Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Black Bear Attack - The Worst Black Bear Attack in History: Part 1

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

This is part 1 of the horrifying black bear attack that took place at the Liard River Hot Springs Provincial Park in 1999. The guys then talk about their favorite road trips, and Mike gets even further in the hole with Jeff. ~~ To advertise on the show, contact us! ~~ Tooth & Claw is brought to you by QCODE. Support the show and get access to an extensive library of exclusive episodes like this by supporting the show on Patreon or joining the Grizzly Club on Apple Podcasts. For the latest updates on the show and all things wildlife, follow us at toothandclawpod.com and social:  Instagram: @ToothandClawPodcast Twitter: @ToothandClawPod Wes: @GrizKid Jeff: @jefe_larson Mike: @mikey3ds    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We got our wildlife biologist. That's me. He has a degree. I do. And he's smart. Sure. And his name is Mike. No, that's not who are well.

Wes Larson. Then we got me, a koala brain. And we got Mike who owes me about just under a billion dollars. That's me. Yeah. We'll see if we can add to it today or detract from it. Do you know who's got to be really smart? Who?

98 degrees. Why? They got all those degrees? Oh. Wow, that's a poll from a long time ago. Is that Nick Lachet or was that O-Ton? That was Nick Lachet. Yeah.

I get my boy bands mixed up. Believe it or not, we all do. His reality TV show because I had a big crush on Jessica Simpson. Yeah. Yeah. Me and my friends recently. got into a discussion over whether or not she was like objectively hot and I got kind of like a little indignant where I was just like yes yeah you know I was gonna say it yeah like how

does anyone disagree with that yeah or like that there was like a rolling stone cover that was really famous with her yeah anyway it was a weird conversation the tuna thing she's a koala brain yeah you remember the tuna thing oh the buffalo wings where she thought it was chicken She was eating chicken of the sea tuna on the show, and she was like, so this is chicken, right? And Nicklishan was like, no. And it was this whole thing. We all have our moments. It was cute.

Yeah. If you're hot enough, you can be really dumb and we'll call it cute. Oh, man. All right. Well, we're all together. Yeah, we're in Missoula. We're staring into each other's eyes. Getting lost in the spring weather.

We don't have it really yet. You know, it snowed like another foot in you. taught yesterday, so it's better than that. It's been a bad spring. It's been cold. I'm ready for it to be over. I'm ready just to be warm for a while. But, you know, it's right around the corner, hopefully.

How are you guys doing? Doing pretty good. Yeah, nothing. We've been playing a Kirby game where you just kind of race and eat raspberries. Oh, that sounds wonderful. It's great. It's so much fun. Yeah, you're like little Kirby balls.

You just eat dessert. But then it does, like, the Mario Party game. gimmick where like at the end you just get a bunch of awards and like whoever won doesn't really win. Yeah, just arbitrary awards for like there's an award the most. Yeah, there's an award for who hovered the most. And that is like who basically saying whoever did the worst. Yeah. Gets like a hundred extra.

Isn't that like the biggest complaint that like boomers have with millennials? Yeah. That we just all get. Trophy culture. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, and look at us. We're all messed up.

We're all messed up. The right way. Yeah. Oh, the podcast still has yet to come in. The Signal Award. Yeah. Banks have a word voted. It's kind of like my master's degree for a long time.

It just existed in the ether somewhere. Well, you know, it's great to be together. It's great to hang out a little bit. We're going to go see a movie later. Yeah. We've been playing some games. We've been just paling around. We have.

You know it's not a good time. is a black bear attack. Oh. Uh-huh. So I like our plans better. Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about the kind of the genesis of this two-part series that we're going to do. Oh, wow.

Yeah. So a few weeks ago, I was in Utah, and I was trying to put it an episode together, and I was looking for one that had a decent narrative. And I kind of stumbled upon this story, and I had been recommended the story by a number of people. And I was like, okay, maybe it's time just to go for it and do the story. and as I dug into it more and more, I realized like, oh, this is a really big deal. This was like one of the craziest black bear stories ever. In my opinion, from what I've come across so far,

as far as American black bears go, I think this is the worst black bear attack in history. Worse than bacon? Really? Yeah, just, yeah. Wow. I think hers is maybe a little more horrific, but this is worse.

And it was like right after we had seen cocaine bear too. And I was also kind of looking for a story about a bear that goes on a rampage. And that's very much what happens in this story. Yeah. So I'd put the whole episode together. Mine is cocaine. No cocaine, at least on the bear side of things. So I'm not going to speak for the people. This was the 80s and 90s. But I'd put the story together and I was ready to do it. And then I stumbled on a bit more information about some things that had happened in the location beforehand. And I was kind of like, man, I feel like there's more to this story. I feel like there's more we need to talk about. And I came up with the idea of doing a two-parter, and I hope it works because it's a crazy

story, and I think you guys are going to like it. And you're also going to hate it. It's kind of both. Kind of like Night of the Grizzlies, but with Black Bears. Right. I'm just going to shut my emotions down. Just shut them down. You're good at that. You can do that. Yeah. Yeah. I wish I could do that, but I can't. Or like, what's Tony Horton say, the P90X guy? I hate it. But I don't know, but I love it, but I love it. I think that's the ab, the ab routine. Dude, oh, ab ripper X, man. I watched that a million times.

I used to do that all the time. I was just watching a motivational video where like anything at all bad that happens, he's like, good. Grow. Grow, grow, grow. Your leg got cut off, good. You didn't get that job, good. It's really funny. You're homeless.

good. Oh, man. So whatever happens in this story, it's good for these people. You know, that's not true, actually. At this guy. I'm not going to ask you. One thing I did want to get into really quick before we start the story, too, this is a big tangent, but you reminded me of something.

Recently, we have done some collaborations or guest spots with different podcasts. Really quickly, I just wanted to shout those out. We had the National Park After Dark hosts on our podcast, so check that episode out. haven't. We were on theirs. I was on Too Scary, didn't watch to talk about cocaine bear. I was on my friend Johnny Pemberton's podcast and then on Ryan Holiday's podcast, The Daily Stoic. So those are some some guest spots that we've done that you guys should go listen to. All right, this is the story of the Leard River Hot Springs Black Bear attack. Leard is how I pronounce it. Watching some videos online, I heard layered. I heard Leard. I heard lots different things. Liyard.

is kind of how I say it. So that's how I'm going to say, I'm sorry British Columbians, if I'm saying it wrong, but that's how I'm going to say it. How is it spelled? L-I-A-R-D. Oh, okay. Yeah.

And then I got the information from this for a lot of different sources, but for this first part, I'm going to pretty heavily rely on a book called Bear Attacks, the Deadly Truth, by James Gary Shelton. It's a book that was published in the 90s. It has a lot of information about Bear Attacks. agree with a lot of it, but there is a lot of it that I also agree with. You know, there's like a lot

of disagreement sometimes, especially when it comes to bear safety. And yeah, I don't know, just to kind of be blunt, there's some stuff in this book that I don't necessarily agree with. But there is some really good information. I think it's an interesting read if you're interested in this sort of thing. Okay, we're going to talk a little bit about Leard River hot springs. So it's been an important area for people in what's now known as British Columbia. The First Nations people use the Leard River as a corridor for moose hunting and then as fur trading when the first European trappers arrived. So when trappers entered this area, it's kind of like, picture British Columbia. If you're right in the middle and you go up toward the border of the Yukon, it's right there.

And currently it's on the Alcan Highway. Jeff's got his eyes closed. He's picturing British Columbia. He's got a smile on his face. I think he sees it. He's right there with us. It sits in the middle of some really lush boreal forest. It's really beautiful. This river in the area were used as this trading corridor between BC and the Yukon for trappers. But there's really treacherous rapids on the river. Oh, really quick too. Sorry, I'm a little congested today. So just bear with me.

All right. Bear. Yep. There we go. With? Yep. With. Okay.

All right. You? Yep. You're funny. So because of these rapids, they actually ended up abandoning this trade route. And for a long time, the Leard River was kind of just wild again. There wasn't much happening there. There was some scientific explorations launched into the area.

Not me, dude. Bigger rapids. Oh, you don't care. Yeah, you'll go for it. Yeah, sure. What's the highest category? It's like five-star rapids or whatever? Yeah, dude, that's nothing.

