Alaska Bear Attack | Into The Wilds with Caroline Van Hemert | 3
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From Wondery, I'm Mike Corey, and this is Against the Odds. Over the last two episodes, we've told the story of Bart P. Chul's encounter with a brown bear protecting her cub in the wilderness near Haines, Alaska. The mother bear mauled Bart, but he survived the attack. It's one example of the encounters that can happen when bears and humans share the same habitat.

Alaska-based writer and wildlife biologist Caroline Van Hemert wrote about Bart's story in her article, It's No Fun to Wake a Sleeping Bear, for Outside Magazine. Her book, The Sun is a Compass, chronicles her 4,000-mile journey into the Alaskan wilderness. Caroline is with us today to discuss Bart's story and her own experiences encountering bears in the wild.

Caroline Van Hemert, welcome to Against the Odds. Yeah, thanks for having me here. I'm excited to talk to you. So I grew up in the forests of Canada, Canada.

Northeastern Canada. And I know growing up in the woods, you get to encounter all sorts of creatures out there. But for you growing up in Alaska, it's a little bit different out there, isn't it? I'd love to hear about your story about growing up over there and what kind of encounters you had with wildlife. Yeah, so I grew up kind of on the edge of wilderness and actually Alaska's biggest city, which is Anchorage. My parents moved here not too long before I was born.

and they were pretty big adventurers themselves. And so our weekends were spent in the woods, in the mountains, exploring. And I have to admit, I was a bit of an unwilling adventurer as a child, but like it or not, I was out in the backcountry most weekends and most days. And even around town, we have lots of encounters with wildlife from moose to bears. And yeah, so it was certainly part of my experience growing up. I knew that

We were not the only large animals on the landscape. I think as a kid as well, you don't really appreciate how incredible outdoors is until you become an adult and realize big city life is nothing compared to what the forests are like, you know? Yeah.

Yeah, very true. I think, yeah, I was probably 20 by the time I realized and appreciated all the adventures my parents had given me over the years and really wanted to get back into it myself. And that's ultimately how I found my way back to wildlife biology was my roots in Alaska and spending time outdoors in these amazing landscapes that I call home today.

Shortly, we're going to talk a bit about Bart's story and your own experiences in the Alaskan wilderness. But first, to kick us off, I thought since I know a lot of our listeners are probably interested in this, we're going to do some bear encounters 101. So when someone does see a bear, if someone sees a bear, what really should you do?

So I know there are a lot of simple answers, and I'm going to give the medium simple answer because it isn't straightforward. Bears are like any animal individuals. And so one rule for all bears does not hold true. But I think the biggest thing I can impart to listeners is the desire and the need to diffuse a situation. So you might hear for a black bear, do this for a brown bear, a grizzly bear, do something else. But in general, you're really trying to read the animal's behavior. And for the most part,

understanding the bears feel more threatened than we do is, I think, a really important place to start. And so as much as you can kind of co-operate

quiet, calm, back away, let them know that you're human, raise your hands over your head, talk to them, but don't start shouting at them because like any defensive encounter, you're going to have a bear get more riled up if they're being shouted out in most cases. And then, you know, there are rare encounters where a bear might be predatory or might be perceiving humans as food. And maybe we'll have a chance to talk about that a little bit more later, but those truly are the exceptions and not the rules for encounters with bears.

What should you never do? Run. Run. I heard somewhere you should carry pepperoni in your pocket and throw it the direction of the bear and run away. Is that true? I don't know.

Always a terrible idea. Don't ever carry pepperoni in your pocket. Yeah. The sort of like bait and switch is probably not a good plan for a large carnivore or a large animal like a bear. They don't fall for it and they run really fast. So we might think of them as being, you know, kind of slow and lackadaisical, but they are anything but slow. They can run as fast as a car, you know, can drive down the highway and you don't want to be on the receiving end of that. So outrunning them is not a strategy that I would recommend. Yeah.

