Moore Outdoors With Chester Moore 10/18/24 Part 1-A man shares for the first time his harrowing bear attack

• Chester Moore interviews a man who is sharing for the first time his harrowing bear attack in part 1 of a 2 part series on surviving wildlife attacks.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to More Outdoors on News Talk five sixty KLVI.
This is Chester Moore tonight. We're going to have something
on the program I've never had before. My friend Ben
Verhill lives in Duboyce, Wyoming, and he was attacked by
a grizzly bear twenty five years ago, but he never
has shared the story in a public setting until now.

(00:22):
This summer at the National Big Horn Sheep Center. I
was speaking with my friend here and he mentioned that
he had been attacked and obviously survived. It's it's my
honor and privilege to have been on today and to
talk about something he's only spoken about among friends and
maybe at camps, but never on a public forum.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
So welcome to the program. Thank you all right, looking
forward to it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (00:48):
So, I think anyone who goes into the wild in
America probably has thought about a bear attack, you know.
I mean, that's something that people probably have in the
back of their mind. My dad would always read me
these stories from like Outdoor Life and Sports Affilies, like
horrible grizzly attack stories, right, And that's the first thing
he would get the magazines that we'd be reading the

(01:09):
ver attack stories, and my dad was so scared of
grizzlies he didn't want to go stay in a state
that had them.

Speaker 2 (01:17):
He just had this thing about grizzlies, and I'm like,
I want to go to see it. Grizzlies.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
Like, we're not camping, kid, We're not camping, you know,
but there's a mystique. And of course, you know, most
of America does not live around grizzlies. Most of America
does not hunt around grizzlies. So I want to kind
of enlighten all of us to live elsewhere if we
come into a you know, a Yellowstone Teton or this

(01:41):
kind of place that has grizzlies in the ecosystem.

Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yeah. Well, I was up on the east Fork of
the Wind River and we were just about as about
as far back in as you could get. And it
was a hunting trip with that I had been planning
for over a year. Little base information. I was working
on a humongous working ranch at the time, and it

(02:05):
was with a job like that, you get a day
off a month, and if you want to take time,
you got a trade time. So I basically worked every
day off for a year to go on this hunt.
And it was with a friend of mine. That that
I had just just kind of a new friendship. Knew
each other, but didn't knew each other well enough to

(02:27):
do like this, And and we were good friends, but
just I didn't know what kind of experience he had
with bears and backcountry stuff. But I knew that I
had plenty, So it was I knew it was going
to work. We I was on a borrowed horse, which
which is always a spooky thing, you know, you never know,

(02:48):
but it was my sister's horse. Yeah, And I worked
with that horse, and she worked with that horse every day.
You know, you pack them, you get them ready, you
get them, they know what the program is. And my buddy,
he had this little, this little white molly mule that
I don't think he lifted up a foot in preparation

(03:10):
for this. So she she had no idea what the
program was. And it was. It was kind of comedy
because as soon as we get out of the out
of the trailer and the and the truck, the first
thing you do, you know, after your trailer stocked for
that long, you take him to water, you know, right away,
and you get a a drink. I boarded that horse
on that big ranch for my sister because they moved,

(03:32):
and the deal was that in trade, she had to
let me take that horse to hunt camp. So that
was that was the trade. It was a very very
high dollar Tennessee walking mare which she had insured for
a lot of money. And then it was I was
nervous about it because again I had just worked, you know,
every day off for over a year to do this,

(03:53):
and I didn't want to spend it chasing some crazy
mare through the mountains, no, when I had to get
her back for my But so we were all in
there and we unload the critters, the horse and the mule.
We take them down to the crick and unfortunately, my
buddy's mule would not go one foot closer to the
water and she had to have water. And I grew

(04:16):
up on horses, and I comfortable with horses, and so
I thought, well, and I'll swing up on this mare
bareback right across the creek and show this mule that
you know, the water's not going to eat you. You know,
it's okay. Well, the one thing my sister neglect tell
me about that mayor was that I would be the
first person other than her to ever get on her.