Class five? Class, yeah. That's nothing. Yeah, Jeff does that for... Shoot to shoot. Yeah, he shoots to shoot whenever he wants. All right, so there's some scientific explorations launched into the area, but the first white settler to build a home at the hot springs themselves

was this guy named Tom Smith, who... I know it sounds pretty white. Professor. Yeah. Mike, do you know any Tom's? You're a Smith. Tom? You got any Tom's in your family?

No. Not in my immediate. I don't think you're related to this guy. Hold on. Let me think about my brother's wrong. I thought your dad was Wes's professor. No. No.

You don't know my dad's name. You've never once gotten my dad's name right. Chris. Chris. Oh, wow. Look at that. All right. I always want to call him David.

Yeah. I do too for some reason. It looks like a Dave. Yeah. All right. So Tom Smith. You're out there, David. listening.

There's for sure. You just got to remember, say Christmas with a lisp, and you'll get it. Christmas? All right. Sorry. All right. So, Tom Smith builds his cabin for himself and his daughter right near one of the main pools of the hot springs in the 1920s.

They're there for a couple years while he's doing some trapping. He's just kind of like a solo trapper in the area. And then he leaves, but he ended up drowning in the Lierd River. That's how he met his end. And his daughter was rescued by some First Nations people and then sent to a mission. Oh, wow. So wait, they saved her from also drowning in that river? I think she was just like alone in the wilderness and they found her after he died drowning. Yeah. So the Alaska Highway was built in the 1940s to help provide Alaska and the Soviet Union with different supplies to thwart the access powers during World War II.

So Alaska was in direct conflict with Japan and then in the Soviet Union, obviously they were fighting Germany and a battle on multiple fronts. Honestly, like a fascinating thing, look into the history. history of Alaska during World War II, like the battles in the Aleutian Islands and some of the conflict between Alaska and Japan. It's really cool. There's some really interesting history there. I'm not going to get into it for this podcast because it doesn't apply at all, but it is really interesting. It's interesting. Nowadays, it's almost like we could team up with Germany against Russia and back then it's like teaming up with Russia against Germany. Yeah. Yeah. Like in one person's lifetime. A lot of alliances change. Yeah. You know, Russia won that war.

forest though. Yeah, whatever. All right. So it sounds like something I would talk about. They got bears. They do. They got a lot of bears over there. And they were using them, right?

Yeah. You know, they rides them. I think there's an argument for Russia having the coolest catalog of animals. Like, they just have a lot of different stuff. Yeah, they have leopards. They have bears, lots of, like three or four species of bears. Who knows what's up in Siberia? You know?

No dire wolves. dinosaurs. Okay. So anyway, the highway was built in order. They didn't use bears in the war, though, just so you know, that's like a bears with guns. Yeah, that's not true. Okay. It's more hockey. Yeah, it was Poland. There's a rumor about Poland having a bear that, like, fought in the war. Oh, I've heard that. It's not true. So the highway ran right next to the Leard River, Hot Springs, the Alcan Highway that they built to supply Alaska and the Soviet Union during the war. And the first boardwalk and pool facilities were constructed in 1942. And then in 1957, the Leard River Hot Springs Park was formerly created. So this is an excerpt from Bear Attacks the Deadly Truth. It kind of explains what the hot springs look like. So close your eyes, I'm going to explain.

I want you guys to just kind of visualize what this hot springs and this dense boreal forest might look like. An elevated boardwalk leaves the parking lot and crosses a large steaming swamp. Then continues about 400 yards to the first hot pool, Alpha pool, which has a nice U-shaped deck with benches and changing rooms. 50 yards further along, the boardwalk splits, with the right turn slowly climbing for 150 yards to the lower viewing platform, then abruptly climbing for a short distance to the upper viewing platform of the hanging gardens.

This beautiful spot has hot water trickling down through an abundance of various plants, growing on a rocky mineralized hillside. The left turn of the split and the boardwalk continues to an upper pool, beta pool, which has fewer improvements and is used much less than the alpha pool. So essentially there's this big alpha pool, and then the boardwalk leads way like a quarter mile down or whatever to beta pool. And in the middle... I'd hang out in the alpha pool.

Yeah, I was going to ask which pool you guys are hanging up. Mike, which pool are you in? I'm waiting for what? We're going all the way to Omega. No, this is it. That's it for the names. We open our eyes. Well, there's actually like eight pools,

but those are the only two named ones. Okay. You can open your eyes. I would do worse job picturing things with my eyes closed. I was just picturing the ground as candy. Yeah. When you said U-shaped, for some reason, I thought of a U-boat, so I thought there was like a submarine in that one.

So I'm not having you guys close your eyes. Wireless can feel like a world of traps, but not with visible. It's one-line wireless with unlimited data and hotspot, powered by Verizon for $25 a month. Taxes and fees include. Plus, for a limited time, new members pay just $20 a month for one year on the Visible plan. Using the code Fresh Start. Refresh your wireless with Visible.

Tap the banner to switch today. Terms apply, limited time offer subject to change. See Visible.com for plan features and network management details. So pretty much so, in between Alpha and Beta Pool, which are the two main pools, there's this other offshoot that goes up this hillside. And there's this place called Hanging Gardens that has this mineralized rock with lush, plants growing on it. And there's two viewing platforms. There's a lower viewing platform. And then up a steep embankment with some stairs, there's an upper viewing platform. Remember that. Put a pin in it. That's going to be really important for our second part. For this part, not so much. But for our second

part, that is really important. And we'll do a recap for the second one, too. The hot springs are thought to be formed from some heated groundwater that's pushed back up to the surface along natural faults. The water picks up different minerals on the way, and that's led to these interesting mineralized rock formations. An interesting thing about these springs, though, is that they, a lot of hot springs, a lot of the ones we've gone to, they empty into like a river or a stream or something nearby. These ones just drain into like a swamp. So when you approach the springs, there's this kind of like steamy swamp-like environment,

and that's what's led to there being a lot of really interesting flora and fauna in this region. Sounds cool. Because you have this really cool geothermal swamp there. And so there's like a really large abundance of insects. of plants, of mammals, of birds. It's kind of this ecological hot spot, you know, literally. I didn't mean to do that. Nope, yours funny.

Anyway, and two of the animals that do... He learned that one in Yellowstone. Two of the animals that do frequent this area are black and grizzly bears. Part of day one training. Yeah. Say ecological hotspot as much as possible. So this is an area, this is a part of the world that has both black and grizzly bears. Nice.

Black bears being much more abundant than grizzly bears in the area. The lush vegetation surrounding the springs gives them a lot of different food sources. So they are commonly viewed or viewed in the area, like seen in the area, especially black bears again. Would they hang out in a hot spring? Yes. Probably. Just kind of relax? Yeah, I think so.

Sounds nice. Yeah. They're more likely to like hang out in colder water in the summer. But in the winter or in the fall, I bet they would. Yeah. I like that. There's this place in Yellowstone that's like under lock. It's like one of the biggest secrets in the park, but it's called the bear bathtub.

And it's this like upwelling of cold water in the middle of nowhere in the park where bears come and just like soak and hang out. And there's a National Geographic article where they had some really cool remote camera shots from there. But I got to hike out to it and set up cameras to get shots of bears to visit it. That's hung out in it. It's really stinky and really cold. All right. So we're going to go to 1981. 41-year-old entomologist, so studies bugs. George Dorskin traveled to Lear River Hot Springs to conduct a study on the dragonflies.

They called the Hot Springs Home. Mike, give me a weird look when I said Dorskin. It just rhymes with one of my favorite words. For skin? Yeah, okay. All right. So he's a dragonfly researcher. He spent years photographing and categorizing the different dragonflies

of British Columbia. Oh, that's cool. And it's been like a five-year project where every summer he goes out for months at a time trying to take a photo of pretty much every dragonfly that lives in the province.

That's a cool project. Yeah, so this would be his last summer doing it, and there's a few dragonflies in northern BC that really only call that specific area home, and they're all found in the Leard River area, and so his whole goal this summer was to get some photos of those dragonflies, and that would kind of...

Mike's favorite game, Pokemon, snap. It's just like that. That's a dream job. Oh, man. So he's finishing up his project. He is hoping to get these photos. And like a lot of entomologists, he's used to really long stretches of fieldwork where he's going to be placed in pretty remote areas, sometimes completely alone.

