pinning his arms to his left side, opposite the knife. Unable to feel his right arm, Colin wiggled his left hand between their
THE BEAR SHUDDERED FROM ITS PAWS UP TO ITS RUMP AND THEN CONTINUED TO STALK NEARER.
bodies and into his pocket. He opened the blade with both hands and inadvertently sliced the bear’s chest as he pulled his left arm out.
Colin stabbed the bear’s neck as fast and hard as he could. Blood gushed from the wound. Even the grizzly seemed surprised.
“Now you’re bleeding, too, bear,” said Colin.
The bear stepped off him and walked slowly away, trailing blood on the gravel. As it disappeared into the forest, Colin assessed the damage to his body. His sides and legs were riddled with cavities. A femoral artery wound drenched his lower half in blood. Colin cut his left shirt sleeve with his knife and tied it around his left leg. Once it was tightly knotted, he flopped onto his backside, scooted to his bike, pulled himself onto it, and concentrated on resting his feet on the pedals. He collapsed off the bike after one push.
Colin fought to remount and take off, keeping a tight grip on his knife. He felt his seat warming as blood from his wounds flowed down his back. Focusing on his breathing, he felt his odds improve.
He pushed ahead for 30 minutes until the road sloped toward the logging camp. He bounced painfully over
the bumps all the way to the mess hall railing and then fell on his side.
Colin flung himself onto the landing, legs flopping on the stairs. “Help! Call a helicopter. I’ve been mauled by a grizzly,” he yelled through a screen door. Five men, including Giannandrea, found Colin streaked with blood and dirt, smelling like an animal.
They kept him talking for 40 minutes until a medevac finally arrived. He received two units of blood at the camp and was eventually airlifted to Vancouver General Hospital. His younger brother, his cousin, and his sister were already waiting for him there. But Jenifer, herself on a camping trip, was unreachable.
IT WAS EVENING when Jenifer returned home. She and Sadie had gone the day without reception and hadn’t turned their phones back on. “Look, it’s almost eight o’clock,” said Jenifer, driving into their neighborhood. “It’s almost time to start worrying.”
Their house came into view, and Jenifer immediately noticed her brother-in-law’s truck in the driveway instead of Colin’s. She saw him pacing outside on a call.
He hurried over. “I don’t want you to panic,” he said. “He’s stable, but Colin was attacked by a grizzly bear.”
At first, Jenifer thought it had to be a joke and expected her husband to jump out from behind a tree.
It was too late for her to catch the last ferry to the mainland. She finally arrived at the hospital late the next morning, just as Colin woke up from six and a half hours of surgery. Doctors had had to make an eight-inch incision to repair an artery wound and treat more than 50 gashes and bite wounds. In all, Colin needed close to 200 staples and stitches. He was groggy, equally confused by the sight of his family and all his bandaged limbs.
The news was as good as it could be. The grizzly’s teeth had mostly bounced off his hips and ribs. Had Colin been any larger, there would have been more room for the bear to sink its teeth into his internal organs.
In the end, the wiry physique he’d tried to defy all his life had saved him.