(04:38):
Oh wow, Yeah, yeah, so I got about. I'm not
going to call it half loaded, you know. I had
a handful of withers and a hand on a rump,
pulled myself up there. I felt her load up and
I thought, oh boy, here we go. And she gave
me one little pop and I went sailing up in
the air, and in my mind I'm thinking, oh no,

(05:00):
you know she's gonna bolt and take off. I can't
let go with this heat rope, I can't let go.
So basically I was a fishing lure behind her for
about about fifty yards going up that crick bottom, which
is all cobblestone, and I'm getting pounded in the chest
in the back by hoofs and rocks, and I realized that,

(05:20):
you know, you better do something right now or you're
just not gonna come out well. So I kind of
spun myself around. And again, I'm only in Might in
my early twenties when this happened, so this was all
possible then. And I spun myself around me. Yeah yeah,
I'm not saying I could do this now, but I
spun myself around, dug in my bootheels and pulled myself

(05:41):
off the ground, jerked her head around, shut her down,
and I went walking back to my buddy like nothing happened.
And his eyes are as big as ends of coffee cups.
I mean, he's looking at me like, oh my god,
you're dead. And I was looking at him like now
I'm fine. He says, you need me to drive you
the hospital, and I said, absolutely not. You know, everything's great. No,
look at your left elbow. So you know, I didn't

(06:04):
feel a thing. So I glanced down at my left
elbow and I had it not on that thing about
the size of an egg, and it was already black
and blue. Wow. Yeah, pretty sure I chipped a bone
in there. But again, I worked every day off for
that long. I wasn't there was nothing going to stop
me from going into this spot. And it was the
spot that my dad told me about a long time

(06:25):
ago where he wrote in and this is right before
I was born, that he went in there and he
and his brother in law killed two massive bulls and
had just this beautiful, awesome experience in the back country.
And it was kind of a camp that had an
old buffalo skull hanging in it. So I wanted to
go to that buffalo skull camp and I wanted to
experience that that coolness that my dad got that he

(06:47):
was telling me about, and the fact that you're hunting
elk that never see people, so you can talk to
him and they talk to you back, and there's you know,
you're pick and choosing your bowl, and it's not the
place you go in just shooting elk. I was going
in there looking for Grandpa Bull. I mean, I wanted
a great, big one. So anyway, we go walking back

(07:08):
to camp and I'm thinking, oh boy, you know this
is going to be a long night. You know, nothing
hurt yet, And it wasn't until the little adrenaline rush
but wore off that I started to feel that elbow.
And I'd like to say it was an easy night
in that tent because we kind of we were going
to pitch a camp in that in the trailhead one
night before we went in, and it was one of

(07:28):
the longer nights I've ever spent in a tent. I
couldn't even blink without that dang arm hurting. But I
was gonna tough it out. So now how far are you?
How far? How far off are you from civilization? Here? Well,
at that point, I mean this turnoff is two hundred
miles from the nearest Inner State Highway and when you
when you turn off onto that gravel road, you're going

(07:49):
twenty five or twenty five to thirty miles to the trailhead.
So we were way back in there. And then when
you get to the trailhead, you're going in another tent
miles plus, So it is about as remote. I mean,
there are a lot of places that are more remote
than that, but this this one, it's it's it's God's country,

(08:10):
it's it's raw apsro come mountain range, and it's it's
tough stuff. So you really should know what you're doing.
And when with my search and rescue background and hunting background,
I was just stoked. I was I was so ready
for it. But so the next morning we get up
and our plan was we were gonna saddle our critters,

(08:32):
horse and mules, saddle them up and we use what's
called saddle paniard, which you drape the saddle paniard over
your saddle and you pack all your stuff on your
animal and then you you you lead your animal to
camp and when you get there, you got a riding
horse or you got a ride and mule to go
out and and see a little bit more country. So
so we we set out and and we had that

(08:54):
probably I think we had probably twelve or fourteen crit
crossings between where we started and where we had to
get And my buddy's mule was still terrified of the water,
so she air jordaned every trick. She would just sail
over it and jump the water. And I'm thinking, wow,
this is an athletic animal, you know, this is this

(09:15):
is pretty amazing. My sister's good old mayor. She trakes
right through it, you know, no problems. I'm thinking eventually
that that little mule figured out and walked through the water,
but she never really did. So I've got my at
the time, she was probably eight years old, she was
just prime. I had a chocolate female, a chocolate lab
female that went with me everywhere, and her name was Sweetie.

(09:38):
And we're walking up the trail, you know, the horse
to mule, my buddy and myself and my dog, and
we get way back in there. We'd gotten almost all
the way back to camp just kind of I'd never
been there before, but I knew where it was.

