Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Grizzly Bear Attack - Night of the Grizzly: Part 2 - Trout Lake

Episode Date: January 16, 2022

Part 2 of Night of the Grizzly, the tragic story of two grizzly attacks occurring on the same night in Glacier National Park. Once again, Wes prepared like mad to get this episode to be as informative and entertaining as possible, so we think you all are going to really like it. ~~ 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

Hey everyone, it's Wes. I wanted to introduce our second part of our Night of the Grizzly series, our three-part series. This story is really crazy. We're going to talk about the second victim in the Night of the Grizzlies. It's a crazy story. It's a story that really shaped the way that we look at grizzly bears, especially in the national parks. It's a story that's really close to my heart because grizzly bears are my favorite animal. They're an animal I've worked with. It takes place in Glacier National Park, which is my favorite national park. and that park's found in Montana, which is my home state. So it's really a fascinating story. It's something that's really taught us a lot about grizzly bear behavior

and how we should act around grizzly bears, especially when you're camping. So I hope you guys really enjoy it. We put a ton of time into it. I hope you're enjoying the podcast. If you are, don't forget to give us a rating and a review over at Apple Podcast. Give us a rating on Spotify, if you're a Spotify listener. And if you're really liking the podcast, head on over to our Patreon, where you're going to get a lot of bonus content.

And more importantly, I think we're creating a really fun little community over there at Patreon. And you're going to be part of that community and get to interact a little bit closely, more closely with the podcast. Anyway, I think that's it. I don't want to hold this thing up any longer. So with no further ado, here is part two of Night of the Grizzly. Well, welcome, everyone. Hey! Welcome everyone to Tooth and Claw Podcast.

We're coming back to you earlier than usual. Yeah. Usually we do a week in between episodes and we do a bonus episode on Patreon. This week we're doing both. And we just are so excited to tell the whole tale of Night of the Grizzlies that we're doing a week by week. I saw someone told us we did a good job. Yeah, a few people did, which was nice. Thanks.

Yeah, we got some nice compliments about part one. A few people, huh? Yeah, yeah, we got a number of compliments. You know, and it felt nice because I worked really hard on that one. I took the credit if they reached out to me. Yeah, that's fine. You probably deserved it. Anyway, so, yeah, thanks everyone for all the feedback.

I studied just as hard for the second part. I have just as many pages and notes. So it's going to be another really long one. But before we get started, is there anything you guys needed to bring up? America's dad died Bob Saget died Rest in peace I'd say he was America's dad

For like my age He was But he also like When he would like do stand-up and stuff He was really dirty Yeah he went like hard to get rid of it It was one of those people where When you heard him do stuff outside of full house

And whatnot it was like shocking And like America's family Family Homevee That's what I know most of it. Yeah. Yeah, but apparently just like a really nice guy that everyone liked. Yeah. I thought Bill Cosby was America's dad.

No, not anymore. I think he got that title taken away. Yeah, I think he lost that one. Yeah. Who is it now? Do we need a new one? Yeah. Can I be America's dad?

I guess. Oh, I wish. I think that's what we should call the president, America's dad. Yeah. Just because he kind of sits there and doesn't do anything. Yeah. Is that like a shot at dad? I don't know.

And the president. I don't know. I don't have anything to say. My mind is fried from all this research. Mike sent me an interesting text. I forgot what it was. I'll read it real quick, though. Oh, yeah.

Just like half an hour ago, this is from Mike. Muscox is such a funny name. It's pretty funny if you, like, I was looking. So I prepared for this episode by going to the Bean Museum in Provo. Oh, cool. They got a bunch of dead animals, which gets me in the mood to come and do this podcast. Yeah. But they had a bunch of moscow.

You're like a football player, siking yourself up before the game. Like, you got to just go get some, like, predators. I knew that this episode was going to be another pretty dark one, hard to hear. So, yeah, I started, I did all kinds of sad things to get prepared, like. Like the Chargers losing. The Chargers lost. That put me in the right head space. I watched the Green Mile.

we need to talk about Kevin, that kind of stuff. Okay. Oh, we need to talk about Kevin. You don't like the Green Mile, though? I don't. That's why you watch to get into a real bad move. Yeah. Well, I'm going to...

Speaking of kings, let's talk about the king of the jungle. Okay, we're not talking about the king of the jungle. We are talking about the king of the mountains. What is the king of the jungle? Maybe we should re-brown. Well, people say the lion, but I don't really love that because lions don't really live in the jungle. They do, but not as much as they live in like the Savannah. Yeah, I would say a tiger.

They could if they wanted. Okay. Here we go. Here we go. You ready for the story? Yeah. Yeah, we're waiting. All right.

So in part one, we talked about Julie Helgeson and Roy Duccott, who were the two people that were attacked. Roy had some pretty serious injuries, but nothing critical. And Julie was killed by the bear. Julie was killed at Granite Park Chalet in Glacier National Park. It was the first ever death by a grizzly bear in Glacier National Park. So it was a really big deal. And as we talked about in part one, the reason those bears were there and the reason they weren't really acting normally was because they had been fed and they were used to getting human food. They're food conditioned bears.

So that was part one. It was really heavy. And the crazy thing about this story and the reason it's called Night of the Grizzlies is because at the very same time, just like an hour or two after Julie died, actually right around when she was dying, another bear was attacking another person eight miles away. So it's a crazy coincidence. I'd be mad if that person is attacking. Why? Because the bear's attacking you? Well, that. And just like I was so close to setting the record for first and the first one. Yeah, they kind of discount on both, though, as being like the first two deaths because they happen

in the same night. Anyway, today. we're going to talk about that story. It's also equally hard to listen to. It just is like this idyllic setting that was interrupted by a really traumatic thing. Again, all of the research I did is mostly from the book, Night of the Grizzlies by Jack Olson. It is a really interesting book. I have really enjoyed reading it. I do think there are some things in it that could be a little bit controversial, especially the way that he talks about the way that the park service responded to these attacks. But that is my main source of information,

and that's where I'm getting the information from. I did also watch the documentary. Yeah, I did also watch the... What's it about? Jeff. I did also watch the documentary Night of the Grizzlies who was made by PBS about the same story. And yeah, it's a really interesting book.

I recommend picking up and reading it. You're going to get a lot more details. But just so you know, that's where most of this information is coming from. So the actual facts of the attacks, they're pretty solid in the book. Yeah. But he gets into some like editorializing, which may or maybe not outdated or like what. Yeah, I think it's more just some criticism of the National Park and how they handle some of these reports where it's like he obviously has decided that they really blew it. And I do think they did.

But I don't know if it's as bad as what he said. And then also there is some really outdated scientific information. in the book, specifically, like, about the animals and their behavior and whatnot. Stuff that we've... I mean, this book was written in 1969, so it is outdated. So are you guys ready for part two of Night of the Grizzly? No. Hell yeah, brother.

Let's go. Jeff's not ready. I'm not ready because the last one was super sad. It was sad. I know. This one's sad, too, unfortunately. Okay, so we are going to talk... Just get it over with...

A bit about, as I mentioned in the first... first episode. In this episode, I wanted to talk a little bit about the National Park Service and how they've managed Grizzlies in the past. So, in 1916, the Park Service was created through a legislative act. And in that act, they stated that the new government agency would conserve the scenery, the natural and historic objects, and the wildlife in the national parks. And then they went on to say, and to provide for the enjoyment of the same, so the wildlife, in such manner and by such means, as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations. So essentially they said, you know, we're going to preserve the wildlife

and we're going to leave them alone so that future generations can enjoy them too. And then the administrative manual on the park service says, the animals indigenous to the park shall be protected, restored if practicable, and their welfare in a natural wild state perpetuated. Their management shall only consist of measures conforming with the basic laws and which are essential to the maintenance of population and their natural environment in a healthy condition. So really, like, wildlife management in national parks

is really minimalistic. You're not having people come in and hunt. You're not selling tags. You're really just managing them as needed. So if, like, maybe if their populations are getting too big and they're affecting some of the other animals in the park, they'll do a call or something. But we try and manage wildlife as little as possible in national parks

so that the ecosystem can exist. in a natural healthy state. This minimalist approach to wildlife conservation in Glacier Park worked really well for a long time, especially given the inaccessible nature of the park for a lot of that history. So we talked in the last episode how, for the early years of the park,

it was really hard for people to get back there. And it was kind of just like a live-and-let-live thing for the bears. And part of that is just like the terrain is like, it's hard, it's hard, it's a lot of elevation, it's a lot of thick brush. Like, it's hard to hike through. Right. So a lot of other national parks, it'd be a lot more accessible for humans than glaciers.

Yeah. But without roads and trails and glacier, there just wasn't any way for people to go back there. And the bears just kind of existed in the Schengerla where they couldn't be hunted. People were never around. And they really didn't need to manage them. But as I mentioned in the last episode, roads, trails, lodging system, all of that expanded in glacier. and as that expanded so did visitation. And by mid-century, there was hundreds of thousands of people who were visiting the park annually,

and they created a lot of waste and a lot of attractants for bears. So this led to, Jeff, what do we call it when a bear starts eating food, human food? I've already said it in this episode. Habituated. No, not habituated. Habituated is when a bear gets used to human present. Food presence. Food conditioning is when a bear starts going after anthropiative.

anthropogenic food. So anthropogenic food is food that's created by humans. You said that this episode? Yes. I said it when I was talking about the last episode. Oh, so we tune. We don't want to use that. We already heard that last time. So we were just food-conditioned bears have received this kind of food reward from people. And that high-calorie human food is like so beneficial and attractive to bears that they'll take huge risk to get it. That means that they'll often overcome their natural fear of humans in that process. of trying to get human food.

So because of that, food-conditioned bears often destroy property in the search for human food, and they sometimes even injure humans when they're doing that. So as visitation and food waste increased, so did conflicts with bears. And we mentioned last time that the first bear-caused injury in Glacier National Park was in 1939. No human injuries were recorded in the 40s, but in the 50s they recorded 25 human injuries, most of them from black bears. And in the 60s, 27 injuries were recorded with about 12 of those involving grizzlies. So the reason there were so many black bear injuries is they were a little bit more comfortable

of being around people. People were like feeding them from their hands and stuff. And people were getting... Kind of Yellowstone deal. Like Yellowstone, exactly. Even though the general view of grizzly bears in Glacier National Park was that they were relatively harmless, this data that we just talked about showed the incidents were actually on the rise.