And on this particular trip, he decided to set up his tent in this really popular campground right near Ljard River by the hot springs. So he's camping in this spot for a few weeks, and the busy campground and, all the kids crying and screaming and couples coming in and out and everything, starts to annoy him a bit. So he decides to relocate his camp to an abandoned campsite about a half a mile away. This old campsite was close to the public, but they opened it up to George, and he was really happy to get a little bit more solace, a bit more isolation. I think like a lot of biologists, he'd come to appreciate that and really love it.

He wasn't a recluse, though, and I actually read as obituary in a few different kind of little dedications to him. And all of his colleagues described him as being really cheerful, bright, warm, and having this really palpable energy for life. That was a bit of a spoiler by saying I read his obituary. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You're dead, good.

What's that? The motivational guy. He would spin it as a good deal. Growth. All right. Come back even stronger. He was social enough that he would even give lectures. to the hot springs campers about the interesting bugs, plants, birds, and mammals of the area.

Like unprompted, he'd just start talking to him. I don't know. I think it was set up. Okay. I do think, you know, there wasn't much information about him at all, aside from in this book and a couple little old news clippings that I found. But he did seem like somewhat of a kindred spirit to me because he wasn't just focused on dragonflies. Like he wrote a paper on barn owls. and he just seemed like he had a real, like, zest for everything wild. He just really cared about all wild things in the world, which I can relate with. About two weeks after camping alone at the Hot Springs in this new campsite, George told park personnel that a bear had been exploring his camp at night

and that this bear had been getting more and more brazen, and this made the park workers pretty nervous. They immediately told George that he should move his campsite back to the more populated campsite, and that this hustle and bustle of the other campsite would be enough to discourage bears, which it typically was. But George was a seasoned outdoorsman. He was really confident that he's going to be fine

at this campsite by himself. And he told the park personnel, bears are going to leave you alone if you leave them alone. I want to take a quick break from this and talk a little bit about camping in bear habitat, specifically habitat that can be home to both grizzly and black bears. So we've talked about this a lot on the podcast. I do think we're going to do a special episode at some point where we just outline kind of all the rules of what you should be doing.

But a lot of you, since it is spring, are probably getting geared up to do some camping this summer, to do some recreating. We've talked about this a bit, but we're going to go into a few tips really quickly just to help you guys out. So first of all, the number one thing is not to have any kind of scent in your campsite that could potentially attract bears. I think, you know, when we're talking about camping specifically, the thing that you really do, don't want is to provide an attractant to a bear to see your campsite as a potential source of food because if they then do get a food reward, they are going to associate your campsite with food. And I'm almost positive that's what happened to George. At some point, whether he left to go do something or what and left maybe a little bit of

food or some kind of reward out for a bear, a bear probably got it. And that just teaches them that lesson. It teaches them to associate campsites with food. It leads to a lot of problems. So that's our number one thing. Our number two thing is have a deterrent. So bear spray is the one that I'm recommending to everyone. Just because firearms aren't as effective, you're probably going to kill the bear.

You might just injure it. It's just, it leads to a lot of problems. They're not nearly as effective. The study that my professor, Tom Smith, ran in Alaska, showed that in 98% of the interactions that he looked at, bear spray stopped the interactions. There was no injuries. The other 2% it was, like the bear had so much momentum that it still hit the person and caused some injuries,

but there weren't any major injuries or deaths. And it was only like 70 something percent with firearms. There was no injuries to the person. So your chances are still pretty good that you're going to like get out of that interaction, but not nearly as good as bear spray. And it was a lot of dead bears in the firearms. Yeah. So bear spray is a great thing to have.

Jeff, where should you keep your bear spray? Well, I mean, most tends have like a little pocket, somewhere where you know where it is. And it's easy to grab. In your tent and in the same spot every time you camp. Honestly, you could. If the safety's on, that's not a bad idea. But in your tent, in a spot where you're... Your underwear?

Sure. The main thing underwear, Jeff. Well, it's where you'd keep your gun. What gun? If you had a pistol. In your underwear. In your underwear? Yeah.

I'm not a gun guy, so I'm going to take your word for it. Yeah, you are our gun guy. You're a resident gun guy. I think the important thing is just that you keep it in the same spot, especially if you do a lot of camping, you're just going to come to associate that spot in your tent with the bear spray. And that way, if, like, you're groggy and a bear wakes you up or something, you know exactly where to reach.

Right. So those are two really important things, keeping a clean campsite, having a deterrent. How about camping with our dad? Do you think that counts as a deterrent? Just because he snores so loud. If someone was just yelling all night. Yeah. It probably helps, to be honest.

It's the same level. Yeah. It's very, I mean, yeah. But you saying that actually brings up one more other kind of, I would say this is like an expert tip that I like to give people. And this is something that Tom Smith, the one that didn't drown in the river, taught me. I would say if you're camping with multiple people and you have the ability to do so, set up two tents. And the idea there is that if one tent gets collapsed, by a bear and the people are having a hard time grabbing their spray or whatever, the other tent has

the ability to respond, spray the bear and get it out of there. So that's kind of like another tip. One more thing I want to say about camping in bear habitat is be smart about where you put your tent. If it's like on a corridor right by the river or like next to a huckleberry bush or somewhere where there's going to be some sort of attractant to the bear, you're just increasing your chances of having some sort of problem. Mike, what are you laughing about? I just, I can't stop thinking about this one time when we're all sleeping in that one room in glacier. Uh-huh. Your dad stopped snoring for a little bit.

And then, you know, sometimes they come back in with like a snort. Yeah. It was like a jump scare. It like startled me awake and I couldn't go back to sleep for like an hour. Dude, I, there's nothing worse than like when you're up listening to someone snore and then they slowly stop and you're like, oh. And then you hear it like start back up and you're like, no. Oh. All right.

So that's just some basic camping information. Like I said, we're going to come back in at some point and give some really detailed information in a special episode on what you should do in your camping. It's funny picturing like a bear coming up to your camp and like the snoring stops or a sec. And it starts like coming in close and then he just like does a huge one and scares it off. Yeah. All right. So you could in this spot, you could run into either space.

species. George is camping alone. He had kind of disregarded that he was having some bear issues. And not long after some of the park workers get concerned when they realized they haven't seen George in five days. He had gone on a hike to a lake nearby, but he hadn't checked back in, and he definitely should have been back by then. And he again was like a pretty constant presence around the hot springs. So they were getting pretty worried. They decided to go check on him at his campsite. And when they got there, their concern turned into just full on panic. George's tent was ripped to shreds, and they found a large pool of dried blood near his car.

Never good. That's not a good sign. Unless it was like a decoy. Yeah. Your guy would probably say it's good, that it's growth. Knowing that a bear probably attacked him, the workers quickly left the area, and they alerted the park officials.

The officials called a local resident named Trapper Ray, and he went to inspect the campsite, armed with the hunting rifle, joined by his loyal dog, and with a friend. I will just say if you ever somehow find yourself in a situation where you're investigating a mauling site, bringing a dog isn't a great idea. Even if it's a dog that you feel very confident with, I wouldn't say, unless it's like a Carillion bear dog that you've trained specifically to chase off bears,

I wouldn't bring a dog. On the other hand, though, bring in someone named Trapper Jay. Trapper Ray. Trapper Ray. Yeah. That's a good idea. Yeah. Trapper Ray is always a good idea in one of these situations.

So he checks out the torn tent and the pool of blood, and then he sees a trail that leads down about 100 yards away, and he follows this trail, and he finds a cache site. And sitting in the middle of a pile of brush and dirt was the torso and head of George Dorskin. Oh, my gosh. They found a few other cache sites that had other severed body parts in them, so this bear had pretty much torn them apart, fed on him, and then cashed different parts of his body in different areas.

That's crazy. Wow. So when I say cash, a cache is essentially like the bear has covered up the carcass with like dirt and sticks. Sometimes it'll even drag a log on top of it. That's what this bear did. Is that to conceal the scent to other animals? It's just to, yeah, knock the scent down so other bears don't come in and feed on it. Both grizzly and black bears will do this.

It's a little bit more common in grizzly bears, though. So the bear had fed on the body of the entomologist and cashed his remains for future feedings. Trapper Ray goes to the campground. he talks with the park officials. He warns them that he found George's remains, and the campgrounds in the hot springs were closed, and a large-scale effort was mobilized to find the responsible bear. Multiple wildlife officials and law enforcement officers

conduct ground and air surveys to find the bear, and at this time, they weren't sure which species it was, but this investigation that some biologist and trapper ray did, they thought it was probably a grizzly, and the reasons they thought that is because the blog that had been dragged on top of his carcass had some canine marks in it, and they measured those and thought that it was probably a grizzly based on the size. And then also there was no drag between the car where the pool of blood was and where the carcass was.