Speaker 1 (09:50):
When we come back on more outdoors, we'll get more
into this really intense story about a grizzly attack and
an incredible will to survive. Welcome Back Tomorrow Outdoors on
News Talk five sixty. Klv I downloaded the podcast of
this program via the iHeartRadio app, or go to KLVI

(10:11):
dot com and click on the podcast link and go
to more outdoors. Get this program and many more programs
dating back several years. Continuing our conversation with Ben Verhill
of his incredible encounter, attack and survival of a grizzly attack.

Speaker 2 (10:27):
And we had just made what our last crick crossing,
so we're kind of gathering ourselves back up after the
little rodeo and getting everything settled, and my my dog
takes over, takes off towards the willows uptrail, and I'm
just kind of watching her go, and I'm looking and
I can't believe what I'm seeing because out of the

(10:48):
willows walks the biggest day in grizzly bear I've ever
seen in my life, and I've seen lots, it's a
common thing for most people. I spend a lot of
time outside, so I see a few bears and this
one was a brute, I mean, absolute monster, and it
had a yellow ear tag in its ear so, which
which comes into play later in the story. Immediately, my

(11:12):
buddy locks up and he chambers his Marlin four fifty
lever action, which is wicked overkill, but it helps him
sleep better. He grew up in Miami, Florida, and it
made him. It made him feel better about life. And
you know, I've I can't say, I've got a three
hundred weather be in the scabbard and a forty four
magnimum my hip, and you know, no no stranger to

(11:35):
what's going to happen. And I get my dog called back,
and I look over at my buddy just as the
color just strains from his face. He just loses all color.
He's got that that rifle cocked and locked, and he's
aiming at that bear. And I've seen him shoot, so
if he pulled the trigger, he would kill that bear.
I mean, four to fifty Marlin would shoot through hi lengthways.
I mean it would crush him, even that big bear.

(11:58):
So immediately, you know, I've got one broke arm, and
I've got my forty four magnum in my right hand
and my lead rope in my left hand, which I
mean it was it was okay, you know, I could,
I could manage, but I don't know what's gonna happen next.

(12:18):
And about that time, that bear stands up and he
looks at us and he drops back down to all
fours and then he cuts the distance in half and
he's even closer now. So we're just kind of standing there,
holding our ground, and I'm looking over at my buddy, thinking,
oh my gosh, he's gonna shoot. He's gonna shoot. This
isn't good because we're right on the trail and if

(12:38):
he shoots that bear. Now, there was no we were
not in danger yet. I mean, we were just face
to face with him. You know, he wasn't far. He
was probably about twenty yards and closing, but it was
he wasn't challenging us, he wasn't threatening us, and we

(12:58):
at that point, you don't know if they're just going
to turn and walk off. You don't know if they're
going to charge. A lot of times the charge is
a bluff with a run here the daylights out of
you and then take off. But I'm looking over at
him and his trigger fingers twitching and his whole body's shaken,
and I realized that I'm going to have to do
something western here, or this is going to get out

(13:19):
of hand. So I'm stepping over, trying to get in
front of my buddy, telling them, hey, camera out of
my backpack, my video camera out of my backpack. We
got to get video of this. That's the biggest grizzly
bear I've ever seen. So it worked. I could care
less about getting video of that big bear. I just
needed him to I needed to distract him so he
wasn't going to pull that trigger because if he did,

(13:41):
we're gonna have to pack out. We're gonna have to
get the fish and wildlife game fish, they're gonna investigate,
and we were in the wrong, so it was not
a good situation. So anyway, I'm standing over there, and
about that time, the bear starts making really aggressive behavior.
He starts clicking his bottom jaw together. When a bear,
when a bear that big does that, it's loud, I

(14:03):
mean it's and then he starts throwing that massive head
back and forth, and it was it was just all
the signs you don't want to see. So then I
knew I had to do something else crazy or he
was going to run right to the middle of us.
And the amazing part was see the wind was right

(14:25):
at our backs. It was blowing up the canyon because
the mule and the horse are just standing there.

Speaker 1 (14:31):
Yeah, I was gonna ask about because seems like I
haven't heard the horse run off, the mule run off
or whatever.