And in the 1960s, the National Park Service released a bear management program, and there would be guidelines that would apply to bears nationwide. And that plan put an emphasis on reducing available garbage and other human food sources for bears, and then replacing trash receptacles with bear-proof ones. So really, the Park Service just is trying to figure out a way to make these kind of places where people are hanging out less attractive to bears and reduce these issues.

And Yellowstone was having bites almost. every day. They were just having like a huge problem with bears. So that was probably mostly what spurred the park service to do this. And spurred the yogi bear. Right. That's why Yogi bears started stealing picnic baskets. Yeah. Picnic. Yeah. I like what you told me once that whatever food I like the most, bears are going to like the most too. Bears like what we like, you know, like heavy fat, lots of sugar. High calorie. Yeah. For bears, it's all. about putting on calories. And our food is really calorie dense.

So they love our food. So when the Park Service released this bear management program, they also put an emphasis on visitor education, penalties for feeding bears, and then removal or translocation of food condition bears. And in Glacier Park, they stated that grizzly bears would be killed whenever they were seen near a visitor use area in the park. Oh, wow. Yeah, so pretty wild.

That being said, these changes took a long time to implement. and the relative relaxed view toward Grizzlies in the 60s led to continued feeding, as like we talked about with the Granite Park Chalet. And that's ultimately what led to the death of Julie Helgeson. On the night of August 12th, at that point, black bears were kind of seen as a biggest threat, but the night of August 12th and 13th changed all of that. I say 12th and 13th because it went from the 12th to the 13th. Dotting your eyes, crossing your teeth.

We get it. 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. All right, that's kind of a basic rundown of bear management in the national parks and kind of what was happening in the 60s with bear management.

I think it's important to talk about because there was a lot of opportunities for the National Park Service to deal with the bear that we're going to talk about today that they didn't take and I don't know why they didn't. I know they had a really busy summer that summer fighting fires and with like much more visitors than they usually had, but they made, there's some big mistakes made. So, well, what were they? Uh, we're going to get to them. Jeff, can you explain to me making us wait? A little bit about Lake McDonald. Uh, yeah, it's named after the restaurant. It's not. And then super pretty. It's like right when you're getting into the, park from West Glacier.

The rocks are like really photogenic in the lake where you can take pictures of it where it kind of looks like the rocks just turn into water, which is really pretty. And then just very open and you see like the huge peaks of glacier in the background. Yeah. Mike, you don't love being outside. It's our mom's favorite lake in the world. Yeah. Do you like Lake McDonald, Mike?

So the rocks, I'll tell you one thing, those rocks look pretty. They are pretty. They look stunning. Don't taste. They don't taste very good. Yeah, that's true. We did have a rock eating contest once there. Or how many we could put in our mouth.

Let's not explain it. Let's just leave it at a rock eating contest. Okay. So, as Jeff mentioned, when you enter Glacier National Park from the west side, Lake McDonald's one of the first landmarks that you're going to see. It's a large 10-mile-long lake, and it's an almost. almost unbelievable shade of blue. And that's because there's this glacier flower that is like really finely ground up sediment

that only glaciers can create. And it gets in the streams. And as it goes down through the streams, the sediment is so fine and so like different from any other kind of sediment that the light catches it a specific way. And it creates this blue color that you can only get in glacial runoff. So Lake McDonald has that. McDonald Creek has that. That's why there's just this really beautiful blue water and glacier.

There's like a, there's a poem you could write a girl involving that somehow. There's something there. Yeah, you should get worked on it. Yeah. Start working on it right now. Okay. So at the far north end of the lake, there's this really beautiful grove of red cedar. And sitting in that grove of cedars is this place called Kelly's Camp.

So Kelly's camp was originally a late 1800s homestead by Frank and Emmeline Kelly, which honestly If you're going to pick a spot for a homestead, I can't think of a better spot than the north end of Lake McDonald. Like, they really lucked out in where they picked their homestead spot. And they ended up turning it into a cabin resort in the early 1900s when Glacier National Park was made, was created. That resort was ran as a private holding within the National Park. And so there's these parks or these cabins in Glacier that were private. The park service didn't own them. And then later they were sold into private ownership in the 1960.

It is worth noting that most of the buildings in Kelly's camp were destroyed in a fire in 2018, and it's unclear if they're going to be restored. Do you have any idea how much those homesteads went for? Like how much they were selling for? In the 60s? I don't. Probably a steal, and now they're just worth. Man, that'd be so cool. So the thing is... There's like 20 cabins on Lake McDonald, and they have, like, really weird rules where they can't sell it to anyone but the National Park or something. They can't sell them, and if the family line dies out or whatever, then the park service gets them.

So it's kind of this weird deal they made with the park. Anyway, this camp called Kelly's camp is really serene and it's beautiful, and it represents this little micro community that's contained completely within the English National Park. They had like a school teacher and all these like, it's really neat. Anyway, in the early summer of 1967, Joan Barry arrived to Kelly's camp where she'd be staying in the big house. The big house was a large multi-room cabin and was typically reserved for descendants of the Kelly family, which Joan was. And she was coming from Washington State and was joined by her three children, and her husband was going to be commuting back and forth during the summer.

And Joan was the first person to see the grizzly bear that would haunt Kelly's camp that entire summer. In mid-June, she looked out the window to see a thin, extremely mangy female grizzly bear in one of the trash barrels near the cabin. And she explains it as being thin but also having a little. a really big frame. So it's kind of like a big, thin bear. Weird. And she had seen... Like Kevin Durant? Yeah, kind of like Kevin Durant, I guess, if you were a bear.

She had seen a lot of grizzly bears in her day, but she'd never seen one that looked so thin. And she'd also noticed that the bear had extremely large white claws. And do you guys remember in the last episode I mentioned what that's a sign of, if they have really long white claws? Anyone remember? That they're eating human food because they're not digging. Exactly.

They're no longer using their claws for what they typically use them for, which is digging for food, for roots, for all these different things. They're just getting human foods, so their claws are growing out really long. All right, so Grizzlies weren't uncommon in this area. So she just simply went to a ranger and told him that she had seen a bear in camp, and then she went about her business as usual. But this would not be the only time that this bear would show up. In fact, it would show up a lot in Kelly's camp.

So this bear started showing up regularly, and Joan and the other berries noticed that the bear wasn't acting like a typical grizzly. So generally grizzlies would run at the first side of a human or like a loud noise, but Joan could yell at this bear and it would simply just stare in her direction, and sometimes it would even do a little bluff charge toward her. A bluff charge... It got really used to her presence. To anyone.

And a bluff charge again is just like the bear's mounting a tiny little charge, and it's essentially just trying to scare you off. A bluff charge is just an intimidation thing that bears. do. Often a real charge is preceded by a bluff charge. So she realized like something's up with this bear. There's something wrong with it. And she started telling her kids, okay, if you ever see this bear around, you have to come inside. You can't be outside when this bear's out there. So this bear started showing up like clockwork every three days. And that's really like an obvious rule. Yeah. But you know, there's black bears and stuff around and they're used to bears. But I agree. It does seem obvious. But she was,

especially if this bear is around, you're inside. So it's showing up every three days. And grizzly bears do, they do this. They'll, like, go to certain spots, and they kind of just, like, on a track, and they'll just be like, okay, on Sunday I'm going to be here, on Monday I'm going to be here, and they just keep showing up at the same place every few days. They do that in Yellowstone. They do that in lots of places, and that's what this bear was doing.

And Joe noticed that it was an especially unpredictable bear, and sometimes it would fly into a rage and just like destroy the trash bins and everything around it. And sometimes when it noticed people inside, it would actually charge the walls of the cabin and it would slam into the walls of the cabin and like slap at the glass with its large claws. Jeez. Yeah. And once I guess it slammed a wall so hard that it sent a large saw flying across the room. Whoa. This bear is like, Would that count as a grizzly bear kill if the saw killed someone? That's a good question. Like would They attribute that. It'd be like second degree.

Yeah, something like that. Sure. Homicide. All right. I think they live according to different laws. Bears. On June 29, 1967. I'm just going to cut you off, Mike.

On June 29, 1967, the camp was throwing a birthday party for one of its regular guest. W.R. Teet Hammond. His nickname is Teet. And that's what we're going to call him for the rest of the story. Good. All right.

He is a retired sheriff from a dusty town in New Mexico. Mexico, and he and his wife had been visiting the camp so regularly that he was considered the unofficial sheriff of the little camp. He was really liked by full-time residents and then just daily visitors, and he really didn't have any grizzly bear experience. And when someone asked him about the bears, he replied, far as me knowing anything about Grizzlies, other to chunk him and pop him, if you have to, that's it. Other than that, I've never been too interested in Grizzlies.

What does it mean to chunk a grizzlies? I don't know. I have no idea, but that's the exact quote. Chunk him and pop them, which I think just means shoot him and kill him. So, on the night of his birthday... I would just boop them and bump him. Pop them. Yeah. All right. So on the night of his birthday, the camp's busy with visitors, and there's children running around,

and, like, there's a large feast that had been laid out on the porch of cabin, too. And in this feast, there's, like, meat and bologna and chips and all these different things. So the bear's getting some smells. Yeah. And then they also have a bunch of liquor out there. And while this feast is being prepared, Teet is out on the lake fishing with a few of his friends. And as he's fishing, his wife comes running to the lake side

and is yelling for his attention. She cried that there's a grizzly in camp, and Tite looks out and he sees the bear on the shore of the lake. But it soon disappears, and by the time they get back to the camp, they'd completely forgotten about it. and the birthday celebration starts at cabin two. So the party's in full swing

when one of the attendants decides to walk to the end of the porch and look down, and there's a little staircase leading down into the woods, and he sees the bear standing at the end of the steps leading up onto the porch. So someone shouts to get the food inside, and while all the guests are cramming into the cabin, Tee walks to the end of the porch to get a better look at this skinny bear, and he makes a threatening move toward the bear to scare it off, and the bear just keeps coming.

