A male grizzly bear makes his way toward Charlie Lansche's camera in Greater Yellowstone. A charging grizzly can reach speeds up to 35 miles per hour and Keegan David found out how quickly he needed to reach and fire his canister of bear spray on May 20. Photo by Charlie M. Lansche
by Joseph T. O’Connor
The sun beat down on his neck as he pushed through shoulder-high
sage and branches of white bark pine. Tall Douglas firs threw spots of shade that
at this elevation, despite the 82-degree weather, still held small pockets of
snow. It wasn’t quite noon, but even in mid-May and high in the Montana mountains,
Keegan David was hot. He removed his pack, took a sip of water from a nearby
stream, and continued on. “I’m not going to see anybody,” the 33-year-old thought
to himself. “I’m not even on a trail.”
David was in high spirits: it was a day off and he was in
his element: off trail and deep in the mountains of southcentral Montana, gazing
at still-snowcapped peaks of Electric and the state’s highest, Granite, to the
east. As he hiked, he made a motion with his right hand to his left hip, where
a canister of bear spray hung from his waist in a plastic sleeve. He had been
practicing with it for the last year, ever since he lost a hiking friend to a
grizzly bear attack not far from where he was today.
Side-hilling on a steep slope of thick sage, David suddenly heard
a thundering noise behind him. “It resembled that of a galloping horse,” he says.
When he turned around, he saw a massive brown object crashing through the brush
toward him: grizzly bear. The bruin was in full gallop, head down, and at 35 yards
away it was closing fast. “His claws were as long as my fingers,” David recalls.
“It was a full-on charge and grizzly bears that big can't
just stop. He was going like a linebacker in football.”
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Grizzlies are the fastest bears in the Ursidae family, with speeds up to 35 mph, “faster than the top speed of an Olympic sprinter,” reads one
article in Popular Science.
Born in Petosky, Michigan, Keegan David spent much of his
time outside near the lakes and woods of the Upper Peninsula. He first laid
eyes on Montana when he was 10 and would spend occasional summers visiting
family in the Gallatin Valley, floating the Madison River, learning the
mountains and the craft of horn hunting with his cousin. “One of the first
places my family brought me was Gardiner, Montana,” he says. “I always knew I
wanted to get back out here.”
After graduating from Northern Michigan University with a
degree in Outdoor Recreation Leadership and Management, he moved west in 2013 and
landed a job near Clyde Park at the Crazy Mountain Ranch. He started in the
kitchen, then began teaching off-road driving courses to clients anywhere from 21 years
old to 80 in H1 Hummers, he says. A two-year construction job repairing
historical structures in Yellowstone National Park followed, and David began
spending more and more time outside, hiking, horn hunting and gradually
venturing into the wilderness, off trails and away from crowds.
“This is the Treasure State,” he says, “where you're not
going to find any treasure on the trail usually, unless it's a bag of dog shit.
I love to hike, hunt and pick up horns … I love cruising up into high country
someplace that probably nobody's hiked in years, sitting down where there's a
nice creek pouring out of the mountains, out of the scree. Maybe there's some 850-year-old
Doug fir tree and I sit there and have lunch and just think, ‘Damn, that tree’s
been around since before Christopher Columbus even hit the coast.’”
Keegan David and Ziggy stare off into the mountains from their home in Gallatin Gateway. Photo by Joseph T. O'Connor
The morning of May 20 began like many others for David. Now
a carpenter for a timber framing company out of Gallatin Gateway, he woke early
to make the most of a Saturday off, one with promise and fine weather. His
3-year-old son Riley—middle name Hiker—was with his mother that weekend, and
David had loaded his day pack the night before: extra layer, rain jacket,
freeze-dried meal and walnuts, .357 magnum, a lighter and a hat. Weather can
change quickly in the backcountry, and he planned to hike 10 miles into the Absaroka-Beartooth
Wilderness east of Gardiner, Montana.
At a well-used trailhead in the Gardiner Basin, David put
his Ford F-150 pickup in park and fished around in the cab behind his seat. He
found his pack, a can of bear spray hanging in a plastic holster from the hip
belt, and grabbed his hiking poles. He started at the trailhead and after a
mile ducked into the brush and off the trail. He was four miles in when he
heard the thundering behind him.