And that indicates that the bear actually carried him in his mouth that entire distance. It would have to be a really big strong bear to carry like a 40-year-old man that far. Wow. Probably a grizzly. By the mouth? Yeah, by the mouth. I couldn't do it with my mouth. No, I don't think so. Could you carry a 10-pound bucket of quarters or whatever, like that guy in Australia did?

The dingo. Yeah. Okay. He couldn't, right? No. Yeah. Well, just for a minute. And he's like, see?

All right. This summer, serve up the cookout classics, craft mayo and dressing. Toss green salads with delicious ranch dressing or zesty Italian. Serve smooth, craveably creamy potato salads with mayo. We all know it's not a cookout without craft. So they removed the cash remains of George's body and they set up a blind and a nearby tree in the hopes that the bear that was responsible

would come back looking for its kill. The next day they did see a large male grizzly from the helicopter, but the helicopter scared it off. And then one of the ground crews actually found another tent in the area that had been flattened by a bear, but there's no signs of people. It was kind of a weird thing that was found. Yeah.

They trapped the area really heavily in the next few weeks, and they killed 15 black bears. Wow. But just about everyone believes that the culprit was a large male grizzly that was seen from the air and then never seen again. Were they like checking the inside of all these black bears? I think so, probably.

But like by then it had been enough time that all the remains would have passed through. And they didn't have like isotope testing or anything back then. So they wouldn't have been able to really determine for sure. They were they were pretty confident that, yeah, he's poop. No. They're pretty confident. that the 15 bears they caught weren't the responsible bears though but they for whatever reason

they were just killing them do you think it's just kind of a display for public like safety concern it could have been PR it could have just been like we're just making double sure that we're doing this bear there's a lot of black bears in british columbia i'm not saying that makes this right like in yellowstone we take every precaution to not have to kill a bear if we don't have to but in this situation they're not worried about the half they're like the population yeah Yeah, there wasn't like a population concern. So George had taken some pretty big risks by knowing that a bear was investigating his campsite and still doing that. I would just urge anyone out there.

If you ever do have bear problems in your campsite, it's time to move. It's time to go somewhere else. Don't continue to camp in that location. You're taking a huge risk at that point. And that's maybe if you're like sure you're going to see that dragonfly the next day. Yeah, you got to get a. Then I would still do it. Right.

Yeah. I would be cool, I feel like, just be so interested in dragonflies that, like, you see a certain type and that it just, like, makes your whole year. Yeah. It'd be cool to get into that. It is. To me, it's really, it's really beautiful that George died doing what he loved, you know, like in a beautiful place, chasing the stream that he had been chasing for a long time.

And he probably died pretty quickly. So they think that he had been. It's a small mercy. Trying to get in. Yeah, he'd been trying to get in, like, the bear they think had been trying to get into his car. and he went to investigate and the bear attacked him at the car and then dragged him off.

You got to just give the bear your car. Yeah. You know? If the bear wants your car, just give it to him. Yeah. Let them drive off. Yeah, exactly.

You can get a new car. I will say, we've talked about this a bit like how to respond to a bear attack in a campsite and I think we'll go over that in the what would Mike and Jeff do. But yeah, anyway,

it would be more than 10 years before Lear River Hot Springs would have their next major bear conflict. On August 6th, 1994, the hot springs were in the middle of their summer season. Dozens of people were enjoying the 110 degree water of the Alpha Pool and the lush forest surroundings. But there was also a large black bear in the area, and it was displaying unusual behavior for bears. It had chased a number of swimmers around the boardwalk, and it only stopped chasing them when they hit it with branches and rocks. Then the bear jumped into Alpha Pool and swam down a Texan man who was lounging in the water.

Wow. It actually corners this dude against the boardwalk next to the stairs, and it's like lunging for him, and he punches it in the nose. Oh, my gosh. And it backs up just long enough for some other onlookers to pick up a bench, and they throw it at the bear. Oh, wow. Yeah, it hits it in the back, and that was enough to send it back into the woods.

Yeah. But then all these people get out of the pool. I've watched enough wrestling to know chairs and benches. Chairs and benches. It's the ultimate weapon. Yeah. These people all kind of panic and they run for their cars and the bear comes back out of the woods, starts following people again. But luckily everyone's able to get to safety and 20 minutes later, park official shows up and shoots the bear.

That's crazy. It's unsuccessful, but it had really made an effort to prey on people. This was almost certainly a predatory black bear. The lucky thing was that there was multiple bystanders there to prevent the attack. But just a few years later, another bear would try again, and this one would be much. more successful. So another quick break. We're going to talk a little bit about Black Bear biology.

We've gone over Black Bear's a few times, but it has been a minute. And this is a bear that we know a lot about. I've worked with them extensively. Jeff's helped me for a few summers and then a few Den trips, too, with Black Bears. You know quite a bit too. Probably more than you. I wouldn't say that, but Mike, you've been with us for a lot of Black Bear episodes. I think you're starting to become somewhat of a biologist.

I wouldn't say that either. But, all right. You really shouldn't let us finish your thoughts. Yeah, I really shouldn't. Do you guys remember basically roughly how many Black Bears live in North America? It's like 900,000. Close. Around 800,000 in North America is the most, like kind of the up-to-date guess.

They range from Mexico up through Alaska and northern Canada. So there's like a big range. They're found in the south. They're found in the east. There's really just kind of like a pocket in central and the midwomen. West United States where you don't really find them and they're just about everywhere else. Black bear isn't really a good name for them. They can be a variety of different colors. You often hear names like cinnamon bear or spirit bear or these other like kind of names for

black bears. It's still just a black bear. It's just one that happens to have a specific color phase. Winnie the Pooh is a black bear and not inaccurately, right? They can be that color or bear? And they don't wear pants. Yeah, they can be that color. They can be a yellowish. Yeah. See? I don't wear his shirts either. Yeah. It's true. But they do love honey.

What would you name them? What would I name black bears? Yeah, would you name? I would name them like, I would probably say like North American bear. That's worse. I know. Or I would name them, I don't know. You come up with something.

Tree bear. Jeff. Jeff Bears. Or just Jeff Bears. Or just Jeff. Panda bears. You're right. North American bear's not a good idea.

That one's taken. Forest bear. North American pandas. I like forest bear. No, I wouldn't do. that either. Okay. Anyway, hey, go ahead and submit your ideas for what we should rename black bears. Anyway, so when it comes to those color phases, something I just wanted to point out. It's like hair color in humans, essentially. It's the same animal. It's the same species.

It just has a different hair color. So don't get too hung up on like cinnamon bear or any of that kind of stuff. It is like annoying to argue with someone who thinks like a black bear is a grizzly bear. And then you're like, no, that's a black bear. And they're like, no. It's not black. I know. And it's like, well, that is a good point linguistically. Yeah, you just say it's a brown phase black bear. All right. So they can be a wide variety of sizes.

Weights in adults ranges from about 120 pounds up to 500 pounds. The biggest individual on record was close to 1,000 pounds. Whoa. Yeah, that's a huge black bear. That's great. But most black bears you find are going to be somewhere between like 150 to 300 pounds. Yeah, I hank the tank. tank was probably pushing the 600.

If that was a human, they'd like make a channel show out of them. Yeah. History channel or a lot of whatever. Yeah. I'd watch that. All right. Big old bear.

I can't. It's like hibernating den is just full of like Twinkies. Yeah. They have a great sense of sight or a good sense of site. It's probably somewhat similar to ours, but their sense of hearing is about twice as good of ours, but their sense of smell is what they really excel at.

They're like number one sense that they use. It's probably like a hundred times better than the typical humans. Better than bloodhounds. Really? Yeah. It's a scent that they use to navigate the world. It's how they find food. It's really like their go-to scent.

The Animal Olympics bears scent is pretty high. Honestly, they might be number one. Wow. It's hard to say. I wonder why their scent doesn't bother them that much. Like their own scent? Yeah, I don't. Well, if you touch their babies, they'll disown.