So he decides Like the bear's coming up the stairs It's coming up the stairs toward this feast So he picks up a four foot long bench And like picks it up over his head And crashes it down And hits the bear on the foot And apparently the bear like

Doesn't even notice But it does snort And then it calmly walks back down the steps And retreats into the woods So just like a piece of advice really quick Don't try and do that with a grizzly picture Don't try and hit it with anything Unless it's your absolute last resort

But if one's like walking up on your cabin porch Don't be like to eat The whole bench That's a good WWE move I like when they do like benches and chairs Yeah it works there a lot That's probably what I was thinking He just needed a chair

Yeah Yeah He picked up the whole bench Apparently it worked though I guess Are we sure the Bears Just not like a little lonely Trying to hang out We're not sure

Sounds like a fun party But we're pretty sure. But you're right, it could be. And it is a single bear. So like what would what should the bear do? Like how can a bear come hang out if it doesn't want to like cause any problems? It could do like the hands up and kind of like slowly walk towards you like, hey, I'm not a problem here. That might look scary if you're a bear.

Bears can't win. It's a lose lose, really. There's nothing they can do. Yeah, I don't know, Jeff. That's a great question. We'll circle back to that one at some point. It seems like there's no way the bear could hang out at the party. Yeah, probably not.

Okay, so the party kicks back up, but only moments later, Tee hears screams from the southern side of camp where someone's yelling for a gun. So Tiet grabs his lever action rifle, and he runs toward the noises, and he encounters like this nine-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl, and they're quickly walking along a dirt road. And they tell Tee not to run, but to walk as fast as he can. And he looks down the road, and he sees the bear about 60 feet away. way and it's walking in their direction. And that is, that's decent advice.

You don't want to run from the bear because it might trigger a pursuit. Okay. But walking backwards somewhat quickly isn't a bad idea. So he fires a shot into the dirt and the grizzly stood up to look at him. And it's funny because in the book they say this is a classic position of attack for grizzly bears. And for a long time that was the misconception that when bears stood up, it was because they were about to attack.

And really what they're doing is they're just checking out what's going on. Like it's just, they're just getting a higher vantage point and they're investigating. That's what they're doing. So that's what this bear was doing. That makes sense. Yeah, but Teet thought that the bear was about to charge. So he places the beat of his rifle on the head of the bear when it drops to all fours and disappears behind the cabins. So he's not really wanting to kill a grizzly in the camp.

He calls the Rangers for help. And the bear stays in the camp for a few hours looking for food. And although Teet continues to call for help, he calls like four or five times, no rangers. Rangers show up until hours later because they were in the middle of a training and they couldn't get the calls. So they were told, like, they show up, but they tell everyone in Kelly's camp, don't worry, they had seen the bear and it was heading up the ridge toward Trout Lake. Now, a few days later, an executive Ranger was visiting the camp, and Joan pulls him aside to let him know that the bear with the mangy hair and the big emaciated frame had been terrorizing them.

And they almost never made complaints about bears, so she was pretty distraught when the Ranger just like completely disregards their comments and tells her to call if the bear goes absolutely berserk. So they're on high alert. They are all carrying like rifles and shotguns around. Rangers try and trap the bear, but it shows no interest in the traps. And they show up with guns a few times to shoot the bear, but it had this almost like supernatural ability of knowing when they were going to show up and it would disappear

as soon as it heard their engine. And bears are really good at identifying certain cars and certain people. They know people that are like there to haze them or to, you know, get them out of there. It's like, did any bears get afraid of you? Like they knew who you were and they were afraid of you? Yes. That's cool. Yeah.

Did you feel like you were just on top of the world when these bears were afraid of you? No. But I felt like I was doing my job. So one morning, Jim Hindle, who was an elderly resident in the camp, heard a screeching noise coming from the direction of his cabin door. And he instantly knew what was happening. He grabs his shotgun and he run towards the door. And the bear had actually started to shred his screen door. It was trying to get into his cabin.

And he sees the bear standing about 10 feet away. And he pokes the gun through the hole in the screen. And the bear ducks behind a large butane gas tank. So Hindle, this guy, Jim, Hindle, chases the bear through the camp. But he never had a shot and the bear disappears back into the woods. That's a good hiding spot. You hide behind, because you're not going to try to pause. I had a pop and chunk and pop a bear behind a tank, you know.

He'll blow up the whole park. Or that's just an easy kill. That's true. Yeah, that's true. That was a gamble by that bear, yeah. Anyways, Hindle goes to the Lake McDonald Ranger Station to make a complaint, and he calls headquarters, and they send a part-time employee out to make a report. And the employee asks Hindle if it was a grizzly, and Hindle says,

Son, I've seen more bears than you have flies because he told him it was a grizzly. And then he tells the man that the bear had lost all fear of humans and it needed to be dealt with before something terrible happens. And the employee makes a report, but he said that the situation wasn't very serious and no action was taken. So this is quite the saga of what this bear does before the attacks. So you guys are just going to have to bear with me. Oh, Wes. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items.

review your list and carefully choose each one. Then we pack it all up and deliver it in as little as 30 minutes. So you can feel confident it's what you ordered. Fresh groceries, your way with Ralph's delivery and pickup. Get free delivery during online deal days, plus $30 off your first online order. Ralph's, fresh for everyone. So a few days later, Tate Hammond was being visited by a Montana rancher friend, and they got a call from one of Jones' daughters

saying that the bear was near their house and scaring them. So they both grabbed their guns and they laid down in a cot in Jones' house and they had this room where they had a full view of the bear. It was like only 10 feet away and it was eating trash and they were just looking through a window at the bear. So their plan was just to shoot through the window and kill the bear. But as they have their guns lined up on this bear,

both of them hesitate. Some of the people in the camp thought the bear was really cute. some of them were treating it like it was a camp mascot and then Tiet was also afraid about whether or not he could legally shoot the bear that day because it hadn't done any damage that day. The rancher that he was with was like, I would 100% shoot this bear if it was on my land.

And then they kind of came up with this plan where they're both going to pull the trigger at the same time and they would have no idea whose bullet actually killed the bears so they could tell the rangers like we're not sure who killed it. Like stoning someone in the old days. Yeah, was that the plan? Just everyone throws rocks. That's why they stoned people so that you didn't know who killed them.

Interesting. Okay. Anyway, they're about to pull their triggers when the bear takes off and disappears into the woods again. So this bear had been making regular visits to Kelly's camp all summer. At first, it was every three days, then it was every four days, and then it was every five. And by August, it's no longer showing up. And a ranger arrived to the camp, and he told them that their bear adventure was over, and that the bear was now at Trout Lake, and it was happening.

tearing apart campsites. So Kelly's camp, we're done with Kelly's camp, but it does set up the kind of behavior that they had instilled in this bear. Right. It's accustomed to people. It is. And it's used to eating people's food, which is really dangerous behavior. All right. So Trout Lake is a beautiful lake that lies about three and a half miles from Kelly's camp. And the distance isn't that bad, but you do climb about 2,000 feet in that first two miles. So it's a pretty hard hike. Have you been there? No. I don't think I have either. Yeah, it's not. It's not. quite as beautiful as a lot of the lakes and glacier, but it does have really good fishing. Hence the name? Yeah, hence trout lake. It's really hard because you do gain 2,000 feet in that

first two miles, so not too many people go to this lake, but it is popular for fishermen. It has a lot of cutthroat trout, and it sits in this beautiful glacial bowl, like all the lakes and glacier. Near the outlet of the lake, there's a bunch of fallen large trees that accumulated in the shallows, and over the time they've lost all their branches and stuff, and they form a really big log jam that's so dense you can walk across it from one end of the lake to the other near the outlet or one side of the lake to the other. The park service cleared an area by the log jam and they put in a fire grill for campers and so that's a really popular campsite for visitors to the lake. The lake is also a bit of a hot spot because there's a lot of different berries that grow

in Glacier National Park and near that lake. And then I include Stimbleberries, strawberries, service berries and huckleberries. So having like good fishing and all these berry picking opportunities make it a really appealing spot for hikers, but also makes it a really appealing spot for bears. And bears are often spotted around trout lake. There is like a little anecdote in the book, and it said once a group of hikers reported being treed by five different grizzly bears at the same time. You guys know what the word treed means, right? Like they had to climb the tree. Right. Sometimes people don't know that word, so I wanted to make sure.

It's not really normally used for humans. It's more for like someone hunting a mountain line or a black bear. They tree the animal. Yeah, exactly. So in the years preceding 1967, the logbook at the like the end of the trail right before Trout Lake was just full of accounts of bear encounters. Some of them were very close range. But the reports of these encounters were often noted, but they never took any real actions.

And it's actually interesting because I learned in this. that they have these log books where everyone was saying like, hey, there's a bear here and it's harassing people like every single day. But they don't actually collect these log books until the end of the season. So no one was really reading them. And they were just like getting all these reports that no one was really seeing. So we're going to go through a few different things that happened at Trout Lake before we actually talk about our attack.

So on June 25th, 1967, a pair of 22-year-old honeymooners showed up at the campsite near the logjam. This was Peter Cummings. He was a medical student at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, which is actually the same university where Dr. Lindan, from our first episode, taught. And then he was camping with his wife Ellen, who was a law student at the same university. And they were starting a multi-day hike into the interior of the park. Now, Peter and Ellen had been warned about the possibility of a bear attack, but they were told the only dangerous situation was stumbling upon a protective mother with Cubs, and that the chances of being attacked were so ludicrously small that it was almost impossible.

But they still bought some bear bells in the hope that they could avoid surprising any bears or other dangerous wildlife. Do you guys know how I feel about bear bells? Dinner bells. Yeah, dinner bells. Yeah, I love them. I don't love them. I feel like you say they don't work, but then you also say it is good not to surprise a bear. It is.

You don't want to surprise a bear. that little tinkling bell sound has no biological significance to bears. They don't recognize it as a threat. They don't recognize it as anything. They just generally don't even pay attention to it. If anything, they're just kind of curious about what the sound might be. And we're actually going to show that in this story. They don't work.