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“The forelimbs of grizzly bears support between 54 percent and 60 percent of body weight, increasing with increasing speed.” – Journal of Experimental
Biology
Even in the moment, David has a vivid memory of the seconds
he watched the bear tearing toward him. Unsure if it was a male or female, he
did know it was a grizzly bear weighing more than 300 pounds. “It was a tri-colored
grizzly,” he recalls, “huge face, massive shoulders, massive hump on [its] back
and a long snout.”
There’s no time to think when a grizzly bear is running at
you. At 35 miles per hour, a charging grizzly can cover about 50 feet in a
second. In David’s case, he heard the bear and turned when it was approximately
35 yards away and in a full gallop. He had seconds to grab his bear spray,
remove the safety and start spraying. His next move was utter reaction, he says.
He reached with his right hand to his left hip and tore the bear spray from its
breakaway holster.
A backcountry hiker's gear. Photo courtesy Keegan David
“I didn’t even get the safety all the way off before I
started spraying him,” he says. “I had five seconds at the most, otherwise I’d
be rolling around on the ground with this goddamned bear.”
David says he was able to spray the charging bear for about
three seconds before his mind went black. “He was about 10-12 feet in front of
me still full on at a run—at one point he was about five feet from me or less,
like an arm's length away—and at that point I don't remember if I tripped or if
I dove out of the way at the last second. It all happened so fast. I did sort
of black out for sure. It was just all instinct, it was nothing more. Your
cells, your eyes, your pupils, just craziness. Total chaos. [I was] just trying
to not let that bear get ahold of me. We might even have danced for a second.”
The grizzly had taken the bear spray in the face. David remembers
the bear slowed, turned, then shook its head. “It just kind of looked at me and
then loped back up the hill. And he definitely wasn't looking very good because
his eyes were definitely messed up from that bear spray.”
David believes the type of bear-spray holster he was
carrying, called Griz Guard, saved his life. “It has a little three-quarter-of-an-inch slit in it; it's
not the standard holster which is like a sleeve-cloth holster. I was able to
just rip [the can] out and, to be honest, if I'd had just the regular bear
spray in that sleeve, I'm pretty sure that bear would have tackled me.”
The grizzly lumbered back into the sage and trees in the
direction it had come. Adrenaline pumping through his veins, David says he had used
about 80 percent of his bear spray and thought about the pistol inside his pack.
He wondered if the bear would return and knew the gun wouldn’t help. “It's not
a pistol for bears, it's just something I keep on me. It's a small .357 [magnum]
with 200-grain bullets. It’s not even fully loaded. And I only had four rounds
in it.”
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“The [grizzly’s] forelimbs have a net braking effect at all
speeds while the hindlimbs provide net propulsion.” – Journal of Experimental Biology
Greater Yellowstone is home to the largest population of
grizzly bears in the Lower 48 but their exact numbers are difficult to
pinpoint. They once roamed the country from Alaska to Mexico, and the
population was estimated at more than 50,000 during their peak in the 1800s.
Loss of habitat, hunting and other run-ins with humans had slashed their
numbers to approximately 1,000 by the time the federal government intervened in
1975 and placed the grizzly on the endangered species list. Experts currently
place the U.S. population at around 55,000, and half of those live in Alaska.
In its latest estimate using a new counting method in the demographic monitoring area, the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team estimates that the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is home to 965 grizzly bears. Photo by Jim Peaco/NPS
Until recently, scientists in Greater Yellowstone relied mainly
on aircraft to count female bears with cubs in what’s known as the demographic
monitoring area, a zone measuring almost 20,000 square miles in Montana, Idaho,
Wyoming and both Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. Using this method,
scientists with the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team estimated 1,069
grizzlies in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in 2021. But methods change and
change again. The most recent report, based on a more advanced scientific
method that combines old counting methods with newer ones which the IGBST calls an integrated population model, now puts the estimated
number of grizzlies in the monitoring area at 965.
“It's a credible interval in a sense,” says Jeremiah Smith, a bear specialist with
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. “That could be anything from 800 bears to
1,200 bears. They’re hard critters to count as you can imagine.”
Smith says reported grizzly bear-human encounters in
Montana’s portion of the system number average between seven and 10 in a given year, but
few result in an actual “spray encounter” or human injury. Or an encounter where a firearm was
discharged. But numerous studies indicate that firearms are less effective than
bear spray when a bear charges.
