This week, a disabled Army reservist described a terrifying grizzly bear attack he survived by playing dead and clutching bear spray.
Shane Patrick Burke, 35, described the attack by the mother grizzly bear last Sunday as “the most violent thing I’ve ever experienced.”
He added in an Instagram post: “I’ve experienced gunfire, mortar fire and IED explosions.”
Burke said he was walking through the Signal Mountain forest in Grand Teton National Park in western Wyoming last weekend to photograph a great horned owl.
Grand Teton mountain closed after sudden grizzly bear attack
A disabled veteran Army reservist was attacked by a grizzly bear last weekend. (Prisma Bildagentur/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
As his wife waited in the car park and he hurried back, he “got into a really uncomfortable state. He was breaking tree branches, singing and talking to himself. These are some things that can help prevent a ‘surprise encounter’ with a brown bear.”
That’s when he realized he had a bear cub in front of him. “I knew this was bad,” he wrote, adding, “I got out my bear spray and saw the mother bear charging at me. I stayed where I was, yelled, and tried to spray her, but by that time the mother bear had already closed in on me.”
With little time to think, he decided to lie face down on the ground and put his hands behind his neck to “protect his vital points” so that the grizzly would attack his back rather than his front.
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He said the bear bit him on the shoulder, leg and buttocks, threw him to the ground and turned him onto his back, then aimed for his neck, “fatally wounding him.”
“I still had my hands clasped together and my arm protecting my carotid artery,” he wrote. “I never let go of the can of bear spray. When she bit the hand behind my neck, she simultaneously bit into the can of bear spray, causing it to explode in her mouth. This saved my life from the first attack. I heard her run, so I looked up and quickly ran up the hill in the opposite direction.”
He rushed back to his wife, texted her that he had been attacked, and wrapped a makeshift tourniquet around her leg.
The man was attacked while hiking on Signal Mountain in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.
While he waited for help to arrive, he prepared for the worst and recorded a video saying goodbye to his loved ones, but soon a helicopter and ambulance arrived and he was taken to hospital.
“The number one reason I survived during that attack was because I had read and understood what to do if attacked by a bear and I had bear spray ready,” he wrote. “I don’t know if I would have been able to spray the bear, but having it with me, holding it in my hand, and focusing 100% on sustaining my own life is the only reason I’m telling this story now.”
He also thanked the “Jenny Lake Rangers for saving my life.”
Burke also said he bore no ill will towards the bear, telling rangers that the attack was simply “wrong place, wrong time” and that the mother bear was simply trying to protect her cubs. Park officials confirmed that they had no intention of capturing or killing the bear, as Burke himself insisted.
The man who received the call said the attack was simply the “wrong place and wrong time” as the grizzly bear was simply trying to protect its cubs. (Huseyin Demirci/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“In fact, the next thing I said to the park ranger was please don’t kill the bear, it was protecting its cubs,” he wrote, adding, “I love and respect wildlife.”
“What happened at Signal Mountain was a wrong place, wrong time event,” he wrote.
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Burke is expected to make a full recovery.