So nowadays, you should just have a speaker with some Justin Bieber pumping. Because that one bear got scared by it. A speaker would probably work, but it's really annoying for. other people on the trail. So are bear bells. Yeah, I don't like, really the best thing you can hike with speakers. No, the best thing you can do is hike in groups and just like talk and make noise while you're hiking. That's the best thing. Anyway, they were hiking with bear bells. They got to Trout Lake, Peter and Ellen without seeing a single sign of a bear and they set up their tent in the site near the log jam and the fire grate. They cook a meal of canned ravioli and they're just

settling into their tent around dust to eat their meal when they hear crashing from the direction of the fire grate. Someone else thinks it sounds good. Yeah, they're like, oh, we're going to eat. Exactly. Peter asks Ellen if she could look outside because she's sitting close to the tent door. So this dude's like, hey, honey, can you go check out what that really loud noise is out there? And she's like, no way, I am not leaving this tent.

And so he actually looks out and pokes his head out of the tent. And there's a skinny grizzly bear with a large frame. And it's busy ripping through their cans of food that they left in a pack near the fire. The bear didn't seem to notice Peter and Ellen, so he whispers to Ellen to be as quiet as she can, and he grabs her by the hand, and they slip out of the tent, and they go up the trail. And they actually pass about eight feet from the bear, but it's so focused on the food that it doesn't even flinch. Once they're a little higher up on the trail, they group up with some fishermen, and all of them start yelling at the bear, and rather than run away, the bear starts walking over to their tent,

and it uses one claw, like a knife, and just slices through the tent with its claw, and then goes inside and just destroys everything that they had. Like truly just completely ravages all of their gear, their tent. And after about 20 minutes of trashing absolutely everything, it walks over to the lake to take a drink. So while the bears distracted at the lake, Peter again tells Ellen to be as quiet as possible. They sneak back into camp to try and salvage anything.

Their sleeping bag, one of their sleeping bags was like the only thing that wasn't torn up. So they grab that and they grab this torn up back. backpack and they start moving away, but as they pick up that backpack, what makes a little tinkling noise? But those bear bells, and the bear notices it, it hears them, and it heads over to investigate the sound. And they see the bear coming and they grab their stuff and they run up the trail towards a shelter cabin a few miles away at Arrow Lake.

The next day, they hiked back down to the trailhead, and they heard from another hiker that the bear had been bothering people recently, and they go and file a report at Ranger headquarters. And at that point during that process, the ranger asked him a question. And I'm actually going to read that straight from the book because it's pretty interesting. The ranger says, what was the bear's name? And the couple answered, huh? And he said, what was the bear's name? When Peter and Ellen persisted in looking blankly at him, he explained that sometimes bears get nicknames after they have disturbed a sufficient number of people. No, Peter Cummings, said finally, we didn't get his name.

So pretty annoying if you were like reporting the fact that you had been like harassed by a bear and the ranger's like, what's his name? Yeah. I'd be like, why are you talking to me? Especially like where he was persistent with it. It's like, come on, dude. It's a bear. Quit asking us what its name was.

Right. Like, yeah, we get your joke, but you don't need to keep asking. Yeah. So a few other things that happened. a biology teacher and his kids were followed by the bear for several hours. Like, think about that mountain lion video that came out a couple years ago where the kid was being followed by the mountain lion. That video was like six minutes long and it was terrifying. Imagine if it was a couple hours and it's a grizzly bear.

It's terrifying. That's really scary. But it's probably not like acting like the mountain lion was. It's probably just kind of like charging and everything. But they did say it would bluff charge every once in a while. And it did just follow them. It would be scary. It would.

Two hikers from California were treed by the bear as it went through their packs. A fisherman lost his whole string of fish to the bear, and it chased him around the lake. That seems more important than the fish being lost. Yeah, I know. I kind of buried the lead on that one. Anyway, all three groups told their stories to the Rangers. All three were told that the bear had been harassing people all summer and that the Rangers had just been too busy to go up there and shoot it.

One of the fishermen asked, well, what are you going to do when it catches someone? somebody and almost jokingly the ranger he was talking to replied well i don't know he hasn't caught anyone yet now it wouldn't be long before that wouldn't be the case in july the sweltering heat of that summer's in full force and one day two 14-year-old schoolboy friends from columbia falls decide to hike to trout lake to do some fishing on the first day at the lake the boys are fishing and they watch as like a fire breaks out on a nearby ridge they watch as smoke jumpers jump into the fire They're just having like this amazing day with these really cool sights. And then because of the fire, they also see a number of bears come down to the lake

and drink water from the lake and be at the lake's edge. So they saw like five or six bears that day. That night they set up camp near the log jam and they fell asleep to the endless night sky and the sound of water lapping up on the shore. The next day, as the boys were trying to figure out a path across the log jam, they heard a noise in their camp and they turned around to see a large, skinny grizzly bear eating a loaf of bread, sitting down, just eating this loaf of bread. The boys snuck closer to the camp, like they sneak up on this bear,

and then they pop up and they started yelling and throwing rocks at the bear. They hit it a few times, and they caused it to growl and take some steps toward them. Finally, one of the boys really connects with this bear right on its nose with the big rock, and it runs off and then circles back to their camp and destroys their backpack in their tent in like a fit of rage. So they piss it off, and it comes back and just, rips everything apart. So they scramble back to the log jam, and they watch as the bear then walks down to the lake shore

and starts eating all the fish that they had caught. So they're now, like, not feeling very confident anymore, and they decide to get in the water near the logs, and their plan is that they're just going to, like, float in the water with just their noses up because they just feel like if they can just sit in the water with, like, their noses sticking out of the water long enough, the bear will just, like, get bored and leave.

So that's their plan. It won't notice they're there anymore. Probably is their mindset. Yeah. It's pretty hard, though. It kind of makes sense. Yeah. It would get pretty cold, though, too.

So they're just about to do that when the bear decides to turn back to their camp and continue just ripping up all their shit. So this buys them a little bit of time. They put their boots on and they sprint across the shallow water and then down through the dense brush of Camus Creek. And they meet up with the trail that goes up and over the ridge and down into Lake McDonald. and they run that four-mile trail in less than an hour. So they gain like 2,000 feet of elevation even,

and they run in less than an hour. That's really impressive. Yeah. They get to the ranger station around 10 at night, and they find a ranger and give them their report. And the ranger tells the boys that the bear's been bothering people all summer and that he's going to have to do something about it. And the next day the boys go back to the lake,

and they recover their gear that's salvageable, which was hardly anything. And they actually, hungry horse news, which Hungry Horses in nearby little town, they did a small headline about that bear encounter, but no actions are taken by the park. That ranger that said he had to go up there and kill the bear doesn't do it. Bears kind of a jerk.

Yeah, and it is. Yeah, it's a troublemaker for sure. An interesting thing, I saw some photos from the 60s at Trout Lake, and there's just trash everywhere. People would go up and just leave food waste and whatnot all over, so it was really an attractive area for bears. On August 8th, Jerry and Sharon Chase are guiding a troop of Girl Scouts, Troop 367 from Calispell, Montana. Not the Girl Scouts way.

Yeah. In Detroit Lake for a three-day camping trip. They're joined by a pony. I'm scared. They have a pony named Sage. They used to pack some of the girls' bags. And it's just so it's this husband and wife, six girls, and a pony. And they get to the trail register by the lake, and they get a little nervous because they see like almost half of the entries in this register talk about this bear. This young couple though, they've spent a lot

of time in the wilderness, especially Jerry. He's been around a lot of grizzly bears. He's really comfortable around bears. And he knew that it was really unlikely that a grizzly bear would come near a camp with six noisy girls in it. So they get to this campsite near the log jam and they see just like shredded clothes. They see like a tent that's all shredded up. They see like cans everywhere. And they decide, okay, this actually is a problem, and they're on high alert, and they set up their camp, and they get ready to take the girls fishing. And that night, the girls are cooking popcorn and fish on the fire, and they spill a bit of both in the fire. Jerry had decided to camp alone near the logjam because he's like a man, and he couldn't camp near all these young girls,

I guess, and he was having a hard time sleeping, and he was thinking about this bear, and he's thinking about his other encounters with Grizzlies, and as he lay awake, he heard splashing in the lake, and he sits upright but he couldn't really see anything through the fog and his pony starts making some noises and after that he had a really tough time sleeping through the night. Now in the morning one of the girls asked Sharon if she had gone to pee in the woods in the middle of the night and Sharon told her that she hadn't and the girl replied

well someone did and they stepped on my foot and Sharon goes one by one and she talks to all the girls and asks all the girls if they'd gone to the bathroom and all of them replied that they hadn't aside from one girl who was on the far end of the line from the other girl and hadn't gone that direction. So there's no way she stepped on her foot. So a bear was stepping on people's feet? A bear stepped on this girl's foot.

You've got to be kidding. The way that they really think this was probably the case is all that food that they had left in the fire had been eaten. Like every colonel of popcorn and the fish was gone. So they packed up and immediately went home, right? They did not. Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard, but not the. the pipeline. That's bullspend, and marketers are calling it out in. Dashboard, confessions. My boss asks for results, so I open my dashboard for the only positive-sounding metric I had.

Impressions. Cut the bullspend. See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign, turns sick conditions apply. The girls were pretty, like, they were terrified and Sharon and Jerry are doing their best to calm them down. But they just to try, they like try to enjoy themselves that day. They're trying to fish and have fun. But by three o'clock, the girls are like so terrified that they decide, okay, we're just going to eat dinner and we're going to get out of here. And so like morale's starting to get better. And Jerry sends one of the girls up to like untie their bear bag from a tree. And she's climbing down. And as she lands down on

the ground, she raises like a shaking finger and she points into the woods and she screams, there it is, there's the bear. Oh, no. And at this point, Jerry's, like, tired of the girls making bear jokes and he thinks she's just joking. They've been, like, saying bear jokes all day long? Yeah. Like, I'm a bear.