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You were living in Haines, Alaska when Bart crossed paths with the bear. I was actually in Juneau just last year and was struck by the depth of the wilderness there. And Haines, I believe, is just a bit farther north than Juneau, correct?

Yeah, it is. It's farther north and it's also about a tenth of the size. So there's about 2,500 people who live there, you know, give or take seasonally. It's a very hard place to get to. You either have to take a ferry or a small plane flight. So really spotty depending on the weather. Or

or you can drive through Canada. So the Canadian border is about 40 miles up the, call it a highway, but it's a two-lane road. So it's the north end of the Inside Passage that some people might be familiar with, which is a sort of a long marine waterway that stretches from Puget Sound all the way up to the northern end of southeast Alaska. It's a really dramatic landscape where mountains meet sea. And just behind the edges of town, there is Parkland,

Parkland, a national forest, and a whole lot of wilderness. When people picture Alaska, maybe they think of tundra or maybe soaring mountains or pine trees. But from my experience near there, it's actually a temperate rainforest. Is it correct in Haines as well?

Yeah, that's right. It's part of the largest impact temperate rainforest in the world. We get very big trees. We get a lot of precipitation, as the rainforest name implies. It's a really heavily glaciated landscape as well. So just behind town and up from the peaks that you can see from the water are lots and lots of glaciers that connect.

to Glacier Bay National Park, for example, and then into the interior of Canada. And what draws people like Bart to such remote places like that? I think exactly what we were just describing. There's something very powerful and humbling about being a small person on a very big landscape. I think the community is also a draw. Like many small towns, it's a very close-knit community. And

People rely on themselves and on each other. But I think that that strong sense of wilderness and the ability to get out into these truly remarkable landscapes, just literally out the back door, is a big appeal for people like Bart and people like ourselves who have also been drawn there. And how did you first hear about Bart's story?

Well, I actually saw the Coast Guard helicopter fly overhead that was at the time carrying Bart, which I didn't know until soon thereafter. So I live with my family seasonally. And over the course of the year, when the Bart's encounter happened, we were there for about 16 months straight. We're about 12 miles boat ride from Hainstown. So we're fairly remote.

And there's air traffic, but not a whole lot in winter and especially that time of night, which was getting to be dusk. And so when a helicopter flies overhead, we certainly take notice. And then not long after that, I had gotten a message from a friend that Bart had been mauled. And that was kind of the first that I learned about the incident. I heard you and your kids went to go speak to Bart after the attack, right? Yeah, that's correct. He had been medevaced.

to Juneau for medical care. And then this was probably about a week or two later when we boated into town and sat down and met with him and heard about his story. What kind of shape was he in when you saw him? He looked better than I thought he might. He was pretty heavily bandaged around his ear and one of his hands, his wrist was bandaged. He had a couple of very large gouges in the back of his neck, but he

all in all, he was in good spirits and was intact. What did you guys talk about when you went to go meet him? We talked about what had happened. But before we got there, we talked about how he felt about the bear and how relieved he was that the bear hadn't subsequently been chased down or hunted or made to pay for

Which says a lot about his character, doesn't it? Absolutely. And I think it says a lot about his respect for living in bear country and kind of what that entails in terms of our own responsibilities as humans.

as well as his deep, deep love for a place that he worked very hard to call home. I heard you gave him something at that meeting? Yeah, I did. It was a bear tooth, an incisor. And there's a little backstory to how we ended up having that bear tooth. And that explains a bit about why I was interested in the story as well. So it had been a very tough year for bears in Haines. There'd been very few food resources available to them. We had horrible returns of salmon, bovine

Both chum and pink salmon, which are very important food resources for bears, had plummeted. There weren't many berries and they were essentially starving. And so bears being opportunistic and in this case hungry, were looking to other sources to find food. And so they were wandering into town.

And unfortunately, in many cases, getting shot. And the story about our bear and the tooth that I brought for Bart was that not that this bear was causing any problems, but it was presumably also a victim of not having enough to eat. And so we'd found it just a couple of weeks before Bart's encounter.

about a mile and a half from our cabin. And we were skiing along, my husband, myself, and our two boys. And we came across this freshly dead bear carcass that had been scavenged by wolves and coyotes. And you could still see blood staining the snow around it.