Yeah. they immediately kick them out. Yeah, it's not true. All right, so they can run at about 30 miles per hour. They have short, curved claws and strong muscles that make them excellent climbers. Even cubs fresh out of the den are really good at climbing trees. And that's a really important evolutionary trait for them, because it's provided them with access to unique food sources

and really important escape terrain when they're presented with a threat. So whereas like a grizzly bear, when you threaten it, is probably just going to charge or do a big aggressive display. Black Bear is just trying to get up a tree. That's how they get away from threats, and that's why they're not nearly as aggressive as grizzly bears. A quick point about their life cycles. They're born typically in January in dens.

They live with their mom for about a year and a half, and they mate in the late spring and early summer. Implantation, though, usually occurs in November. So even though they're mating in like June, that fertilized egg doesn't implant into the wall of the, uterus until November when the body is pretty much told the mom you're healthy enough to have a cub. We've talked about delayed implantation, right? Yeah. We're not going to get too into it. How quickly are they ready to start reproducing when they, after they leave the den? Is it pretty quick? It depends

on the population. The population me and Jeff worked with in Utah, they typically start having their first cubs at like three and a half, four and a half somewhere in there. So a couple of years even after Yeah, I mean, that's like when they come into their sexual maturity. Sure. Okay. All right. So in places where it gets cold and food isn't widely available in winter, they do enter dens in the late fall and they hibernate through the cold winter months.

In places where it doesn't get that cold, like southern Florida or whatnot, they won't hibernate. They'll just continue throughout the winter looking for food. So they get a little bigger? Not necessarily, because it's hotter and they like maybe don't have access to lots of protein like they do in some of the colder parts of their range. For a long time, they weren't considered hibernators, but now we do consider them efficient hibernators, as they tend to lose body heat much slower than smaller mammals, and therefore they don't need to drop their metabolism to the same level.

So we do, they are really efficient hibernators. Huh. Yeah. I just thought all bears hibernated. For a long time, there was a lot of discussion about that, and people were saying, like, no, it's just a torpor. They're not actually hibernating because the idea was like true hibernators, like a ground squirrel or something, essentially dies. Like, its metabolism slows down so much that its heart is barely beating and it, like,

takes weeks for it to come out of it completely. Whereas bears don't need to do that because their body is built in the specific way where they don't lose their body heat nearly as fast. Oh, okay. They just kind of plug up their butts and sleep a lot. Recycle their pee. And the metabolism slows down. I saw someone make a comment about how they jam stuff up their butts.

Uh, they don't necessarily jam stuff up. their butts. Okay. There's a fecal plug that sometimes develops, which is just like hardened poop. Gotcha. It makes it so they don't have to poop while they're in their head. When Jeff takes opiates, that's kind of what's... You get a fecal plug, too?

You just rocket it out. Recovering from surgery. It's not like some pill fiend. Yeah, whatever. Just to clear that out. Okay. All right. So we are going to talk in the next episode a lot about attacks from Black Bears, but really

briefly, since 1900, there have been about 70 fatal attacks from Black Bear's North America, which really isn't that many considering that's like 120-something years, and there's 800,000 black bears in North America. So it's 70 deaths in that span of time really isn't a lot. I have one more hibernation question. Yeah. So Mike said he thought all bears hibernate. Yeah. Isn't there, like pandas don't hibernate? Pandas don't hibernate. Well, so like denning females in just about every bear species will go into like a somewhat state of hibernation where they slow way down to have their cubs inside of a den. But outside of that, like male polar bears don't hibernate, black bears in warm areas don't hibernate males that aren't

pregnant. Pandas don't, I don't think pandas hibernate unless they're pregnant. Okay. Um, sun bears don't. So it's more an exception that they hibernate than a rule. It is, it is an adaptation in places where they no longer have access to food to sleep through the winter. And then it also is an adaptation for females that are pregnant or an evolution for females that are pregnant to like raise their cubs within a den because their cubs are born. Okay. Completely altritional. Like they're tiny, naked.

They need to have a safe place to grow. And when you say sleep through the winter, it's not like they fall asleep in October and wake up in April. No, like because they aren't hibernating at like that level, they actually can come out of So like, especially if it warms up or something, a black bear may wake up, it may even leave the den and go kind of on a little walkabout, but then it'll go back asleep. And that's very much dependent on like where they are in the world. It's dependent on, yeah, environmental conditions. It's dependent on a number of different things.

Cool. It's really not much different than like your current situation. Yeah, that's true. All right. Am I a bear? At some point, I wish I was a bear. At some point we will talk more about hibernation and like, in detail, but that's kind of like a basic telling. Okay. So when it comes to frequency of attacks,

they are responsible for the most attacks and injuries from bears in North America. And a lot of that is just because of like, we talked about in Yellowstone for years. They were just biting people that were giving them handouts and stuff. And there's just a lot of these bears. So they are responsible for more. But if you were to look at like per capita, grizzly bears have more, if that makes sense. Sure. Okay. That makes sense. They don't really cub defend either, which is a very big difference from grizzly bears. Yeah. You could, like, there are researchers that have grabbed black bear cubs in front of their moms, and the mom just runs off.

That's some good research. Yeah. Like, will they cub defend? Yeah. Let's pick one up in front of the mom. Yeah. If you did that with a grizzly bear, it would kill you. Okay.

Yeah. If there's a hostage situation, you have, like, a gun up to the bear cubs head, the mom would just be like, do it. I don't care. I don't know. Maybe. Probably not. All right. So I did want to just like a quick, not correction corner, but just a disclaimer.

I do think when we talk about Black Bears on the podcast, we sometimes talk about them very casually. Because we have, like I have a lot of experience with them. Jeff has a lot of experience with them. And they do tend to be very shy, very non-aggressive animals. And you do kind of develop this casual view of them when you have hundreds of them run away from you or just not care. about you or anything. Right. But they can be very dangerous.

And we've talked about that on the podcast. Even if it's just one in a million of these bears that's predatory, which is essentially what it is, that one bear could give you the absolute most horrific experience that you can possibly imagine. And so they do all need to be treated with respect. You should be careful around black bears. Even if you've had a million encounters with them and they've all been like non-injurious and just kind of like interesting encounters,

that one bear is going to be the worst experience of your life. So I do think people should be careful around them. I do think people should have a deterrent when they're near them because you don't want to have happened to you what happened to these people in 1997 at Learred River Hot Springs. What I would say to add on to that too is like you need to be careful and respect them, but also like I wouldn't want them to be scared when they see. see a black bear because it's like you're going to make the worst decisions if you're scared

and not thinking straight right and we and we've talked like at length about probably something nothing will happen right this is an animal where you want to have like a confidence with them because um the more dominant you are with them the less chances you are going to have of being attacked but again it's just kind of like i think of dogs like we've all passed hundreds of thousands of dogs probably on the street or whatever at least thousands not hundreds of thousands but we've passed a lot of dogs and like almost all of them are going to be fine

like almost all of them are going to be friendly you're allowed to touch them or whatever but then every once in a while like there's a dog that you don't know that dog's backstory you don't know what's happened to it in its life you don't know what its motivations are

and that dog might be the one that attacks you or bites you or whatever and so that's why you have to kind of have that view toward every dog until you know it's different you know and I kind of feel the same way with blackbirds Just treat it like you treat a doctor.

That's not what I'm saying. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, maybe it wasn't a great metaphor. Hey, you. What's you doing? Scrolling? I'm sorry.

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dollar-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. All right. So we're going to get into this day in August in 1997, this one and a million predatory bear at Leard River Hot Springs that would inflict the most devastating black bear attack in

modern history. So I'm going to set the stage and then we're going to get into the actual meat of the story in the second episode. All right. So in 1997. 37-year-old single mother, Patty McConnell, is ready for a new start. She had a really difficult life for her and her two children in the town of Paris, Texas, and she decides to head out to explore a new frontier.