Yeah, exactly. There's a bear? Kind of like, wherever me and Jeff go, we always say there's a bear. Anyway, he's, like, getting tired and then some movement catches his eye. And he turns, and the bear's creeping up on his pony. And the pony is tethered to a 28-foot rope. And this pony manages to run away from the bear, and the bear chases at it kind of half-heartedly,

and then the pony runs to the other end of the rope. And they're kind of doing this back and forth, like, yo-yo, and everyone's, like, standing there. The girls and the chases are standing there watching it. Uh-oh. So Jerry tells the girl and Sharon to run up the hill, and they do, and they stop about 50 feet from the bear. And the bear's now moved on to their packs,

and it's ripping each of them open, eating any food it found, including a small jar of jelly that's like in glass. And that's kind of an important. That tracks for bears. Yeah, it's kind of an important detail to remember that, though, that it ate this small jar of jelly that was like in glass. Okay. So this whole group starts throwing rocks at the bear, and Sharon finally connects and hits it right in the nose. It gets his attention and actually starts heading up the hill toward the people.

So Jerry is still throwing rocks at it, and he holds its attention while the girls circle around. and they go back to camp to try and salvage what they can. And it follows Jerry up onto the trail. And it would, like, charge at him, and he would throw rocks at it, and it would stop. And then he would charge it it, and it would run away. And then he would pick up more rocks, and it would charge at him. And they're doing this back and forth for a while. And then finally, it mounts a full charge.

Like the bear does a full charge, not just a bluff charge. And he just completely holds his ground and starts yelling at the bear. and it stops just short of him and peels off into the woods. Oh, wow. So he's pretty, like, this Jerry guy knows his way around bears. Of all the people and all these stories, like he seems like he really knows what he's doing.

So he runs back to his wife and the girls, and they're starting to saddle the horse. And as he's saddling the horse, Sharon starts screaming that the bear's coming back. And she tells her husband that she's going to hold off the bear while he unties the horse. But she didn't actually need to stop it. It stops its charge about 50 feet from them

and then just lies down in the tree. trail, puts its head on its hands, and just watches them lying down. Les is doing like a kindergarten picture day pose. Yeah, there's a chin on your hands. Anyway. The bear seems kind of cute, like eating the loaf of bread sitting down and then like doing these like cute little poses watching people. Yeah, so far he's just a little rascal.

Yeah. Anyway, as they run away, one of the girls does manage to snap a photo of the bear. And she has this photo of it as it got up and walked across the log jam. and they get back to Lake McDonald later that evening, and Jerry actually decides not to make a report because he sees this trail register is full of reports, and he figures, like, if they were going to do anything about this bear, they would have done it already, which is kind of true.

And a few days later, the Daily Newspaper in Callis Bell publishes the photo that this girl took to the bear. With, like, the story of it going to camp? Kind of. Not like the whole story, but like a really short one. Okay. So we're at August 12th. We're at the day.

Night of the Grizzlies. Night of the Grizzly. So on August 12th, five young friends start the hike from Lake McDonald, up over Howe Ridge, and into Trout Lake. There's not nearly as many people in this story as there were in the last one, but I am going to go through their names and a brief explanation of who they are, so hopefully you can track who they are. In the group, there's two couples and one single boy.

The single boy was 16-year-old Paul Dunn from Medina, Minnesota. Paul had accepted a job at Lake McDonald as a bus boy about a month earlier. He was actually just like on a trip with his parents to the park and he took a job and they like left the park and left him there. So he was just like, you know what, I'm just going to work here the rest of the summer. He quickly made a lot of friends with a lot of other employees. And earlier that day, this is like maybe the craziest detail of this entire thing. Earlier that day, Julie Helgeson and Roy DeCott had invited Paul Dunn to hike with them to the Granite Park Chalet. And he turned them down to hike with this other group up to Trout Lake.

So this dude was just like, the universe had decided that that night he was going to have a bad run in with the grizzly bear. Loadstone for bear attack. Yeah. Yeah. So it's just like, he talks about it in the documentary. He's just like, there was just something that was making it. So I was going to have a really bad night either way. Yeah.

So also in this group are Ray and Ron Nosek and their brothers from Oracle, Arizona. Ron is 21. He worked as a waiter in the East Glacier Lodge, and Ray is 23, and he worked at a service station near Lake McDonald Lodge. Both boys are attending dental school at the University of Louisville, and they were working in the park for the summer to get a break from like the stressful workload of dental school. Both brothers had brought a date on the overnight camping trip. Ron's date was 21-year-old Denise Huckle from Arizona. She's a red-haired room clerk that worked at Lake McDonald Lodge in the summers and was a college student the rest of the evening. year. I'm not totally sure where she went to school. There wasn't much information about her, but what I do know about her is that she had adopted an abandoned puppy that she found in the park. She named the puppy Squirt, and the group had decided to bring squirt along with them on the

hike. They knew that dogs were not allowed in the park. They were not allowed on the trails, but they still decided to bring squirt. The hike was really steep, and squirt actually struggled to keep up with them the whole time and had to be carried a few times while they were hiking. Ray's date was Michelle Coons. Michelle was beautiful. She was 19-year-old girl from San Diego, California. She's about to begin her second year at California Western University, and she had been spending her summer working at the gift shop in Lake McDonald Lodge.

Her bubbly personality and her positive outlook on life quickly made her the favorite employee of all of her bosses, and all of her coworkers really, really loved her. So most of the group knew that Grizzlies were somewhat common in the Trout Lake area, but they also didn't really care because they had hiked hundreds of miles in the park over the summers that they'd worked there, and they really didn't ever have any problems with Grizzlies. Only the 16-year-old Paul Dunn was inexperienced in Glacier, and he had just taken a short safety meeting regarding Grizzlies, and really his only take-home from that meeting was that you should climb a tree if you see a grizzly.

And he probably trusts their kids because they're older than him. Yeah, he's 16, Michelle is 19, and the other ones that are in their early, 20s. So yeah, he probably just kind of sees them as like big brother, big sister figures. So as the five friends in Squirt make their way down from How Ridge to Trout Lake, a hint of smoke is in the air. So dry lightning the night before it set a number of fires and the blazing hot weather that day wasn't helping with the fire situation. So they're really looking forward to this trip to a cool mountain lake. They're going to do some fishing. They're going to do some swimming. They're really excited. It's a little later than five

in the afternoon when they get to the lake. And the fish were starting to run. rise all over the lake. So they set up a camp near the log jammed outlet of the lake, and they wanted to start fishing as soon as possible. So they set their camp up really quickly, opting just to sleep outside under the stars rather than set up tents. Sounds perfect. Yeah. I love when like fish are just rising like crazy. I know. Still lake. In the evening. Yeah, I do too. So they put all their food into one backpack and they hang it from a tree, which is good. That's like what you're supposed to do if you're smart. Out in bear country.

And they knew that a bear had been getting into food and camping gear at the lake, but they didn't want their stuff to get ruined or their food to get eaten. So the boys and Denise were really anxious to go explore and to get fishing. And as they get ready to, like, go down there, they meet two other fishermen that gave them a really dire warning. And they said that they had been treed for two hours the day before by an aggressive grizzly bear and that that experience had really left them really shaken. And they told these young employees, like not to walk through the berry bushes,

and to be really careful. And these kids in this group didn't really let it bother them. They'd been told time and time again that a grizzly bear wouldn't bother them if they didn't bother it, and they weren't planning on bothering any bears. So, as the other four fished and explored, Michelle sat back at camp with the puppy squirt. And she was alone for a couple hours just straightening up camp and playing with squirt and like throwing rocks into the lake. And during that time, she really started thinking about bears.

and she wasn't afraid of them, but out there they do tend to pop up in your mind when you don't really have much else to think about. And she was pretty excited when everyone showed back up and started helping around camp. So Paul had brought back one fish, and they fried it up along with some hot dogs. And as they cooked the food,

Michelle was watching the smoke, and she kind of followed it from the fire down to the lake shore. And as she followed it, she saw something down near the tree line. And she saw something lumber out from the trees, Something else was following this moment. Yeah, exactly. And she jumped up to her feet, and she yelled,

Here comes a bear. So Ron quickly unties the leash from squirt, and he picks the dog up. And the whole group runs up the hill from the campsite, and they stop about 50 yards away, and they watch this large mangy grizzly stroll into their campsite and get to work eating their entire dinner. So it eats each of their meals, and then it starts in on their packs.

And finally, after about 15 or 20 minutes, the bear gets up, it walks back across the log jam and it disappears into the woods. So I did, you know, I probably should have said this earlier, but I did really want to talk about grizzly bears again and just how powerful of an animal they are. They, there's a very big, a lot of people that are listening to this podcast have probably seen a black bear in the wild and then a handful of probably seeing grizzly bears. There's a big difference between the two species. Black bears are relatively docile.

They're afraid. They're shy. They'll take risks to get food again, but as soon as you start making loud noises or throwing something out or whatever, they're probably going to leave. And that's often the case for grizzly bears too. But grizzly bears often switch to this fight response rather than a flight response. And they're much more territorial than black bears. They're much more aggressive than black bears. They'll defend their cubs.

A black bear generally won't. So there's just a lot more situations you can get into with a grizzly bear that are much more dangerous. than with the black bear. They're bigger, they're more powerful, claws are longer, teeth are longer. They are a very powerful animal. And I think it's worth noting any of the bear species could kill people. But grizzlies are one of the biggest, their second biggest bear. Even a small grizzly has the ability to kill you and to do it very easily.

You wouldn't have much of a fight against a bear. This grizzly you keep saying is skinny, but it's still probably bigger than most all black bears. Oh yeah, for sure. And it's still a bear. It still knows how to catch prey and how to kill prey. I mean, they are a predator. As far as animals in Glacier National Park, like, how does the grizzly bear compare size-wise and, like, it's smaller than like, danger-wise.

It's the most dangerous animal in the park. Moose would give it a run for its money. But it's smaller than a moose. Yeah, or butterfly, apparently, according to that guy in the first episode. But they are, I mean, they're the animal that when you're hiking around in glacier, you have to be most concerned about. They're the animal that you have to prepare for. They're the animal that you want to bring bear spray along with you for.