In a 2012 study, wildlife ecologist and Brigham Young
University professor Thomas Smith found that in 269 human-bear encounters in
Alaska, handguns stopped a bear’s “aggressive behavior” about 84 percent of the
time, but that the pistols did not prevent injuries in the incidents. “Firearm
bearers suffered the same injury rates in close encounters with bears whether
they used their firearms or not,” the report says. In an earlier 2008
report, Smith examined 83 bear spray incidents and wrote that 98 percent of the
users were uninjured in close-range encounters with bears.
It doesn’t always happen that way. Todd Orr of Bozeman was
scouting for elk in the Madison Range east of Ennis in fall 2016 when he was
mauled by a grizzly bear. Twice. Orr posted a Facebook video after a sow
grizzly—which had cubs—charged him through his bear spray cloud and attacked.
Among other injuries, he suffered a deep gash on his head
and ear and puncture wounds to his arm and shoulder. Experts have said that
bear spray is effective within about 30 feet and Orr said he started spraying
the bear at “about the max distance my spray would reach,” he wrote on his website. “Bear
spray doesn’t always work,” he said in the video, “but it’s better than nothing.”
Craig Clouatre, who David knew and had hiked with, was killed in March
2022 by a grizzly bear in Park County near where David had been hiking. An
investigation conducted by a group of bear experts and biologists from local,
state and federal agencies, and released last month, nine days before David’s
encounter, determined that Clouatre’s death was “likely caused by a
defensive attack from a nearby denning grizzly bear.”
Investigators found a can of bear spray in Clouatre’s pack on a ridge
about a half-mile from the encounter and reported that he had left the pack there
at some point before the attack. For David, who had a deep respect for Clouatre
as an accomplished mountain climber (“He always outhiked me in the mountains.”), knowing about the
2022 attack may have saved his life.
“It did increase my odds,” David said. “It did change my
behavior. Ignorance is not bliss in the wilderness. It is not.”
Having bear spray while you’re hiking is one thing. Knowing
where it is on your person and how to use it is quite another. Brad Bolte is a
law enforcement officer with the Custer Gallatin National Forest who
investigates human-bear encounters.
“I see it all the time where folks pack bear spray but it's
in their backpack or it's otherwise inaccessible,” Bolte says. “When you're in
a life-or-death situation and
David and the can of bear spray he discharged on May 20 to stop the grizzly bear that charged him. Photo by Joseph T. O'Connor
there’s seconds to react, you’ve got to have that
muscle memory to go to that life-saving device and use it properly. The biggest
thing is practice. Practice drawing it. Practice figuring out different ways to
carry it.”
Bolte likens bear spray to other life-saving tools such as an
avalanche beacon. You can have it, he says, even power it on, but if you don’t
practice using it you’ll be in trouble when the unthinkable happens.
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"We know now that the grizzly is chock-full of curiosity, and that one of his habits is to follow up any trail that seems to puzzle him or interest him be it of a man or a beast. This trait has been noted and misconstrued by many. So often have I seen this curiosity and proved it to be innocent." – account from hunter, photographer William H. Wright from The Grizzly, by Enos A. Mills
After the attack, David says, he was standing there, head
spinning, eyes burning. He had taken some of the bear spray himself. “My lungs
are burning. My eyes are burning. My lips are burning … I’ve just been charged
by a bear.”
He knew he needed to get into the open in case the bear
returned, so he flung his hiking poles into the sagebrush and clambered to the
top of a large rock with 360-degree views. He turned in circles looking for the
grizzly. “I’ve got one hand on the pistol and one hand on the bear spray,” he
says. “I don't know if there's cubs. I don't even know what just happened. I
just know that I'm in his zone and he just made it very clear that he doesn't
want me there.”
Keegan David had just enough phone battery left to make
three calls after the grizzly charged him: the first was to his friend who is a
resident of Gardiner and a hiking buddy with significant backcountry
experience. “I knew he would answer,” David says of his former roommate who he
calls an “extreme hiker.” “He knew I was in one of three drainages and told me
I had to get the hell out of there.”