The last frontier, Alaska. Cool. Space. Depending on who you ask. So she's, from what I could gather, there are some really heinous stuff that was happening in her personal life in Paris, Texas. I don't want to, like, go out on a limb and say, say it was like domestic violence, but I kind of got the feeling that that's what it was,

because she essentially had to take her two kids one day and leave and, like, go start a new life somewhere else. So her kids are Kelly and Kristen. Kelly is a boy. He's 13 years old. Kristen's a girl. She's seven. They're heading to Alaska. They're trying to get this fresh start. She's just going to find a job when she gets there. And this little family had budgeted for like a couple weeks to make this trip from Paris, Texas to Alaska. It's roughly a 60-hour journey if you're to do it all at once, but she's got two kids with her. She's like taking some time to do this trip. So it's August 14, 1997. They're approaching the border of British Columbia and the Yukon, and Patty passes a sign for a local tourist attraction called Leard River Hot Springs. The kids are getting

pretty restless at this point. They're sore from a long drive, and a dip in some hot springs is sounding pretty nice to them. So even better, Leard River Hot Springs is located really close to the highway. So the stop isn't even going to cost them that much time. They can kind of just pull off the highway, take some time at the hot springs, then they get back on their route. Okay. So they pull into the parking lot, and in record time, her kids have their swimsuits on. They're like ready to go dashing for these hot springs. Ray Kitchen lives in nearby Fort Nelson, British Columbia, and he had similar plans to visit the Hot Springs with some family. He's a truck driver who's hauling explosives to road crews on the Alaska Highway,

and on that particular day he had his 11-year-old daughter and her friend Sarah with him on the drive, which to me, it's kind of weird to take your kids on an explosives hauling drive. Wages of fear. He might have dropped the explosives off and then, like, picked them up. I know where this is going. What? The bear blows him up. Okay, we're going to see.

Anyway, the three of them are together, and they're also headed to the hot springs. It's Chekhov's explosives. You can't just bring them up and they won't come back in. So Ray and Patty don't know that their lives are about to intersect that day in a really incredibly tragic and bloody way. So if you drive through this part of the world, it's likely you're going to see some bears. Most of those are going to be black bears. So it's probable that the McConnell family had seen some bears, and then I'm almost positive that Ray had run into him at some point or another because he was a local. On that day, they would both meet a 220-pound black bear

that was very different from the vast majority of black bears in North America and that this one was ready to explore humans as a potential source of food. So Patty and her kids get into the main pool of the hot springs, Alpha Pool, and they feel rejuvenated by this hot water of the springs, the beautiful scenery, the boardwalks, all of that. They're hanging out in Alpha Pool and her daughter, Kristen, who's seven, meets these other kids, and they make friends with this other family.

and they're all playing together, and they decide they're going to walk up together to Betapool, up the boardwalk. After they visit Betapool, Kristen, the daughter gets restless again, and she decides to go with her new friends to the parking lot to eat lunch. And not long after, Patty and Kelly also decide to head down for lunch. And as they're walking down the boardwalk, they see that little offshoot that goes up to the hanging gardens. And Patty's hesitating to, like, go up there and explore it because, like, Kristen's gone off with this family that they just met to have lunch. But let's remember this is the 90s. Yes, yeah.

Yeah. This isn't the explosives guy. This is just another family. She's like, okay, we can go up there really quick. We'll just go up to the hanging gardens, check it out, and then we'll go check on Kristen. So her and 13-year-old Kelly decide to go up there. Now, this is one of those things where it just seems like this tiny throwaway decision

that you would make. But it goes on to alter their lives in a really violent and tragic way, as well as the lives of Ray Kitchen. the guy that we just brought up who's driving there with his family. Man. We're going to go over what happened at the Hanging Gardens in part two of the story. Oh, can't we just do it right now? Nope.

Nope. I hate you. Well, we know what happens. It's a little strong. The bear blows them up. So really quickly, let's, I guess we'll do ouchies for George. It's been long enough that I think that's okay. I mean, being killed by a grizzly bear in your campsite,

it seemed like he, there wasn't like a lot of signs struggle. It was the pool of blood and then like his cash body. You got dragged. So I mean, he didn't get dragged. He didn't get dragged. So that means he's probably killed him in the car. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's a good point. So it's still being killed by Grizzly. I'm still going to give an eight. But for me, it's not like a Cynthia Dussle Bacon kind of thing, getting your arms chewed off. Yeah, that sounds like the right answer. It's sometimes it's hard, especially since we've done so many of these to kind of put yourself in the place of victim, but just the realization that you're completely alone and helpless, and it's actually happening that you're being attacked

by a bear. It just has to be the terror involved. Unbelievable amounts of terror. Yeah, eight for me. Yeah. I'll go with a four. Oh, geez. Okay.

Justify that. I just need more details of how he died. So you're going with four. Yeah. So there are a couple details. Where he's head and his torso were removed from his body? Yeah. Yeah, but that's a half of him is dead.

He died is really the main thing to consider one. All right. Well, I'm just going to, we're going to move on. We're not going to do talk much more about the story, but I wanted to set up the environment for you guys. I wanted to talk a bit about British Columbia, about bears, about this kind of weird history that Learge River had before the craziest thing in their history actually happens, which is what we're going to talk about next episode.

All right. So let's get into our categories. Yeah? Yeah, let's do it. For our pop culture category, I want to do best road trip in pop culture because Patty McConnell and her family were on a pretty crazy road trip. Yeah. So I'll go first.

I'm going to say dumb and dumber is my favorite road trip. You know, when that movie came out, I was like just the right. I was like 10 or something probably. That John Dabber is full of shit. Yeah. And I think it just like. like the Fairley brothers just really their comedy is just designed for kids around that age. I thought it was the funniest thing I've ever seen in my life and I watched it over and over and over and over again.

So I'm going to pick that. It's really funny. Yeah. I like that. Big Gulp's, huh? Well, well, see you later. Yeah. I wanted to pick Mad Max Fury Road.

Oh. I don't, probably doesn't count. So I'm going to actually go Thelman Louise. That's a great one. I love Susan Sarandon and Gina Davis. Yeah. Just both at the top of their game, in my opinion. Plus, I don't know, just like a great underrated Ridley Scott movie.

Everyone, go check it out. Ridley Scott directed? It's crazy to think, right? Wow, I had no idea. I, like, kind of knew what happened at the end, and I was still pretty shocked. I know. That was one of those movies that The Simpsons told me what happened before I actually saw the movie. Yeah.

But, yeah. I'm going in Rain Man. Okay. That's another pick. Yeah. Fun pick. I love, I just love the idea of, like, you meet a brother who you love. You didn't know existed until, like, an hour earlier.

And then he's just, like, super good at gambling in Vegas. Like, having, like, a super, like, hot streak in Vegas just seems like the most exciting thing. He's so fun. And then, like, the brother doesn't even know what money is. So, like, you just taking it all. Yeah. Great. I like that.

I love young Tom Cruise, you know. Yeah, I love old Tom Cruise. Anyway. Middle-aged Dustin Hoffman, how you feel about him? I don't have his stronger feelings. When he was in Hook, he's pretty good. He was good. He's good.

He's good and just about everything is in. All right. You know what? Hot take. I think he picked the right girl in the graduate. The mom? Okay. Oh, man.

I haven't seen that. I need to read watch that. It's been a while. All right. So I'm going to introduce a new category. and I'm going to call this one TikTok Trash Talk. Okay. Which is there's this kind of growing thing on TikTok.

And I'm trying, pretty soon I think we're going to start posting some videos to kind of try and counteract this movement on TikTok. But it's essentially just kind of any old Joe picking up a mic and doing a green screen and like spouting off myths about animals that are like sometimes a little harmful. especially when it comes to safety. And it's turning into a problem because I think I'm constantly being sent these videos by people. And I'm like, man, this is terrible advice that these people are giving on TikTok.

Oh, is that where you heard the polar bear one? That's what this one. Today's is going to be like the one that kicked this off for me. I've been sent a few times now is this TikTok rumor, and I've seen it on a few videos where people are saying,

if you're attacked by a polar bear, the thing you should do is strip off your clothing and leave it behind you so that the bear, as it's charging you, will stop, inspect the clothing, and leave you alone. And so the idea here is like, you're in the Arctic. One of the coldest places on Earth, you're taking off one of your only sources of protection from this bear, and you're leaving it in a pile in the hopes

that it's going to buy you a little bit of time to get away from this bear. Yeah. And if that's your game plan, you are already in, like, such a world of hurt, that it's just the worst possible advice. It's terrible. You're exposing yourself to the elements much more. You're exposing yourself to the bear much more.

And it's not, like, these are not stupid animals. This is not an animal. Like, it might stop and check it out for a second. So if you do have a backpack or something and you need to move away from this bear, that's not necessarily a bad idea. But taking off your clothes is going to cost you more time and it's just going to...