Like, they are the animal that gives those kind of places the feel that you get there. What about, like, a pack of wolves? No, you don't have to worry about a pack of wolves. Listen to our wolf episode, but we talk about that a lot. I'll do that. Yeah, go do that, Jeff. Anyway, I just want to stress that, like, through these episodes,

as I'm talking about the way that they viewed bears back then, I don't want it to get into people's heads that that's how they actually are. Grizzly bears are a very formidable, very potentially aggressive animal. You have to treat with a lot of respect. You have to be very careful around them. Okay. So, this bear had just ripped up their camp. It disappeared in the woods.

In this small group of hikers, they have a decision to make. They're either going to walk through the night and head back over Howe Ridge and back into Lake McDonald and just look. leave, or they're going to move their camp to where they're now standing, which is about 50 yards away on the side of the lake. Their flashlight's starting to die. It's starting to get dark. They don't really want to walk down the trail that the bear had just left in that direction. So they decide that they're going to remake their camp on the lake shore. Why does that help anything?

They just wanted, they just figured if the bear came back, it was going to go back to where their old camp was, and it's going to pick around in like the scraps of everything that it destroyed. and they just wanted to be away from that spot. They didn't go very far, though. No. So what happened was Ray, Ron, and Paul went to the abandoned campsite, and they gathered up all their sleeping bags, and they managed to salvage a pack of cheeses and a package of cookies,

and they brought everything to the new campsite on the lakeshore. And they all agreed that the bears seemed to be gone for the night, but what they decided to do was to keep the fire going all night, and then they also built like a little wall of logs that separated them from their old campsite. Are bears afraid like a campfire? Not really. I mean, like a big blazing bonfire, maybe.

But I think it's more just, I don't know. I don't think it would necessarily keep a bear away. So all five campers are a bit nervous, and they arrange their sleeping bags in a semicircle around the fire. And after sharing these snacks that they salvaged, they decided to go to sleep for the night. So Denise loops squirts, leash over a nearby log, and then she grabs the dog and pulls him into cuddle.

And having the dog so close to her was like a really much needed comfort for her, and it allowed her to drift to sleep. And nearby every so often one of the boys would wake up and he'd throw a log on the fire, but it wasn't long before their campsite was completely still. So Paul Dunn fell asleep with his sleeping bag open because it was a really warm night. And around midnight he was starting to get cold and he woke up to try and zip up his sleeping bag, but he couldn't get his zipper to work. and after trying to like zip it up for a couple minutes,

he just gave up and like kind of wrapped his bag around him, but it remained unzipped. And little did he know that that little small inconvenience of sleeping an unzipped sleeping bag would actually save his life. Wow. Or possibly save his life. Around two in the morning, Denise wakes up to splashing in the water. The bear had returned and it was investigating the old campsite

and then it walked fearlessly toward their new campsite where it ate the rest of the bag of cookies that they'd left out on a log. squirt, the little dog starts... Seems like they should have known better than to leave out food. They made some big mistakes. Squirt starts growling and Denise pulls him deeper into her sleeping bag and she waits to see what the bear would do.

And luckily, after it ate the cookies, the bear simply turned around and disappears back into the woods. And when the bear disappears, Denise wakes up the other campers. They added some logs to the fire and they decided to stay up until it got light and each of them inch closer to the fire. It's like 3 a.m. this point. They're like, we might as well to stay up. It's going to be light in a few hours.

So they heard a couple more splashes from the lakeshore, and they hear some woofing noises in the forest. But at 4 a.m., they hadn't heard any noises for a while, and all of them managed to drift back to sleep. Denise pushed squirt deeper into her sleeping bag, and she hoped that the bear did show back up, the dog would growl or bark and let her know that it was approaching. So at 4.30, Denise once again wakes up to the sound of water splashing,

and she peers out of the small opening in her sleeping bag. In the darkness she could see a large shape approaching the camp, but this time instead of slowly ambling up, the bear's running toward the campsite. When the bear was about five feet away, she could clearly see its head, and squirt starts to squeal in fear, and Denise covers both of them with the sleeping bag.

She's lying completely still in this warm sleeping bag, and she starts hearing a ripping noise like shredding canvas, and that noise only punctuated by the sniffing and woofing noises of the bear. and squirts trembling next to her shaking body, and she had her hand clamped over the dog's mouth in an effort to prevent him from agitating the bear. So 16-year-old Paul Dunn wakes up to one of the most frightening experiences of his life. The huge wet shape of the bear is lumbering over him,

only feet away, and he can hear these slow, deep breaths from it. And he goes on to describe, like, in the documentary, he says that those breasts were so deep and spaced out that it, like, gave a weight to the bear, like, he understood just how big and powerful it was by like how long and deep its breaths were. And it just made it seem so much more menacing to him and realize like how large and powerful it actually was. And that fear is just like coursing through him in that moment

and was all encompassing and indescribable. That would be absolutely terrifying. He says that he can still, it's like followed him through his entire life, that kind of fear. Yeah. The noise. I mean, just like imagine being in wherever your sleeping bag and you're just hearing those heavy breaths, you know, that I can't imagine. Try sleep. Try camping with our dad, dude.

Oh, I did. He breathed so heavy when he's asleep. I will carry it through the rest of my life. The crazy thing, too, is like, even though it really isn't a barrier, when you're in a tent, even if you were to hear something outside, you just feel a little bit safer. If you're just sleeping out in your sleeping bag by the fire and you hear that, it would just be, yeah, it'd be terrifying. Yeah. So through clenched teeth and like with these teary eyes, the campers whisper to each other to play dead. And the bear's sniffing at Paul's bag and suddenly he feels it crunch its jaws into his bag and it grabs his sweatshirt.

And it was unclear whether he was like wearing the sweatshirt at the time and he like slipped out or if it just grabbed his sweatshirt. but he throws back his sleeping bag and he jumps up. And when he jumps up, he slams into this bear in the process. And he yells to his friends and says, The goddamn bear tore my shirt. And then he watches the bear, stands on its high in legs to get a better look at him. And that's enough for him.

And he turns around and he sprints to a nearby tree. And he climbs 30 feet up in like seconds. And he's ripping and cutting his chest in his legs and this climb because he's just not thinking about anything but getting up this tree. And apparently the tree didn't even have any branches on the bottom, and he just, like, grabbed it and shimmied up. Wow. Like Moulon? Yeah, exactly.

No, Milan had those little things. He was more impressive than Moulon. So Paul's not watching. That's a good pull of the Moulon. Yeah. I like that. Paul's watching from above as the bear continues to circle the campsite and investigate his friends, who are all still lying terrified in their sleeping bags near the fire.

So Ron and Denise are laying side by side, and Ron watches as the bear, leaves this semicircle of campers and goes over to the tree that Paul's in to investigate the tree. And he knows this is an opening. So he yells at Denise that they need to run and go find trees to their own. But Denise is fumbling with squirt's collar

like she can't get his collar unlatched. And she tells Ron that she can't leave until she frees the dog. But Ron knows that time is short and he jumps out of his sleeping bag and pulls Denise in one motion all the way out of her sleeping bag and pushes her toward the lake and tells her to run.

And the two of them make a dash toward their old campsite. And as they're running, they hear Paul yelling at Ray and Michelle to also get out of their sleeping bags and to get out of there. And they reach the old campsite and squirt somehow gets free and bounds up to them. And Ron helps Denise into a tree and then like shoves squirt into her arms and then he climbs a tree of his own. And meanwhile, they climbed a tree with the dog? Denise climbed up and Ron grabs the dog and like gives it to her. Oh, yeah. Good for them saving the dog.

Yeah. We're a pro dog podcast. We are. We like dogs. Meanwhile, they can hear Paul, who's still in history, and he's yelling at Ray and Michelle to get out of their sleeping bags and to get out of there. So Paul has, like, seen that the bear is reacting nervously to the campers. When he pops up, the bear kind of backs off. And then when Ray and Denise pop up, he sees the bear kind of move away.

Or sorry, Ron and Denise. He sees the bear move away. and so he knows all Ray and Michelle have to do is get out of their sleeping bags, and the bear will probably be a little bit scared, and then they can make it to a tree. And he's convinced that, like, playing dead is not going to work, and he's screaming at Ray and Michelle to get up. So the bear's now approaching Ray and Michelle, and Ray ends up shooting out of his sleeping bag and heading toward the lake,

toward Ron and Denise, and he's yelling at Michelle to get out of her bag and to run for it. And meanwhile, Paul is still screaming at his tree at Michelle, and he's saying, get out, get out. unzip and run for it. Because I guess she has one of those sleeping bags that zips almost all the way up and it's totally zipped up. Oh, my mommy.

Michelle is totally paralyzed with fear. She's tucked her head into her sleeping bag. She's unable to move. She can hear the approaching bear. She can hear the screams of her friends, but she couldn't bring herself to move. Finally, when the bears just feet away, she summons up her courage

and she decides she's going to, like, get out of her sleeping bag and run for a tree. And just as she grabs the zipper of her sleeping bag, it sticks and she can't get out and the bear's honor. So up in his tree, Paul watches in horror as the bear jumps on Michelle's sleeping bag, picks the bag up in its jaws and starts shaking it back and forth with the girl still inside. And then he hears her start to scream and the screams intensify because the bear starts ripping into the sleeping bag with its claws. And she screams out, it's ripping my arm and she almost pleads as the bear continues to tear into her and the sleeping bag.

