It’s easy for ‘civilized’ humanity to forget just how ‘wild’ the wilderness can be. And dangerous.
Urban living and modern conveniences have lulled many of us into a false sense of security that takes a story like this to awaken us from.
When we’re out in natural settings… we are the outsider. Animals don’t play by the rules we think they should play by.
Colin Dowler got that same harsh reminder recently.
He was minding his own business, almost 200 miles north of Vancouver, BC, Canada, looking for the best way to climb a mountain named after his grandfather.
A Grizzly didn’t care for him being visiting his turf. It picked him up by the abdomen and carried him 50ft to a ditch. Yes… in his maw.
But he turned a corner in the remote area 180km north of Powell River and ended up ‘too close’, only 100ft away, from the creature that nearly killed him when it gripped him in its mouth.
‘It was so much pain and weirdness, I could feel the hot blood,’ Dowler recalled to the BBC in a phone call from hospital. ‘I’m being rag-dolled, suspended by my flank by a bear carrying me.’
…Even though the approach was at a regular pace, Dowler dismounted the bike and took his hiking poles from his backpack to create some distance. He admits he was ‘scared the whole time’ during the face-off in the Ramsay Arm area.
…The grizzly kept coming at him with ‘methodical, heavy swats’ before it carried him away by his abdomen and started to bite into his thighs.
Dowler said he tried playing dead but when that didn’t work he tried gouging out the bear’s eyes.
‘It grabbed me by the stomach and kind of pushed me down and dragged me toward the ditch maybe 50 feet,’ he said. ‘I tried eye gouging it away and it didn’t really work.
Source: DailyMail
When he heard the bear’s teeth ‘grating his bones’ he knew he was really in trouble. He was able to reach a buck knife his dad had given him only two weeks earlier.
He plunged it into the bear’s neck, spilling a lot of blood. The bear left him alone, but he still had to make it back to medical help.
He then used the same knife to cut his shirt sleeve and tie it around his leg wound to cycle 7km [a little more than 4 miles] to a logging camp.
He collapsed on arrival but received life-saving first aid from people there who he credits for saving his life.
‘They’re truly the heroes of the story because there’s no way I would have made it without [them],’ Dower said.Source: DailyMail
