‘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…

Rashah McChesney is a multimedia journalist and editor who has reported and edited newsrooms from the Deep South to the Midwest to Alaska. For the past decade, she has worked in collaborative news as the...