Michelle Paul shouts, get out of your bag, run and climb a tree. I can't, the injured girl screamed back. It's got the zipper. Then in almost a babble, Paul hears her scream. He's got my arm. My arm is gone. Oh my God, I'm going to die. So he then watches in horror as it pulls Michelle from the sleeping bag by her shredded arm,

picks her up in its jaws as though it was like picking up a little branch or something and carries her into the woods. Then there's a brief pause and he hears the muffled sounds of bones. cracking and crunching and then he doesn't hear anything after that oh that's horrifying it seems like in this time they feel like like we know now that like a group could kind of scare it off yeah but it seems like they from the last story too it seems like they feel like they would just all die if they tried to gang up on a bear this the science like the science of how you deal with attacking grizzly bears isn't there yet people just really don't know

what to do and for them all they could think was like get up a tree get up a tree which had been working with this bear I mean it treated a lot of people that summer and so getting up a tree was working anyway after a few seconds of silence after hearing all these bones crunch Paul shouts at the other campers and he says the bear dragged her up the hill and then after a few seconds he cried she's dead she's dead Paul's alone in his underwear and he knows that the bear's at least 50 yards away at this point and pretty occupied so he quickly climbs down the tree and he runs along the lake to where his other friends were, and he finds a new tree and climbs up it, and then the four comfort each other while they wait

for dawn, which came at about 6 a.m. About an hour and a half after the attack first started. And at dawn, Ray helps Denise and squirt out of the tree, and then Ron and Paul run back to the camp to grab their jackets and boots. Before leaving, they listen for any sounds in the woods that maybe Michelle is still alive, but the only noise they hear was the periodic sound of bones being snapped. So they're terrified, and they take squirt and they run down the trail, and they get, you know, eventually back to the road, and they hitch a ride to the Lake McDonald Ranger Station, and they bust through the door to tell their story to the Ranger, who is Ranger Leonard Landa. And he's already heard about the other attack, maybe, right? He has, yeah. And we're going to get to that in the next episode.

But miles away in the woods that are now completely quiet surrounding Trout Lake, Michelle Coon's body is lying there motionless. She's completely unrecognizable at this point. Her stomach and abdomen have been completely chewed away by the bear. And she was the second victim of the Night of the Grizzlies. That was Night of the Grizzlies. The next week in the third episode, we're going to talk about the search for Michelle's body. They have some more bear encounters while they're doing that. And then we're going to talk about the aftermath of the attacks, what happened to these bears,

what they did to change things in the park. It's a really interesting story, kind of the what happened after this night because it really changed everything. So that's the story of Michelle Coons. And do you guys have any questions? Poor Michelle. Yeah. So you mentioned that the others in the group, they waited a little bit until dawn hit. And then they ran back up to the campsite to, you know, grab some stuff and get out of there.

How long do you have to stay away from a, or how long is recommended to stay away from an attack site. Like the bear, I would not have moved on by then. Would it have? It's still probably over the kill, right? No, I mean, they could hear it still up in the woods,

like crunching bones. I wouldn't go back. Unless I didn't have, like, boots or a way to get out, I wouldn't go back. If, like, they didn't have boots and there's stuff that they needed

to get out of there, then maybe if I knew the bear was, like, a good distance away, I would sneak back into camp and try and grab some of that stuff. But, I mean, they probably didn't have boots because they wouldn't be sleeping with them on.

Right. So they probably did have to run back and grab some of their like essentials. But you want to avoid it if you can. If there's any way for you to avoid an attack site or like a carcass or somewhere where you know there's a bear guarding a kill, that's not a place you want to be. You don't want to be there. So they probably had to go back and get that stuff. But that's not something you would ever choose to do. Yeah. I have a question.

Yeah. So like is there anything the group of four should have done while? she was being attacked? I mean, at that point, the, there three of them were already, like, 50 yards away or further, and they didn't even really know what was going on. Paul, who is right. They could hear screaming. Yeah, but they, I mean, they were too far to do anything, is what I'm saying.

Paul, who was right above in the tree, probably could have tried, like, throwing stuff down at the bear or yelling or doing something, but this again. You don't think they should have all gone out of the tree? They could have, they just didn't have time. It happened so quick. and Michelle never left her sleeping bag. By the time Ray got to the other two in the tree and was like climbing his tree,

the bear was already attacking Michelle. It was already back and attacking her. And them throwing rocks or something might have helped. But with this bear and with its previous behavior, I don't know if it would have. They might have had to hit it like right in the face and get like the perfect hit. And I still don't know if it would have stopped killing her.

So generally if you are in a group, you don't want to split up. You want a group up. But as we talked about in the last episode, a lot of the rules really go out the window when it's a campsite attack. Things get really, really crazy. And we'll talk more about that in the what would Mike and Jeff do. Right. I had maybe another, and this is just morbid curiosity.

So I guess fast forward if you're extra sensitive, because maybe this is a little insensitive what I'm about to ask. So the bear took Michelle away from the campsite and obviously was consuming. her. This was like a kill to eat, right, for food for the bear. Yeah. What do bears do in that scenario? Do they, do they just eat or would they be able to eat a whole body in like in one sitting or do they take the carcass with them or do they hang around for a day or two or what? It really depends on the size of the bear. Like a really big male grizzly could eat a person in one sitting. This bear probably, my guess is what it did is it dragged her off, ate the parts that it really wanted to eat right away, which is like organs, really fatty areas. And then what they usually do

is they'll cash a carcass. So they like half cover it with dirt. They'll like pull them inside out sometimes. And they like they spread dessert all over, or dessert. They spread dirt all over the carcass in order to like cut down on scent so that like other animals so other bears don't catch it and come and steal it from them. So that's what's common for them. They don't care if they eat some dirt. Yeah, exactly. Generally, if a bear does cash a carcass, and they don't cash it to the level that, like, a mountain line will, but they do some cashing. And if a bear does that, it's not going to go far. Generally, it's going to hang out pretty nearby, and it's going to keep coming back and forth to that carcass and eating as much as possible.

Man, poor Michelle, that is. Yeah. Her zipper got stuck on the sleeping bag. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. It's pretty unfortunate. Cool. Well, that's part two.

I would say uncool, but teach their own opinion. Cool wasn't the right word. Anyway, let's launch into our categories. Yeah, let's do it. Last week we did our favorite grizzly. So this week I was thinking, and I do think we've kind of talked about this in the past, but I was thinking to kind of bring a positive vibe back to the podcast. We could talk about our most positive encounters with grizzly bears.

So, Jeff, why don't you go first? Yeah, I'm going to talk about Hyder, Alaska. So I've done two separate trips to Hyder driving from the lower 48, once with Wes and once with Mike. And the time I went with Mike, so there's like, there's like this porch area where you can watch grizzly bears jump on salmon and eat salmon and it's super cool. but then like half a mile up the road there's also just like a bridge to a trail and i always thought like man it'd be so much cooler to see a grizzly bear on this bridge where there's like no people around and like just kind of have a more intimate setting and so then me mike and britain decided to go back at evening and right when we got there a female grizzly bear came around the corner of the

river and just walk down the river and we were just like 10 feet above it on this bridge. And it was just so cool to like be that close to a wild grizzly but still kind of feel safe because you're above it. So yeah, that was my favorite one. Cool. Yeah, that's for sure mine too. And it's funny, knowing what I know now, I would have been a lot more scared in that situation. But back then I was like, well, Jeff and Brent don't really seem to care.

So I guess this is fine. But the bear really was so close to us. Well, I had bear spray too. Jeff had bear spray. But yeah, like looking back at it, no, it's pretty shocking how close we got to it. It's really cool. And it's not like we tried to. It walked right underneath us.

We didn't approach it or anything. It just walked right under, yeah. Those bears there are pretty habituated to people because there is that viewing platform. So they always have people around. And they just eat so much every day. Right. They're not very grumpy or anything. thing. Yeah. I'm going to pick one that happened to all three of us. So this isn't my favorite,

but it's one that I really like and remember. This summer, we were all, this last summer, we were all in Glacier. And there was one night where we were in the back of my dad's truck. And it was like a really beautiful kind of sunset night in Glacier. And we stumbled upon a grizzly that was feeding in some berry bushes not far from the road. And often when you're in a national park can you see a bear. Like, there's a huge bear jam, and people get really cranky and upset. And, you know, in Yellowstone, I have to manage those jams, and it can be really chaotic. But this one was just really calm, and there were hardly any people there.

And it was just, like, a really beautiful experience just, like, in the last dusk, watching this bear go through berries. And the bear didn't care at all that we were there, and we watched it for, like, over an hour. And it was just a really kind of idyllic, beautiful night to watch a grizzly bear. It wasn't anything that special, but it was really pretty. Yeah, a lot better than the one we saw where the Ranger just was screaming at us. Like, don't even look at it. Keep driving. His Ranger was like frothing at the mouth, like suffering some kind of mental breakdown.

It was funny because when I saw that, I was like, I am never going to talk to anyone in Yellowstone like that person did to me. That's so bad. Anyway, okay, so we're going to move on to, again, what would Mike and Jeff do? So I think the situation for this one, what would you guys do? I would say, what would you do if someone else in your campsite is being attacked by a bear? And you aren't. What would you do? So first of all, I would have eaten all those cookies.

There would have been no more cookies for that bear to try and come in yet. That's a good point. After that, it sounds like the best plan of action would be for everyone, of course, to become alert and get up and about, but also maybe to stay in the campsite, group up and have a group of four or five people all yelling at the bear and trying to be scary. Jeff? I would get us all to climb up the same tree, and then we all just at the same time jump out of the tree and cannonball onto the bear. Yeah. Yeah. That's way better than my answer.

Probably would work. Okay, so Mike, your answer was right. You know, when a grizzly does come into your campsite, I talked to Tom Smith about this because he just knows a ton about bear attacks and is one of the main guys when it comes to it. And we talked about this a bit about campsite attacks. And he really said that if a bear comes into your campsite, you have to defend your campsite.

You have to push that bear out however you can. because it's looking for food and there's a good chance that it's a predatory attack, especially if it sticks around after you try and scare it off initially. So really, what these kids probably should have done is as they woke up, they should have made sure everyone was awakened out of their sleeping bags before they took off. And as a cohesive group, they should have yelled and thrown stuff at the bear

and maybe like waves sticks around with fire on them, doing whatever they can to scare it off. and then if the bear didn't run off then they all as a group again find trees and claim up trees but them kind of like one at a time zooming out of that campsite and leaving like that

it just left one girl alone and it gave the bear one option and it didn't really have any kind of and she wasn't moving or making noise so there's just no threat anymore exactly there's no opposition to the bear at that point and it could just tear into her so that was kind of their mistake

But again, the only thing they had heard is get up a tree. And so that's what they did. But if a bear, if a grizzly bear comes into your campsite, you don't treat it like a typical grizzly bear encounter. You treat it like a black bear almost. You just have to fight it off with everything you've got. Hopefully you have bear spray. I like how in Jurassic Park they like pretend to know that a T-Rex can't see you if you're moving. And it's like, these things existed like millions of years ago.