The second was to his cousin, Mark, who phoned a family friend
who knew where David was. “He said, 'Go up the drainage 150 yards, take a right
and then get back to your truck and take the trailhead out,' and that's pretty
much what I did for the next two hours.”
When he got back to his truck, he drove to the Yellowstone River and sat there
for an hour or two watching the water flow by.
David later called Jeremiah Smith, the grizzly bear expert
with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, and Brad Bolte, the law enforcement
officer with Custer Gallatin. Smith told Mountain Journal the grizzly’s
behavior wasn’t out of the ordinary. Even though David said the grizzly charged
him from behind, Smith says it was not acting like a “predatory” bear.
Keegan David places a hand next to the paw print of a grizzly bear. "I cross their tracks but that set was large," he says. Photo courtesy Keegan David
“What I know is that he was able to deploy bear spray to
turn a charge which is great,” Smith said. “I'm glad he's OK. And once that was
done, this animal did not come back or try to repeat the charge. Typically, in
a predatory behavior, that bear is not going to give up, it's going to keep
following you around. It's going to follow you down and keep coming at you.”
So, why would the bear charge? David believes it became
curious after catching his scent. He had seen grizzlies in the backcountry
before but every other time they would run off. “I've often seen them do the
same thing that deer and elk do when they see you, but they don't quite believe
it until their nose confirms it and then they just bolt the other way.”
Smith agrees, but says sometimes a bear’s curiosity will get
the better of it.
“It's in the backcountry, kind of where bears are supposed
to be,” Smith says. “Depending on the time of day, they could be sleeping, they could be digging. You can
walk right past them. And then all of a sudden the wind shifts. They get a
smell, they wake up and they catch movement out of the corner of their eye and
they go for it.”
Neither David nor Smith knew if there was an animal carcass
in the area, but the U.S. Forest Service typically only closes trailheads if a
carcass is on or close to a trail. It’s already happened this spring, and does
nearly every spring.
Click the link below to watch Keegan David read from Enos A. Mills' 1919 book, The Grizzly, and provide background related to his grizzly bear encounter.
"Grizzlies and wildernesses are risky propositions. As they should be." – Doug Peacock, author of The Essential Grizzly, and Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness
People make mistakes in the backcountry. Occasionally, those mistakes lead to injury or even death. Keegan David says among the mistakes he made were not telling someone exactly where he was going, not hiking with a friend (though he invited two and neither could make it), not having a charged cell phone, and carrying just one can of bear spray. Luckily for him, this time one was enough.
But a number of things were in his favor, as well. He was familiar with the terrain, he knew where his can of bear spray was (on his left hip), and he knew how to use it. Skill and a bit of luck also played key roles.
Following a traumatic situation, victims will sometimes want drastic measures taken. For David, however, grizzlies have a right to be in the wild, where they’ve been for centuries. Currently, the states of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho are looking to have grizzly bears removed from the endangered species list and have bear
Keegan and his son, Riley Hiker David, hunting horns. Photo courtesy Keegan David
management transferred to the states.
“We’ve manipulated pretty much everything and they really don’t have much space left,” David said. “I go to work every day, I want my kid to be able to grow up and go to a truly wild place. Yeah, there are inherent dangers. You just mitigate the risks and tell people the true story … so they don’t end up in a predicament that they’re not prepared for. [Grizzlies] deserve to be here.”
While his incident left him unscathed physically, it’s not an encounter he’ll soon forget. Keegan David carries the lessons of a close encounter with a grizzly bear.
“Technically … it worked out,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong, it has kind of scared me out of the mountains for a while, but will I be going back? You’re damned right. Eventually. Will I be even more prepared with two cans of bear spray and a buddy, and somebody knows where I’m going? Yes.”
EDITOR'S NOTE: Keegan David is second cousin by marriage to Sarah DeOpsomer, MoJo's Development and Executive Assistant.
Joseph T. O’Connor is Mountain Journal’s Managing Editor. He has an extensive background in multimedia storytelling including writing, editing, video broadcast and investigative journalism. Joe most recently served as Editor-in-Chief for Mountain Outlaw magazine and the Explore Big Sky newspaper in Big Sky, Montana. He has published work in several publications from the East Coast to California, including Newsweek, CNN, and Skiing magazine, among others. Joe moved to Montana in 2012 after taking graduate journalism courses at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