Speaker 2 (14:35):
No. No, it was obvious that neither one of them
had ever had a bear encounter. This was no different
to them than seeing another horse or something. They Yeah,
at that point, they couldn't smell him, they could see him,
and they I'm not sure they knew what it was.
But when he started making that aggressive body movements and stuff,

(14:57):
I knew that I'm going to have to go and
try and bluff this big bugger. And that's when I
made my one the mistake that I will admit to.
But I swung that forty four into my left hand
with my lead rope in it, and that arm is
that elbows busted and it's not like hanging, but there
was something chipped in there. Because I could feel it.
I could still bend it, but at night it would

(15:19):
lock up and it was no it was to me,
it was no big deal, but it probably was. And
so I walked right out past my buddy with my
lead rope in my left hand, my pistol in that
same hand, horses following along, dog's following along, and I
reached down into the crick bottom. I start picking up
these cobblestones about the size of the baseball, and I

(15:41):
just start absolutely clobbering that thing with them. I mean,
I hit him every throw and yelling and screaming, and
when you're in that situation, you know, I embarrassed to say,
but the only thing that come out was profanity. So
I cuss that bear up one side down the other,
and he just looked at me and blinked like it
really or yes, yeah, that's the best you got. Yeah. Well,

(16:05):
I kept picking up rocks, and on that last throw
I got, I hit that bear right in the eye socket,
and that hurt. You could tell it got his attention
because he snorted and shook his head and backed up
a few steps, like WHOA, what was that? You know?
And about that time he walked out around us, and
he crossed the creek below us, and he hit the

(16:26):
trail behind us and just kept on going. But about
that time the mule and the horse smelled him and
they they pitched a fit right there. I mean, It
was borderline yard sale. And if you've ever been around
pack animals and backcountry hunting, when your critter blows up
to the point where it bucks every single thing off

(16:47):
its back and spreads it out across the creek bottom,
it looks like a yard sale. So we almost had it,
but we didn't. We kept going and I look over
at my buddy like, yeah, you know, this is good,
let's go, and he's looking at me like, man, we
can't go up there, And I tell you know, what
do you mean he's leaving? You know, this place is huge.

(17:08):
There's chances he won't be back in this valley for
two weeks. So we're going, you know, let's go. So
we walked up about another hour and we found a
spot and we pitched this beautiful camp, and we set
up a twine and makeship pole fence to keep the
horses in, and we just built this beautiful camp because
we were two days before opener and we had a

(17:28):
whole day to build this awesome camp. And we built
the camp. Finally opening day comes along and it was
just awesome. I mean, it was everything I dreamed of.
My age, my physical fitness from working on that ranch
every day, seven days a week. I was in incredible shape,
and I got to see the top of every single

(17:48):
peak that I've been staring at from way out. I've
always wanted to see them. So we're out hunting and
we're out hiking, and I'm passing up big bulls every day.
I'm seeing big bulls every day. The bull got into
the first day, which I wish I would have got,
which was a heartbreaker. I had him broadside at two
hundred yards just as the rising sun came up behind

(18:10):
him skyline. So I had to watch that big bugger
walk off because I could not see him through my scope.
But anyway, went back to camp and my buddy and
I were kind of hunting separate. I had my dog
with me, and she was just awesome. You know, she
was right at my heels. I could lay my pack down,
tell her to stay, and I could go hunt for
two hours come back She's laying right there by that backpack.

(18:32):
I mean, she was an amazing dog. But a few
days go by and we're just kind of hunting elk,
and one evening we're out on a big ridge and
I hear gunshots, So I figured, all right, a buddy
gun nelk. So I went over there and I start
hollering for him and hollering for him, and he won't
answer me. And he won't answer me. And I don't
know if it was a wind or whatever, but he

(18:53):
he got nervous and built a fire when he was
quartering out this elk. And he should have paid a
little closer attention where he built that fire, because we
went back, you know, met him in camp and he's like, yeah, yeah,
I got an elk, And I'm still thinking, you know,
why wouldn't you answer me? But anyway, the next morning,
before light, we went up there and we brought his

(19:14):
mule and I brought that mare with and you know,
the fire was just kind of smoldering just a little bit,
and didn't you know, we had a huge task to
do because we had to pack that elk all the
way back to Two Boys because warm, we had no
way to cool it. It had out of the mountains
that day or we'd lose the meat. So we packed
his elk all the way back to Two Boys, which

(19:37):
is over ten miles down trail, almost thirty miles of gravel,
and then twelve miles back to town and got the
elk cooled out, hung out on ice, and returned to
camp in the same day. Wow, so it was Yeah,
it was a marathon.