You'd almost have to make a snowman. And put it on the snowman. Yeah. That's a good. If you can do that. Jeff, you'd be great at these videos. Don't listen to this stuff, guys. If you want to actually know what to do with the polar bear,

listen to one of our polar bear episodes. But that's my TikTok trash talk for the week. Anytime I see something on TikTok that especially sits with me, we're going to bring this category back up. Yeah, I like that. That's great. All right. So we're going to move on to what would Jeff and Mike do?

I'm going to let you guys pick. If you're going to pick the campsite attack, or the hot springs attack. Well, which, oh, like the one that didn't get the people? Right, the corner of the guy in the hot springs. The bench? I mean, I couldn't come up with anything better than throwing a bench at it. And Jeff's idea of just letting the bear have the keys to the car.

Yeah, I kind of gave mine away. Yeah, that's true. I'm a big proponent of letting bears drive cars. All right. So give it the keys to the car, let it drive the car. Yeah. Okay. I don't think it was trying to drive the car.

That's a tough one because it seems like, George, he was just investigating because he heard something going on the other side of his truck. So he probably wasn't even really certain what was happening until it was already way too late. I will say, though, he had already complained about a bear being in his campsite and rummaging through his stuff. So he probably hadn't. So it was probably likely that he thought it was a bear. Okay. Then don't get closer to that bear to confirm.

If I think it might have like a 1% chance of being a bear, I'm going to stay on the other side of the truck. Yeah. So that's great. You know, putting a barrier between you and the animal is great. What I will say is for a campsite attacks, if a bear is investigating your campsite and refuses to leave, that is a, like, kind of a rare scenario where with the grizzly bear, you do want to be somewhat aggressive.

So grizzly or black bear, you need to do everything you can to get that bear out of your campsite because whatever it was that brought it in, the campsite is keeping it there. And so if, like, you come out and you yell at it or whatever, and it doesn't just bolt, that means you've got a real problem on your hands. So hopefully you have a deterrent. Hopefully you have something you can hit the bear with to try and get it out of there.

If not, you got to try and probably get out of there. So I wouldn't run, obviously. But if you can somehow get to your vehicle or get to a safer location, that's what I would do. But he didn't have bear spray. This was 81, so it wasn't really widely available yet. I don't think he had a gun. He didn't really have anything to do to stop this bear and it ended up costing. him his life. Do you think his truck's

check engine light turned on? We love talking about a check engine light, don't we? All right. Okay. I love Mike when we're talking and I can just see you think of something and smile and just wait for it to come out. Really quickly, we're going to do

where Mike and Jeff paying attention. It's going to be a shorter round than normal. You guys each get one easy question, one moderate question, and one harder question. All right. All right. You want a bet a billion? I'm too deep. You don't want to dig out?

Double or nothing? Double or nothing is your only way out. Let's go. All right. Who wants to start? I'll let Mike choose. I'll go first. Okay.

A real easy softball for you on this first one. What kind of insects was George studying? Oh, no. Dragonfly. Okay. It's one for Mike. Jeff. What was the trapper's first name that investigated George's attack site?

Ray. Good. One to one. Mike. How did Tom Smith? Smith die. He drowned. Good. Jeff, where was the guy who was attacked an alpha pool from? Texas. Correct. Mike, how many black bears were killed in the hunt for George's killer? Oh, man. 16? Is that your guess? I mean, it's, no. It seems like it's wrong. No, that's your guess. 14.

Jeff, do you want to try and steal? He's wrong? Yes. It sounded right. 15. Correct. Three to two. Jeff, how old was Kelly McConnell in 1997? 13? Correct.

I had that one, too. Two billion dollars in the whole. I've got a bonus question that's worth three points. Currently, the score is. It's 402, Jeff. I'm going to ask it, it's a lightning round. Whoever answers at first gets it. Roughly how many deaths from American black bears have there been since 1900?

75. Mike? 20. Jeff's closer. 70. You owe Jeff $2 billion. You know what? At what point does it stop mattering?

I mean, at a million? All right. Let's get on to our listener questions. Payment plan though, right? 25 cents a year. And I'll let you keep, we can go double or nothing again. Yeah, it's going to be really hard to break that news when I get married. Hey, by the way.

Well, one of you owes prima nocta at this point, too, right? I know, I'm still, I'm in, I'm in debt on that one, too. Five days, I think, nights. There's once he was like, like, I was, like, going to take a shower. He's like, I'll bet you you won't take a shower. You bet you premonacta? Yeah. This is the worst bet I've ever made.

All right, let's do listener questions. Jeff, you got some questions for us? Sure do. So I have some questions from our Patreon here. Okay. From Laura. So first of all, I didn't know this was going on, but hey, guys, I have a couple questions we came up with for West during our screening of backcountry on Discord. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. There was a movie night that some of the listeners set up. That's cool. It's really cool. Yeah. So it was said that you are always within 15 miles of a road when you're out in the woods. I wanted to know how many bears could fit within 15 miles, literally. And like what do you think for sardine style?

Okay. It seems more like a math question than a biologist. Yeah. It seems like more of a question for me here. And also, Philidorah wanted to know how many bears would fit on a bus. Okay. Those are both really good math questions, like Mike said. On a bus or what? Kids, you can fit 20 kids on a bus. 25. No, probably 30.

Are we like, again, is this clown car rules or just like traffic? I'm going to say you could. Obeying traffic laws. Fit 35 black bears on a bus. Sure. You know, like those are good questions. I would say like the backcountry one, first of all, like the being 15 miles from road. That movie was based in Canada, and that's not the case for Canada. There's definitely places

where you can be much further from a road there. In the U.S., like the furthest you can be from a road is like 29 miles, and it's in the spot in Yellowstone in the thoroughfare. But as far as Black Bear density goes, like how many bears could you have in that area? Density is really very between populations, but like the densest Black Bear populations, I think it's somewhere around like 1.5 to 2 bears per kilometer squared. Like in Bryce, where we worked, it's probably like 0.03 bears per kilometer squared or something like that. But in really dense places, it's around that many. So I know that's kind of hard to visualize, but they don't, like, they can have really varying

home range sizes is what I'm trying to say. And in places where there's lots of food and really good habitat, there can be lots of them, places where there's not, there's not going to be many of them. Okay. I don't know how many would fit on the bus. Of you. From Carlos. Ice powers question.

If you shoot ice from your hands, is the ice basically frozen sweat? Let me explain. In the credibles, Frozo needs to stay hydrated in order to produce ice, meaning his powers need water and his body to function. And since sweat is basically water pouring from our body, if you have ice powers, you would basically sweat and then freeze it. And if that's shooting from your mouth, is it frozen saliva? Yeah, this is your question.

I mean, those seems like your very basic ice powers, right? That's like if you're ranking everyone with ice powers, they're on the lower end of ice powers. Like, their most productive thing would probably be urine at that point. I'm having a really hard time confronting this ice power question academically. So I'm just going to say yes. Yeah. I think like the ideal ice powers you pull moisture from the air. That's what I always.

I always thought ice powers was like you're just collecting vapor from the environment. Yeah. Not from inside your own body. You could do it from your body. Yeah, but then your ice breath. But then like afterward, are you not able to like, do you not have any saliva left or any other fluids? If it's sweat, you're going to have to ruin one of Jeff's maintenance for ice germs. All right.

This one's from Kitty. I'm on pain meds after having spinal surgery a few days ago. So I hope this makes sense. I had to get operated on because I got hit by a tractor trailer on the turnpike. Jeez. So in every shark attack story, we always hear the survivors say that they felt like they got hit by a truck. Yeah. Does that mean that I, and people like me, theoretically know the impact of a shark attack?

I guess. Can I tell people that? Is that like a flex? I think we need someone that's been hit by both. To say like, hey, these feel the same. Yeah, so please, once you get better, go get attacked by a great white shark. And then they say, by the way, listening to your podcast and my other faves have really helped keep me in good spirits through this. Good.

Hopefully those painkillers are helping too. Yeah. I hope you recover well. Real heroes. Yeah. Pain killers. Oxicon, the real hero. Big Pharma.

All right. From M. Munoz, 20. This is from Instagram. Okay. I fed a wild squirrel at the Grand Canyon. Will they kill it just like a bear? I was young and dumb.

Probably not. Yeah, don't sweat it. No. I mean, don't do that. But we probably all did that as kids. Yeah, as kids. Yeah. It's not good to feed wild animals.

A lot of times the stuff you're feeding them doesn't have the nutrients they need. It, like, changes their behavior around humans. It's not good for them. But for a squirrel, it's not going to, they're not going to have to kill it. It's not going to, like, attack people or anything. The Ashley 14. How prepared were you guys when you created your podcast? Did you just wing it?

