The Terrible Bear Attack On Alan Precup

Welcome back to Scary Bear Attacks. Today’s episode takes us to the remote and nearly untouched Glacier Bay National Park & Preserve with its iconic glaciers and fjords. The park is located in SouthEast Alaska along the coast and presents some of the most beautiful scenery on earth. The forests are lush and green with giant pines and all kinds of berry bushes. The bay itself lies to the east of where our events that we are discussing today occurred. This area is remote and rugged. Help is not close nor is it fast in response. Most people who travel to this area understand that if they get into trouble, they are on their own.

On September 10th, of 1976, 25 year old, Alan Precup arranged for his backpacking trip into the preserve through the visitors office. He was up from Illinois and had quickly embraced the Alaskan lifestyle. He established his travel route and timeline so they would know where he was planning on visiting and when he would be back. When September 13th rolled around Mr. Precup did not meet officials at his pick up time and location. A search was immediately launched to locate him.

On September 16th, a party including Charles Jackson, Leilani Vega, Peter Talbot and Colin Milmer were hiking into the White Thunder Ridge area just above Muir Inlet. The group had been briefed on Mr. Precup and agreed to keep an eye out for him. They were only planning on staying a single night and being picked up on the 17th, but it made them a little more comfortable to know there were search crews in the area. The group began setting up their camp to prepare their soup lunch and hot chocolate. The fresh air rejuvenated them as they embraced their short lived experience to the fullest.

It was a little after 11:30 AM when Talbot noticed a brown dot approaching in the distance along the lake. It could be a caribou, or maybe a moose. It didn’t look big enough to be a moose though. Slowly the brown dot approached and the friends discerned it was a smallish brown bear. The group decided to take some proactive measures to make sure this bear knew they were there and were not prey. They grabbed pots and pans and anything else and clanged it together and yelled to frighten the bear. Each time they did this, the bear would stop and look around, seemingly confused, but then continue heading toward them after a few seconds.

The party now decides that the safest thing they could do is to pack up their food items and hike over to a shelf of cliffs, in a respectful attempt at getting out of the bear's intended travel route. He would probably just walk right past them and go be a bear somewhere else.

They labored to the cliff tops and found trees to cache their food in. As they looked down upon their camp, they could see the bear trashing their tents and biting anything he could find with human scent. Then the bear dropped its nose, like a bloodhound, onto the group's trail. The bear sniffed along the exact path they used to get to the safety of the cliffs. They immediately decided they needed to make more space between them and the bear so they headed further away from camp along the cliff. They looked back at their food stash, expecting to see the bear pulling in their food bags, but the bear kept his nose to the ground and followed their trail. He wasn’t interested in the food cache, but the people.