Close Encounter with a Grizzly in Glacier National Park

Glacier National Park is famous for its glaciers and its grizzly bears.  The glaciers are gradually melting, but the grizzly bears are doing just fine*.  The occasional victim of grizzly bear attacks in Glacier National Park, however, would find little comfort in this.  My close encounter came in 1981 while I was hiking on a remote mountain trail with a friend.  Below is the excerpt from my book Close Calls and Foolhardy Romances about what happened.

“Ahead of us, just twenty-five feet away, a large brown body (a grizzly) was emerging from the forest and onto the trail . .  .  I reached my right hand down to my knife and unsnapped the sheath cover.  The grizzly stepped out and paused, broadside on the trail. Amazingly it was unaware of our presence, and I took advantage of its heedlessness by letting out a blood-curdling roar.  Simultaneously, I ripped my knife out of its sheath and raised it menacingly over my head.  Caught by surprise and startled by my belligerence, the bear turned on its haunches and sped away with the utmost haste.  For ten seconds I remained in my stance, adrenaline pulsing through my arteries.  Then I felt a weakness at the back of my knees, and found it hard to stand.”

About a week later, while I was driving home to Wisconsin, I picked up a seedy looking hitchhiker.  After a few minutes he took out a jackknife and intimated that I should drive out of my way to deliver him to Wisconsin Rapids.  I said I needed my roadmap to navigate, opened the glove box and took out my grizzly knife instead of a roadmap.  Seeing this he meekly folded up his impotent little jackknife.  This incident is eerily like a scene in Crocodile Dundee where a New York punk pulls a knife on Dundee and his girl.  Dundee is unimpressed and the punk says “What’s a matter with you?  This is a knife.”  Dundee then pulls out his huge hunting knife and says:  “That’s not a knife.  This is a knife.”

*The same cannot be said for polar bears.  Loss of habitat (the arctic ice sheets) is causing a  great decline in their numbers.

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