A Canadian man who was hiking in British Columbia says a pocket knife saved his life after a bear picked him up by his abdomen and carried him 50ft to a ditch before mauling him.
Colin Dowler was cycling on a logging road in the back-country 300km north of Vancouver on July 29 as he scouted out routes for himself and his brother to climb Mount Doogie Dowler, named after his grandfather.
But he turned a corner in the remote area 180km north of Powell River and ended up ‘too close’, only 100ft away, from the creature that nearly killed him when it gripped him in its mouth.
‘It was so much pain and weirdness, I could feel the hot blood,’ Dowler recalled to the BBC in a phone call from hospital. ‘I’m being rag-dolled, suspended by my flank by a bear carrying me.’
Colin Dowler was bitten in the abdomen, arm and thigh by a grizzly bear in British Columbia
The struggle began after the Qudra Island man realized he was ‘too close’ but hoping the grizzly bear would not pounce unprovoked, he was surprised when it walked towards him.
Even though the approach was at a regular pace, Dowler dismounted the bike and took his hiking poles from his backpack to create some distance. He admits he was ‘scared the whole time’ during the face-off in the Ramsay Arm area.
Dowler confessed that it did cross his mind to record the incident and thought: ‘Man, it would be cool to be catching this on video.’
But he didn’t get the opportunity because the bear ‘made a hard turn to the left’ behind him, making him feel ‘wildly uncomfortable’.
Dowler said it prompted him to poke the creature with a hiking poke while keeping the mountain bike in between them and when the animal tugged back he told it: ‘I know this is your territory, I’m just passing through – we don’t have to do this’.
The grizzly kept coming at him with ‘methodical, heavy swats’ before it carried him away by his abdomen and started to bite into his thighs.
The animal heavily swatted him during a struggle then ‘rag-dolled’ him 50ft away. The wounded bear was found and put down in the days following the incident. File image
Dowler said he tried playing dead but when that didn’t work he tried gouging out the bear’s eyes.
‘It grabbed me by the stomach and kind of pushed me down and dragged me toward the ditch maybe 50 feet,’ he said. ‘I tried eye gouging it away and it didn’t really work.
‘It sounded like it was grating my bones up.’
While he heard the animal’s teeth grating against his bones he struggled to reach into his pocket for a buck knife his father had given him two weeks prior but managed to plunge it into his neck and send blood gushing from the animal.
The trick worked and the bear backed off in the direction it came from, according to Dowler.
‘Somehow, I don’t know how I did it. I used both hands to pull underneath the bear to get to that knife, and I grabbed the knife out and opened it and put it in [my] hand and stabbed the bear in his neck,’ he told CBC.’ It let go of me immediately. It was bleeding quite badly. I wasn’t really sure if it was dying faster than I was.’
He then used the same knife to cut his shirt sleeve and tie it around his leg wound to cycle 7km to a logging camp.
He collapsed on arrival but received life-saving first aid from people there who he credits for saving his life.
‘They’re truly the heroes of the story because there’s no way I would have made it without [them],’ Dower said.
Camp cook Vito Giannandrea told CTV: ‘If you looked at his back where his kidney would be, it looked like a T-bone steak size of flesh was missing and you could see things that a person’s not supposed to be able to see.’
A medical team that arrived via air ambulance gave him a blood transfusion at the camp and he was then airlifted to a Vancouver hospital.
Via the wound to the neck, days later conservation officers found the grizzly – which is one of an estimated 15,000 in British Columbia – and put it down.
But the four officers found themselves in a spot of trouble.
‘It was definitely a little threatening,’ BC Conservation Officer Service Sgt. Dean Miller told CTV. ‘It actually probably stalked us for about half an hour while we were thinking we were stalking it – it was just happenstance that one of the officers actually picked up on the bear’s odor from behind us and alerted the second officer who then destroyed the bear.’
They believe human-bear conflicts occur mainly due to them developing a taste for human food after people improperly dispose of waste. But it’s rare they are killed because of these circumstances.
Colin Dowler was mountain biking in British Columbia when he ended up 100ft from the grizzly bear on July 29