Speaker 1 (19:52):
Well, we come back on more Outdoors. Ben is going
to encounter a grizzly bear and you might be surprised
exactly which bear he encounters. Welcome back Tomorrow Doors on
news Talk five sixty KLV.

Speaker 2 (20:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:07):
You can follow my blog at higher Calling dot net.
Also find out about our ministry work with children giving
them amazing wildlife encounters. In fact, we just returned from
the Smoky Mountains of a blog up about that. Now
we're getting into the intense part of the story where
my friend Ben Verhill survived a grizzly bear attack. We

(20:28):
got to killed one hundred Texans right there. We'd be
like this, we don't know how to hunt like that.

Speaker 2 (20:33):
Oh man, ten thousand feet. It's it's a lot of work. Yeah.
But so we get back to camp and I saddle
up that mayor and I'm like, all right, I'm gonna
go see some country. Work gets dark and have you
ever been on have you ever been on a Tennessee
walker in the mountains that's used to it. It's it's
a heck of an experience. We go flying up this
mountain and I get all the way up there where

(20:54):
I'd been hoping that great big bull would come back
to and I look across where he killed his elk,
and I could see flames. I mean, I can see
big flames, and I mean, you know background info. There
was not a whisper of wind, which was unusual for
this area. It's it's called wind River for a good reason. Yeah.

(21:14):
So I go loping back into camp and he'd already
seen the fire and he was there, and I was like, man,
what in the world have you done? And you started
a forest fire, buddy, And he's getting ready to break down,
and he just had his firstborn son, and he's thinking, well,
he's not going to college cause if you know, you
they prove that you did this, you're going to be
making pavements for a long time because you're going to

(21:36):
be libel. And I'm thinking, you know, you know, buddy,
we got two choices. Yeah, we can ride out and
get the for service and you're going to be paying
bills for a while, or you and I go up
there tonight and put it out because it's no wind,
we can do it. And I had a little trifled
Coleman camp shovel. He had this sweet little axe, and

(21:58):
we got the critters and in the makeshift Craal went
up there and it's dark now, so we're fighting this
thing in the dark. So I took that folding camp
shovel and we probably had maybe a thousand square feet burning, yeah,
And then I told him, I said, you tip over it,
because we had lodge poles that were six inches in

(22:19):
diameter burning and it was you know, it burned into
the duff and then it would come out. So I
started digging fire line all the way around this thing.
So I dug about a five foot trench wide and
all the way down to dirt all the way around it.
While he's chopping these trees down into the center of it,
and we're choking and gagging on smoke, and before you
know it, it's daylight. I mean it just I just

(22:40):
kind of blurred out the whole night because we were
going at it like you know, possessed badgers, just trying
to get this thing out panic mode basically. And by
ten o'clock the next morning, we had smoldering ashes and
we'd done something that probably wasn't even possible we got
that fire put out, and you know, now I know
like a campfire's armpit. Basically, I'm not going to get break.

(23:05):
So we go back to camp and I jump in
the creek. I take a big long bath and clean up.
And granted, that water up there is cold because it's
it's only out of the ground. It's only been out
of the ground for a couple hours, so it's really cold. Though.
It was a quick bath, but one to get that
smell off because I was useless with that smell. So

(23:28):
I sent my buddy back up there to baby sit
the fire all day. And I was thinking at this point,
this is like day oh boy, this would have been
probably day eight or No. Eight probably, and just having

(23:49):
the time of our lives. So I decided, Okay, you know,
my elbow hurts like heck, we put out a forest fire.
I think it's time to shoot an elk can go home.
So I took off up the valley and walked all
the way up there, and I got up on the
canyon wall and I'm looking down into these huge canyons
and cathedral basins. I mean, it's just incredibly raw, beautiful country.

(24:13):
And I spot this sort of elk has this nice
bull in it, so I sneak down there make a
perfect shot. The bulldyed in his bed. He didn't even
know what happened. So it took me thirty minutes to
walk down there. It's just so steep and gnarly. And
I get there, you know, when I shoot, all the
other elk take off and they go up into this
basin and they kind of taking their time getting out
of there, and they're tipping rocks over, and it's still

(24:35):
just as calm as you could be. You know, you
could hear everything. So as I'm working on this elk,
getting it all bumed out, I'm getting it all ready
to go to bring the horse and mule back to it.
That morning. Oh, just to back up a little bit,
I thought, you know, we thought, well, let's load as
much of this elk on this mule as we humanly can.

