Just about two weeks ago, a bear finished what a coyote started with Michelle Stigen’s 2017 Hyundai Tuscon Sport.
Stigen was on her way home from a shift at the 33 Mile Roadhouse when she rounded a corner near Klukwan and hit the brown bear just after 7 p.m.
“I had no time to even react because he was already pretty much in the road,” Stigen said. “I didn’t even have time to hit the brakes or anything.”
The extent of the damage was not clear at first, because Stigen did not want to get out and look at the car, fearing that the bear was still around. She said she called a friend who came out to help and the two went looking for it in some nearby woods where it ran after the collision.
“We could see where he went in. Then this owl started hooting like crazy and another bird started screeching.” That spooked her so the two decided to move the car to a safer location. It was still running, though she said it barely got up the hill as it was slipping in and out of gear. They got it to a pullout near 21 Mile, closed it up for the night and came back to tow it the next day.
This was not the first time Stigen, who has been working in the upper valley since 2013, collided with an animal on the Haines Highway.
“Two years ago, I hit a coyote on my way to work. It was 4:30 in the morning, on a Sunday morning,” she said. “It was the same thing; he was right there and I hit it. I think I went right over him.”
That tore up the undercarriage of her car and she said she had to get it to Anchorage to get it fixed.
“It was like $5,900 bucks,” she said.
This time, her car was totaled.
“Pretty much the whole front side was crunched. My airbag deployed,” she said.
Stigen, who said she has a reputation for driving fast on the highway, said she was being cautious that night because she had seen a bear that morning on her way to work.
“He kind of ran off into the woods, stopped and stared at me,” she said. “It looked like the same one, a huge brown bear.”
Stigen said she sees a lot of wildlife on her way to and from work.
“The funny thing is, two nights later I’m turtling it by Klukwan and right there when I got over the hill, there were two bears in my lane,” she said. “I pretty much came to a complete stop. It was a sow and a cub. I started honking and then the mom started running right up to me. You know, it’s that time of year.”
Before that, there were two moose hanging out in one of the lanes.
She said she’s pretty sure the bear she collided with survived the accident. That’s in part because Stigen said she called State Park Ranger Jacques Turcotte, who was unavailable for an interview as of press time, the next morning.
She said there was no blood anywhere.
“There was hair stuck around the screws on my license plate and there was hair under my hood latch,” she said. She said Turcotte told her he had been out to the site and did not find any blood there either.
She also went into Klukwan and told the bear patrol. “They tracked it to the river but we didn’t see it after that,” she said.
As for Stigen, she said she was sore from the impact of the airbag and she has a jammed right thumb, but is otherwise healing just fine.
She got a check from the insurance company for her totalled car and plans to go up to Fairbanks soon and pick up a truck.
And Stigen, who works as a flagger on the road improvement projects, said she’s looking forward to some of the highway improvements on the horizon.
“You know, widening and straightening some of the corners from town out to 25 Mile,” she said. “It would have been nice if it was a little bit wider, fewer curves,” she said.