You don't know anything about like if they can see you. Dr. Grant's like, he can only see you if you don't move. It's like, how do you? It's like, no. You studied bones. This is the first T-Rex you've ever seen. Yeah, I agree. But it's funny to me that like, well, it's not funny, but it's just interesting that that

used to be what people thought you should do with the grizzly bears play dead. Yeah. And it's like you're losing all your credibility as a threat. And then, like, bears are curious. So, like, if they don't feel threatened and you're just, laying there motionless like they might come check you out then right they wouldn't and they might not have otherwise you know the only time playing dead works is if it's a bear that's just trying to neutralize a threat which is generally what bears are trying to do but like you said you're giving

up all your control to the bear at that point so that's why like i was just going to say they didn't have bear spray back then we do now like carry bear spray with you if this had happened today and one of these people had bear spray and the first thing they did was just get up and spray the bear it's over like it's over at that point the bear's out of there they're gonna have a pretty shitty night like packing up all their stuff and like getting out of there but that's it like it goes from like the worst night of all of their lives and one person dying to being just like a really uncomfortable night with a really good story the next day so bring bear spray with you know where it is when you're sleeping be ready to use it and you'll be fine that's that's what i would

have done actually is it just invented bear spray during the day. Oh, yeah. And just had it ready. That's your best one yet, Jeff. That's a good one. All right. Yeah, we're just...

I can't believe they had leftover cookies. That's unbelievable. I know. I mean, they just didn't... And they lost all their food. They should have been hungry. Yeah. That's true.

All right. So we're going to go on to some listener questions. I think we have some Patreon ones and some listener questions maybe. Let's go. Oh, sweet. Patrons. Let's hear them. Jeff, I think that's your job.

Oh, yeah. Man, I got to do so much work on this thing, you know. Yeah, you got a big workload these days. Okay, so Patreon questions. This is from Zed, and it's who came up with the name Tooth and Claw? Were there other options you were deciding between? Was it a team effort? I came up with Tooth and Claw.

So, Wes, you came up with it. And we did have some other options. I don't remember what the other ones were. Uh, ouch, that hurts. There was a gris kid in the cuddle buds. I remember that one. Oh, yeah. Gris kid in the cuddle buds.

Yeah, we should have gone with that. Um, yeah, I can't. Most of the discussion, I mean, stop biting me. Wes had tooth and claw pretty early, and really the biggest discussion was whether it should be tooth and claw, like the word and, or like the ampersand. Yeah. It was pretty quickly the best. We settled in on it pretty quick.

Yeah. I think we have a list somewhere. We should see if we can find it sometime and publish it. Yeah, we will. This one's from Christina. Would you rather be a child trapped in the body of a polar bear or a polar bear trapped in the body of a child? I'd rather be a child trapped in the polar bear body.

Oh, no way, dude. No way. What's your argument for the polar bear trapped in the body of the child? Because, like, if you're in a child's body, you're still going to get taken care of by other humans, you know, and it's just going to give you food and stuff. If you're a kid trapped in a polar bear body, you're out in the wilderness, you're dead in a day. I guarantee it. Fair enough.

You don't know what you're doing out there. Oh, that's a good point. I don't know what the, who knows what the thoughts of a polar bear are, though? I don't know if I want to be a polar bear. Just Coke, I think. They want Coke. Like, what if it's just terrible being covered? I love Coca-Cola.

There you go. I was going to answer to be in the polar bear body, but Mike kind of convinced me, like, it's not like I could go to a movie theater if I'm in a polar bear's body. You can't do that if you're a polar bear's body. You can't do that if you're a polar bear's body. You can't do that if your child is a polar bear too. And as a poor bird, is a porrub. You just won't understand the preference for what's going on.

Oh, man. Polar bears do look like they have fun when they're sliding around on the ice, though. So that's a pro. Here's a question. If it's a polar bear in a child's body and it goes through like a child's education and it's like taught language and everything, does it just become kind of a human? Yeah, it's like a... I don't think so. I don't think it ever learns a word. It'd be like Paddington.

Oh, yeah. That'd be cute. Yeah, I want to be that. I want to be. No, that would be the other way. That would be the child trapped in a bear's body. Oh, man. We're all mixed up. Shoot.

I'm taking that child and a bear's. I figure if I put on people clothes and like a nice, sophisticated hat, people won't be afraid of me. You can find a British family to take care of you. And I could learn how to talk, right, if I'm a bear. Yeah. If I'm in a bear's body, couldn't I still just talk? They don't have like the same vocal cords that we have. That's the answer to your question, Jeff.

Like if a bear's lonely and wants to hang out with humans, just dress up in human clothes. Like I would be totally down to hang out with like a little polar bear and like a propeller cast. Just up like in a suit. Yeah. All right. This one's from Adam. You're going to ask a wild animal to be your prom date. What animal are you asking and how do you make sure they say yes?

Um, huh. Maybe a peacock? Because they're kind of wearing prom dress. Oh, no, no, no, no. You got to go with B because bees are good at dancing, and you want a date that's good at dancing. So, like, I guess you just, what do the, what do bees like? Pollan? Just give it some pollen.

Yeah. I'm going to choose a polar bear and just hope it's a child trapped in its body. You want to go with a child to the prom? Well, I mean, I don't want to go with an animal. I'm going to go with, uh, I'm going to pick an African crowned crane because I just think they're beautiful. Oh, yeah, easy pick. And they probably are good dancers. Birds usually are good dancers, right?

They do their little, like, mating dance where they, like, swivel their head around and stuff. And I could, like, hold its neck while I'm dancing. I don't want to go with a child for the record. Sounds like you do. Just let me tell you that I don't, please. Okay. And then from Instagram, we have from Niste. what Disney movie animal pet would you most want?

I'll start. I'm going, I'm going Rattatooie. Yeah. Just have delicious food all the time. That's a great thing. Maybe start my own restaurant. Oh, that's such a good pick. That's the best pick.

Yeah, probably. I was going to say in Coco, you know that like flying jaguar mystical. Oh, yeah, that one's cool. That was the one I was going to pick. I like the two crocodiles and rescuers. That'd be kind of cool to have two crocs. Okay. So there you got.

What's the monkey's name in Aladdin? Abu. Apoo. A boo or a poo? Abu. Yeah, you're right. A boo. I like Abu.

Same movie, Jasmine's Tiger. That would be sweet. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And someone wrote me about how, like, joking about monkeys being your pet, that that's a big problem, people like buying monkeys as pets. Oh, so we shouldn't.

Just so you know, we don't really want any pets that are causing problems to. No. I don't know. Wildlife. We want them. We want them, but we would never do it because it's problematic. Correct. Yeah.

From Tyler J. Larson. If you could only eat one meal for the rest of your life, what would it be? Probably a bowl of cereal. What kind? Cinnamon Life. Oh. Wait, but in this question, are we getting unhealthy by eating just that one? food because if so then I would like eat like a green smoothie or something that's just going to be

good for me all the time I don't know if I was just going to say pizza and then I could have like breakfast pizzas barbecue pizza that's a good cauliflower pizza. A whole dessert question. Jeff always is fine loopholes in these. You can't say like you can't say like oh I just want a burger and then I can have like chicken burger and beef burger like a dessert burger. That's a good choice. They have cheeseburger pizza. I'd have that for it if I want to bring it. You can't ask Jeff these questions. Mike, uh, I would have my dad's homemade pancakes, I think.

Oh, that's how wholesome answer. No, you can get sick of those in two years. I know. But I'm going to get sick of it. Yeah, it might as well be something that'll kill me fast. I don't think I'll get sick of cereal. That's why I make it. Yeah, bleach.

I just choose poison because I don't want to eat one thing the rest of my life. Uh, by Jeff's definition, poison would include like, Mountain Dew and ice cream. We put it on Instagram. The majority people think ice cream and cake is one dessert. They weren't there for the argument. They didn't need to be. Yeah, they did.

All right, continue. If you could make up a sound for giraffe, or wait, from Rebecca 13, if you could make up a sound for giraffes to make, what would it be? It would be like a really light. Do it. Like something. that you just won't picture them making. I'd want a slide whistle sound.

That's a good one. That's a better pick than me. Maybe like a boing. Okay. Because they have the long neck, so when they like move their head. I'll add sound effects and pose. Or if they just start mooing, like, today, it's like, now giraffes move like a cat. I like that pick, too.

That'd be very cool. All right. That's it for listener questions. All right. Thanks, listeners. Thanks for your questions. Keep them coming. it on Instagram this week for more new fresh ones.

All right. You know, we're going to go really in depth in how we're messing things up for them next week. And we talked about it a little bit last week. So I don't really have any more categories. But I do think we should, again, just agree that this is a 10-ouchy story. Oh, yeah. Oh, no. I'm going to give it a 9.

Okay. She seemed to die quicker than the last girl. That's true. The last girls seemed worse to me. Okay. Yeah, Julie's was a little bit, it was longer and harder, but Michelle did get eaten alive in the woods. The guy climbing the tree with no shoes or shirt, it gets a three. Yeah, that sounds hard.

I think the difference between the two also is just that with Julie's story, they found her when she was still alive. This one, we don't know really how long Michelle was actually alive while she was being eaten by the spare. I know that's a really grim thing to talk about, but it could have gone on for a little while. So I feel like if she was very alive, though, she would have made noise since her friends were close by. Yeah, maybe. You never know. Regardless, it's an awful way to go. It does sound like she went pretty quick.

So, yeah. It makes me just feel so bad. For me, it's a 10 outies. And then we've already ranked. We ranked them last time. So me and Jeff, both of them, they're a 10-claw animal. Mike, they're a 9-claw. So, all right, that's it.

That's part two. Cool. We're two kids that's the way through this. Thanks, guys. Yeah. We made it through. It sounds like the worst of it. We have.

We have. Next episode, we can. It's going to be a little bit more interesting, less storytelling, but still a decent amount of story. We'll slip into something a little more comfortable and let our hair down. Yeah. And we'll have some more fun with the categories next week, too. I'm excited.

All right. Thanks guys. Thanks for listening. We'll see you later. See ya.