(24:56):
I want to see it jump a crick loaded like that.
But no joke. We put the whole elk boned out
on that mulley, on that mule. And I'm thinking, all right, Bud,
let's see you do it. And I was wrong. He
can still jump the day. That's a whole elk on
his back. It was amazing, all right. So going back
to where I was, I'm I'm working on this elk,

(25:18):
and I'm a fourth generation butcher, so it doesn't take
me long to break an elk down to the point
where it's ready to go on a horse. And so
I've got my backstraps, my tender loins, parts of my
round all in my backpack. The head is all skinned out.
I'm not going to mount this bull. I didn't cape him,
so I just basically skinned his head out, took all
that off, and I've got that thing kind of in

(25:41):
my hands or on the pack. And the whole time
I'm doing it, you know, it probably takes thirty five
minutes to do all that. I can hear rocks tumbling down,
and I'm thinking, man, those elks sure are taking their
time getting out of here and get up, you know,
and looking up into these basins looking for him. And
about the time I finish up, I can still hear it.

(26:02):
So I get my binoculars out and I start glassing
all these kind of avalanche shoots and rock cuts coming
down and up inside one of them, about two hundred
yards away, I see these two last year's grizzly cups
and they're looking at me and they're kind of playing
around each other and coming down the draw kind of
you know, slow but steady, And right away I'm thinking,

(26:24):
oh boy, where's mama, you know, because I would rather
deal with that eight hundred pounds bore than mama because
there's there's no rhyme to reason there. There there's no
bluff charge, there's no prediction she gonna get you. So
right away I start glassing hard and I finally start
seeing pieces of her coming through the rocks, and she

(26:44):
comes out and she's still a couple hundred yards away.
But I realize that I got to get the heck
out of dodge because I'm pretty safe once I get
away from this elk carcass, because she's gonna take they
won't know which bums me out because that's you know,
that's that's seventy five percent of the elk that she's
going to get what I took, and that's my winter

(27:06):
meat supply. And but I picked up that huge, heavy
pack with my right arm, threw it over my shoulder
and I start taking. I start walking right down the crip,
getting out of there, thinking I could do it, but
I didn't know it. I didn't know what the bottom
of that canyon looked like because I came in clear
up on the wall and I made it about one
hundred and fifty yards, turned a corner and here's a

(27:28):
straight up waterfall, I mean, completely boxed canyon with a
little waterfall trickling off there. And I'm thinking, oh boy,
you know, do I backtrack and try and come down?
Go up the same way I came in. But if
I backtrack, I'm gonna have to shoot three bears because
there's no way around them. They're in the bottom on
that elk, and I got to go I am, and

(27:48):
she's not gonna let that fly. So I kind of
start eyeball on this waterfall, and you know it was
it was probably twelve feet. But if you've ever worked
in construction, feats plenty far to fall. I mean it's
gonna hurt you, you know. So every night in camp
you hang everything in trees to sleep. It just you know,

(28:10):
all scent is hung up off the ground, anything that
treats in it, anything that would remotely smelly. So on
the top loop of this the top loop of this backpack,
I've got fifty feet of parachute cord and it's tied
on there and tucked in that top packet. It just
kind of lives there. So I'm looking at this thing,
and I always bring a pair of leather gloves to
the mountains and they're always handy. So I'm looking at

(28:33):
this drop and I'm looking at those big beautiful elkorns, thinking,
oh man, it's gonna shatter when it hits the bottom.
I'm gonna bust off all kinds of times. But I
didn't know how deep the water was. I didn't know
what the bottom looked like. So I gave her a
few kind of swings out and I just let it
drop straight down, and then I tried to squeeze and

(28:53):
slow it down. And when it hit it made a
big splash and I saw sand come up. So I realized,
all right, this is not a solid rock bottom. There's
some silt down there. I got a chance to jump this,
So I sat down on my butt kind of did
a hail Mary yeah, and I jumped. But I couldn't
just drop. I had to clear the pack which five

(29:16):
foot antlers on it want to get shabobbed on the
way down, So I had to jump over the pack
into the water, and the water was about probably twelve
inches deep and then sand. So when I hit, I
let myself crouch into a ball and I absorb as
much pressure as I could, and I'm kind of laying
there on the side thinking, all right, did I break
an ankle? Did I break anything? And I stood up.