Yeah, not. I mean, I think. Well, our first episode is you can't find it. Yeah. So that's kind of answers. The annals of history. That a little bit. We were figuring.

figuring it out, but I feel like we hit a groove really fast, too. Yeah. I mean, I love our early day episodes. All of us were like, we're podcast listeners. We all had things that we wanted to emulate from the podcasts we listened to. And then like, for me, I had had 10 years of preparation in studying bears for 10 years in wildlife. Yeah. So I'd been doing audiovisual production for six years at that point.

Yeah. And we'd all been friends for close to 10. So, like, yeah. I've been making poop jokes. your whole life. 20 years? Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Hope that answers your question. Tyson X. Thao. Utah Raptor versus adult male polar bear. Who wins? Huh. I feel like Utah Raptor always gets exaggerated how big it actually was. But I think they're like roughly as tall as a person.

I'm going to give it to the male polar bear just because it's like bulkier. Oh, yeah. I'm going to say the polar bear. And then American. lion versus grizzly bear? That's a good fight. In the wild. In the wild?

Yeah. American lion versus grizzly bear? Yeah. African lion. American. Like they're extinct. I don't know. Well, I'd probably say the lion.

Okay. Yeah. I would say the grizzly bear since they're still here. Okay. Fair enough. Yeah. Good point. The Willow Pond Farm.

For Patreon episodes, how come expletives are beeped out? We like an F-bomb. Well, I don't know. I kind of like doing the animal noise bleep out. Yeah. We used a dolphin, a lion a couple of times. But I feel like when a F word like really hits, we leave it in. I don't feel like this patron speaks for everyone either.

I think for us, you know, for everything in the podcast, we've wanted to make it like accessible and listenable for everyone. Yeah. And that's why we decided to bleep out certain words. And I think we're going to stick to it. I've slipped up and not caught a couple, and I get called on it almost every time. So, sorry if it happens again, but I'm not poignant. Libby MCA wants to know, how do I beat my nephews at Smash Bros?

I'm clueless. I just press all the buttons. There's a deer right out inside our window. Interesting. I don't know. I'm not that good at it. I think, like, the key is if you're not as good as someone else, You got to pick a fast character that you can get to items before the other person.

Well, and one that doesn't fall a lot, too. Like a fly character. Pick a good recovery character. Start with Kirby. Yeah. I would recommend Pitt because with Pitt, you can get all the items. Okay. The beginner's mistake is dash attacks.

If you find yourself just dashing and attacking, running and pressing A, basically, that's bad easily exploitable. There's YouTube videos out there. Some of them probably feature Mike. So, yeah. Carrot King, ever pass out before? Oh, yeah. I don't think I've ever just passed out.

Really? Yeah. You passed out in a pile of vomit once. I saw you do it. Kind of. No. You weren't like fully unconscious, but you like fell into it.

That's not passing out. It's falling. I feel like you were like fainted. Uh-uh. Okay. I threw up. And then put my face in it. Okay, that's worse.

I've definitely passed out a number of times. There's one, my first concussion I ever had, I crashed, and the next thing I remember was being in the hospital. But I was conscious. I just lost my memory for it. I don't know if I ever passed out. Mike, have you passed out? Yeah, once and just once when I was playing soccer in high school.

I don't know, just getting knocked unconscious the same thing. Yeah. Okay, then yeah. Well, have you, did you guys never do the pass-out game? Yeah, where you like cross your arms and... Yeah, everyone out there, try this. Actually, don't. Don't.

But you, like, put your head between your legs and take a bunch of deep breaths and then throw it back super quick and, like, strangle yourself essentially. And you pass out. And I'm like, yeah, I've passed out a number of times doing that. No. Okay. Some people add a little flourish to that, too, but we're not going to get into that. Yeah, no, I've been wanting to try that.

Yeah, the flourish. You know who did it. Auto erotic. Yeah. When things get a little boring, Kill Bill. You got to spice it up a little. The worst case scenario is you like it, though. And then it's like, oh, this is like my thing.

David Caridine, you're right. He died that way. Yeah. So did some other people. Endless stitching. Who would win a game of Mario Kart out of U3? I mean, Wes, you play all day. I think I used to be really good at Mario Kart, like the Switch version.

I play the mobile one sometimes And I am pretty good at it I think I'd put up a good fight We'll give it to less then Okay Seems to have the most confidence Yeah I think I'd win

I mean there's always the blue shell To even things out of it It's true And then leeryery Designs What is the stickiest animal In the animal kingdom Stickiest

Snail They're like the slimyest Yeah I would say I would say like a... Like a starfish, maybe. Or like a gecko with those pads. Starfish is just latch on.

Or octopus. I'm going to octopus. Octopus is a good pick. That's like suction. But that's suction. But it's sticking to you still. I'm going to say octopus. I like octopus.

Good answer. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. That's it. All right. Hey. Questions for all the questions, guys.

Thank you. Well, actually, I have about $200. No, let's just do. Let's be... I think we're okay with that. All right, so we're going to do a quick conservation corner about black bears in British Columbia. British Columbia has, I think, the highest population of black bears for any province or state. Nice. I like that about them.

Yeah, they have around 150,000 black bears in British Columbia. They're doing really well there. There are some conflicts, though. There's conflicts between people. There's impacts on bear habitat. Conflicts arise when they're looking for foods in different neighborhoods or in, you know, camp. sites or whatever, beehives, fruit trees, farm waste, pet food, anything like that, bird feeders. They become conditioned to those foods.

We've talked about this bare conditioning. And then they end up, or sorry, food conditioning. And then they end up often being killed because of that. They also die as a result of poaching. They get hit by trains quite a bit in BC. Oh, really? And then on highways, yeah. So there are obviously like a decent amount of habitat loss, but as we've discussed,

Black bears are really good at living on the fringes of human society. And then in BC, kind of a really specific thing that's happening to them, too, is there's been a lot of collapses of salmon streams and salmon stocks there. And they do feed on salmon pretty extensively in British Columbia. And so that is also affecting their numbers. So even though they're doing really well in British Columbia, there are some kind of looming threats that are facing black bears. Yeah. All right. Finally, how much do we like this animal?

Black bears? Yeah, they're 10 out of 10. This is a gilded platinum 10 out of 10 for me. Yeah, they're my number four. Okay. What do you think bears compare getting hit by a train to? Yeah, I don't know. Shark.

Shark. Yeah. I forget what I've given black bears in the past. Even after you just said, I would love to be a bear. Yeah. Okay. No, I think I said, I asked if I was a bear. Oh, okay.

And that would explain maybe why I hate myself. The problem, which I think is, like, actually pretty valid for Mike, too, is, like, I think you like maybe at least three different species of bears more than black bears, right? Yeah. Panda, grizzly, and polar. Yeah, for sure. But they're awesome. I can't deny whenever we're up in Glacier or Yellowstone. When I see a black bear, it's just really exciting.

You know, it's something that big, powerful animal, you don't see it every day. And they're just cute. They won the, or they got runner up in the cutest baby animal. Yeah. I was surprised it beat polar bear, but I agreed. I'll say, like, for me, they're kind of, like, always bouncing between them and grizzly bears for my favorite bear. And then every once in a little, like, sloth bear, polar bear creep in, too. But, like, they're kind of the middle child of the bear.

you know, where they're just, they have to be a little bit sneakier and a little bit more adaptable. And they just, I just kind of feel this, this kinship, kinship and connection for black bears. I just really love them. They're just little rascals. And so, yeah, I don't know. Sometimes I think they're my favorite animal even, but. I will say when I see a black bear cub clambering up a tree. Oh, they're so cute.

It's one of the highlights of, like, my nature going life. Yeah. It's so amazing how fast and how cute. And it's a really cool thing to witness. Yeah. But it wasn't for those stupid Highland Caz. They'd be the winner. All right.

Well, that's it for part one. I hope you guys tune in for part two. It is, we are going to go over what is commonly considered the worst black bear attack, American black bear attack in history. It's very tragic. It's very violent. And it's coming next week.

It's coming soon. Right? Yeah. I think we're going to do these back to back, just so we don't keep people waiting. I need a cigarette. My first full cigarette ever. All right. Well, thanks guys.

Thanks so much for listening. We love you. We do. Bye. See ya.