‘Wrong place, wrong time,” is how Tracy Wirak-Cassidy described her recent encounter with two bears near the Mount Ripinsky trailhead.
Wirak-Cassidy and friend Emily McMahan decided to do a quick lunch hike up the mountain Oct. 28 and were just coming up on the trailhead.
“We were talking. We weren’t being quiet and we weren’t running, but we were moving quickly,” Wirak-Cassidy said.
All of a sudden, they heard something.
“We look off the trail … and there are two bears. I’m guessing two- or three-year-old cubs. They weren’t tiny but they weren’t huge, full-grown bears either, Wirak-Cassidy said. One of them turned and started running at us.
The two started yelling at the bear – and this is where her memories get a little fuzzy.
“It was such an intense experience,” she said. “I had turned away from the bear, and then I got my bear spray and it was on my scat belt which is right on my waist. So I’m like, tugging out my bear spray, which felt like it took forever but I got it out.”
She took the safety off, hit the trigger and started spraying.
“I whip around to spray the bear and Emily is laying down in front of the bear in a protective posture to make the two look like less of a threat.
“That was just her reaction was to lay down and she’s firing off her air horn,” Wirak-Cassidy said.
She said she shot the bear spray over McMahan who then scrambled toward her and the two started power walking up the trail, yelling.
A little ways up the trail, Wirak-Cassidy said she was full of adrenaline and didn’t feel anything except the drive to get away from the bear.
But McMahan, who had just been hit with bear spray, had to stop and catch her breath.
“The bears down below us start vocalizing, it sounds like they’re roaring,” Wirak-Cassidy said. “So I put my hand on her shoulder, like we just got to go.”
The two kept hiking up the trail and after a few minutes saw two hikers coming toward them.
“I was so relieved,” Wirak-Cassidy said.
It turned out to be two friends of hers, Sarah Elliott and Alissa Henry.
“Sarah just gave me this big hug, and I started shaking uncontrollably,” she said. “That’s when I was like. Oh my god, I can’t see. I’m covered in bear spray. My nose is on fire, my mouth is on fire.”
McMahan and Wirak-Cassidy started packing snow onto their faces to relieve some of the irritation.
The four decided they couldn’t go back down the main trail, so they headed for a nearby trail.
“We were yelling and making lots of noise. It was probably like another hour-and-a-half of hiking to get back to the road,” she said.
Despite her fear and lingering anxiety, Wirak-Cassidy said she doesn’t think the bears were bad or did anything wrong.
“The first thing is that, you know, there’s no way of knowing but I really believe that there must have been some food source that those bears were on because the one bear didn’t come at us. There was something there that it was staying with,” she said. “We surprised them. They surprised us, and they just wanted us out of there.”
She noted that the trailhead is close to the Skyline neighborhood and said she wonders if they found a bag of garbage or something else to eat.
“So I guess it’s just another plea to the community to really secure bear attractants,” she said.
The other lesson she took away from the encounter is that her bear spray was the best possible tool for her to have at that moment. But, she will change the way she carries it.
“This all happened within seconds, [but] it felt like in my mind, it was taking forever to get bear spray out,” she said. “ My new thing is that I will always have my bear spray in some sort of harness on my chest or on the front of me where I can see it and easily just pull it right out,” she said.
She also feels lucky that she had a can that was not expired because they get less pressurized as they age.
“I own [five or six] of cans of bear spray and I’d say probably half of them are expired,” she said. “I never think about it. I just grab bear spray. I would just really caution folks to make sure they’re carrying non-expired spray.”
Wirak-Cassidy said she has lived in Haines for a dozen years and has had many close bear encounters, including ones in which she has pulled out her bear spray. But, this is the first one she had where a bear charged at her and she had to use it.
This is the time of year when bears are in a state of hyperphagia – that is that they eat constantly to gain weight and prepare for hibernation.
“They’re gorging themselves. They’re agitated. I think this is a time to be especially thoughtful about having your bear spray,” Wirak-Cassidy said. “Make sure you’re making lots of noise – that’s something we could have been doing, we could have been yelling a little bit more. I think it would have been different if the bear had heard us before we got there.”
And, it’s not just enough to have the spray. Wirak-Cassidy, who works at the Takshanuk Watershed Council, said they partner with the Department of Fish and Game every year to teach people about bears. It’s also a chance for people to fire inert bear spray.
“It’s a great thing to have gone through those motions so when you’re in the moment, you know what to do,” she said.