(29:40):
Everything was okay. I kind of felt around and I
was like, oh my gosh, I can't believe that. I
kind of wiped my brow, thinking geez, that was close.
That was just too close. So now my backpack instead
of weigh in one hundred and twenty five pounds, it
probably weigh one hundred and fifteen.

Speaker 1 (29:56):
When we come back on More Outdoors, will have the
conclusion of the bear attack story from my friend Ben Folks.
It's intense. Welcome back Tomorrow Outdoors on News Top five
sixty klv I. This is Chester More continuing our bear
attack story and we're about to get into that intense

(30:17):
moment in this epic wilderness adventure.

Speaker 2 (30:21):
And it's getting dark. I mean, it's right on the
edge of dark and I had I had a ways
to go, but I just start trucking. It was downhill
and about the time I realized that, you know, I'm
not going to make it back to camp before dark.
I'm still half mile out and it's pitch black. It
all hit me at once. It was like, I'm so

(30:42):
tired from not sleeping the night before and packing that
elk all the way back to town and back, and
it just hit me. I did not have it in
me to stop and get my headlamp out of my pack.
I couldn't. I couldn't put it back on again if
I had to, So it wasn't you know, it was starlight.
So I just kept going. I knew where I was.

(31:03):
I could stay on the trail. All I had to
do was walk into camp. You know, another half mile
and I'm walking along up on this little bench off
the creek, and I've got a three hundred weather be
in my hands. I've got thumb on safety, finger on
the trigger guard, and there's one in the two. And
that's just how you walk out grizzly country. And all

(31:24):
of a sudden, I get hit from behind chester with
so much force that it's hard to I mean, I
played football, I being growing up in Wyoming. I did.
I did some fighting, and it's I can't say that
I've ever been hit by a car or three NFL

(31:45):
linemen at the same time. But when it hit me,
I flew in the air. I mean, I think, and
I don't really blame the bear, because I honestly think
that he mistook me for a wounded bull elk because
he got the antlers and a smell and everything on.
You absolutely down a canyon, the wind is blowing up,
so he can't I'm sure he could smell the blood
and he could see those big old white tie tips coming.

(32:07):
And I think he mistook me for a wounded out
because the amount of pressure he hit me with would
have been enough to knock a seven hundred pound elk
off its feet. So he hit me. I just went
straight up airborne, and when that happened, thumb thumb the
safety off and touched one off while I was in
the air. And my rifle has a muzzle break on it,

(32:31):
so when that happens, if you ever seen a rifle
go off in the dark, it shoots a flame about
sixty feet barrel. And so when we hit the ground,
we just kind of both crumpled up and bounced, and
then the bench I was walking on was scree all
the way down to the water's edge, probably another ten feet,

(32:53):
and I wish I could remember. My brain blocked it out.
I don't remember the fall, remember hitting the bottom and
the bear landing right on top of me. So the
bear went on top of you already. Soon as you're down,
he's all outlaw on you. Yep. I like to you know,
I like to think I got a couple of licks
in on the way to the bottom. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(33:13):
that heavy backpack and those antlers. I just kind of
went right onto it and it kind of laid me
back over and my head was just hanging up out
of the water, and I had a paw on each
side of my ear, and the bear's muzzle was about
ten inches off mine. And if it would have been daylight,
I could have looked right up his nose because he

(33:35):
was close laying on top of me, rifle still in hand.
There's nothing I could do. He had me pinned to
the top of that backpack, and I'm thinking, oh my gosh,
this is it. This is the end of it, you know,
this is how I go out. And for whatever reason,
I like to think that maybe the elkhorn stuck him
a few times on the way to the bottom because

(33:57):
but I don't remember, you know, I don't my brain.

Speaker 1 (34:00):
And it probably happened a lot faster even than you think.
It probably was such an instantaneous thing.

Speaker 2 (34:05):
Oh absolutely, it was just a flash. And I was
in the water with the bear on top of me,
and he just I couldn't. I couldn't. I could see
his shadow. But when he grabbed a hold of me,
I looked down and there was that yellow ear tank. Mm.
It was Bubba that got me. Unfair, the same bear

(34:28):
he had a house.

Speaker 1 (34:29):
Had that fair come from where you left him to
where you're seeing him now.

Speaker 2 (34:34):
Well, he was where we saw him the first time.
He was a mile below our camp, and now he
was half mile above it. So he spent a week
somewhere else, and then he come back. I just happened
to bump into him in the dark, coming up out
of the with an elk on my back, and he's
looking down at me, and I figure and he just

(34:56):
snorts right in my face, snot hits me, and then
he bolts. He turns and pushes off with both front
feet and ran right back up where we had just
fallen from and abandoned. Because I think he realized that,
oh my gosh, this isn't an elk, that's a person.
You know that this is not what I thought it was.

(35:17):
I'm going to get away for a second. Yeah, But
when he did that, I don't know if it was
one paw or two paws. It got me right in
the face, and it drove my head into the rock
that was right behind me and knocked me right out.
So when I came to, he was gone. You know,
I came to, everything kind of came flooding back into me,

(35:41):
and I don't really I don't remember how long. I
don't know how long I laid there, but my buddy's
in camp half mile away. Oh and another thing that
kind of would have avoided this whole thing is when
we packed my buddy's elf back to town, I left
my lab with my parents because she had already spent

(36:01):
like six sleepless nights or seven sleepless nights in camp
because she would stay up so we could sleep and
let us know if we had a bear in camp,
which we were around bears every day. Yea, excuse me.
So I jump up to my feet because adrenaline. That's
good stuff right there, Holy good stuff, and there's something

(36:23):
about a head injury that makes you mean. Because when
I got to my feet, I was furious. I was
just angry, and granted I didn't have a live round
in my rifle, so I drew my side arm, which
was a forty four magnum and where I was, I
knew there wasn't a living soul within fifteen miles of us.

(36:47):
So I shoot five shots out into the dark, saving
one round somehow. And it wasn't for the noise. I
didn't know where the bear was. I wanted to make noise.
But I also when I did that, I could see,
oh lit up a little bit. Yeah, yeah, it lit
it up. I could see if he was standing there
ready to hit me again, and he wasn't. So I

(37:07):
had the presence of mind to drop in a speedloader,
reload my pistol, and take off towards camp. Like I
didn't even feel that one hundred and fifty pounds pack.
I jumped to my feet, fired my pistol, and took
off running torture.

Speaker 1 (37:20):
He didn't leave the pack there. You decided you're bringing
the pack with you. You just you probably didn't even
think about that. You probably just did.

Speaker 2 (37:26):
It right yep. I couldn't even feel it was on me.
I mean, I shot to my feet, fired my pistol,
and took off towards camp, yelling to my buddy, who
brought his dog back, which was a Rottweiler, and I'm yelling,
bring your dog, bring your dog. I got hit by
a bear. Bring your dog. Get up here. I'm running
in break. You know, he can hear me yelling, but

(37:47):
adrenaline is amazing. And I actually hit camp just as
he was walking out of it. He had to get
his pack out of the tree he had to get
and then he had a few things to grab before
you run into a situation where a bear's chase. I
didn't know it. Come to find out, the bear was
probably long gone, but I didn't know that, so you

(38:09):
don't know. We get into camp. I get into camp
and I dropped down and my face is just pounding.
My head is pounding. When I look down, his mouth
was buried into my right side, and I'm thinking, oh
my god, what's hanging out? You know what I mean,
because when when he hit me and poolballed me, all
he got was shirt, skin and backpack strap. If if

(38:33):
he would have hit me different he'd have taken three
ribs right out, I'd have put out right there, and
that'd have been the end of me. But we're sitting there,
and at the time, I was a wilderness first responder,
wilderness EMT and had everything we needed to treat probably
two mal victims with us. We were very well prepared.

(38:54):
And the first thing I asked, my buddy, is is
my face still there? You know? Because it felt like
he ripped my face off when he hit me with
his pop and I had I had a few I had,
I had marks, you know, I mean, I was my
face was covered in blood and my clothes was covered
in blood, but being soaked and wet, I couldn't tell
where the drips were coming from because I landed in

(39:16):
the crick So we assessed the wounds, and I had
gotten so lucky. I mean, I had some holes in
my scalp line from where the claws went in when
he pushed off, and and then the most righteous hematoma
pinch hickey you've ever seen on my right side, with
three tooth holes in it. And I got so lucky

(39:41):
because he never really got me. He just he got
shirt and skin and he bashed me in the face,
ran me over and then we took a tumble to the.

Speaker 1 (39:51):
Crick What an amazing story and we will continue this
story in next week's episode. So make sure and Cat's
out hero on News Talk five to sixty, KLVII six
to seven pm. Follow me at the Chester Morning Instagram.
God bless and have a great outdoors weekend.