When we looked more closely, it was essentially just the skeleton besides a couple of paws that were intact. And inside the roof of its mouth, where there was still some tissue, there were porcupine quills. And so the bear had obviously either tried to eat a porcupine or had a run-in with a porcupine and later, we think, starved or was weakened to the point that wolves and coyotes were able to take it down.

You know, this was telling not only in sort of finding these clues, but the fact that a bear had been awake in the middle of winter, which is quite unusual. And we had never encountered that in all of our almost 15 years of being out on that landscape. And so when I saw the skull and came back to it later, it seemed like a talisman of sorts to offer to Bart.

particularly knowing that, you know, of course he was traumatized by the experience, but still had this really strong connection to bears and to wild places. And so when we came, we brought him the tooth of a brown bear.

It seems these days we sensationalize a lot of these bear attacks in the media. You're a wildlife biologist. Why did you want to tell Bart's particular story? Well, I think I wanted to tell Bart's story, but I also wanted to tell the bear's story. So Bart was quick to recognize that sensationalism was exactly what was going to be drawn to his story.

And he was not interested in that. He'd been contacted by some of the biggest media outlets in the country. And he said repeatedly, no, I don't want to talk to you.

And I think part of his concern was that this would turn into, you know, yet another story about bears misbehaving and being a threat to humans. When, in fact, the bigger story around Haines, and this was part of my interest, was that the bears were facing really tough conditions, largely due to climate change and to these environmental changes. And, you know, as a result, they were coming into town seeking food and, you know,

in turn getting shot. And I think it's this bigger story of all of us trying to understand how to coexist in a changing landscape. I mean, certainly, you know, bears and humans have long wrestled with how to live with each other. But in recent years, that's become a whole lot more acute.

And it could have easily been giant, bold letters, bear, mames, man, and Hanes, Alaska, exclamation mark, underline. When you joined the long line of people trying to tell Bart's story, why do you think he chose you? I hope...

I hope that it's because he trusted that I would respect his wishes and respect his intent in how the story got told, that I wouldn't sensationalize it. Of course, there is a story to be told in the mauling itself, and anyone who's ever had an encounter with a bear or even imagined an encounter with a bear is sort of drawn to that piece of it that is maybe as uncommon or rare as a mauling is. It still is something that lives large in our imaginations.

When we come back, we're going to hear more about Caroline's own experiences in the Alaskan wilderness, including some run-ins with bears. When you're hiring, time is of the essence. That's why more than 3.5 million businesses worldwide use Indeed to find exceptional talent fast. Indeed's powerful matching engine works quickly. So quickly that according to Indeed data worldwide, every minute 23 hires are made on Indeed.

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So I was just finishing up my PhD and I was, I guess you could say, becoming a bit disenchanted with science or more specifically disenchanted with staring through a microscope at slides of bird beaks. So I had gotten involved in a research project that was looking at this large cluster of beak deformities in Alaskan birds. And although the subject was fascinating, I was feeling a little bit burnt out on the lab heavy components of it.

At the same time, you know, I was in my early 30s and kind of feeling that itch to do something big before other life decisions became imminent. And so my husband and I set out on a pretty epic journey to travel from Bellingham, Washington, up to Kotzebue, Alaska, which is in the northwestern corner of Alaska, so about 20

4,000 miles, kind of linking these disparate landscapes, everything from the temperate rainforest of the Inside Passage to the high Arctic tundra and all the places in between. I'm assuming there's more than one way to go when going so far north to Alaska. How did you choose which route you were going to take?

So a combination, we were trying to sort of use the contour as a landscape in a way that made some kind of sense. So when we were traveling up the inside passage, we used rowboats that my husband Pat had built by hand and then went up and over the mountains by ski. And then we had a number of sections in the interior where we were hiking and packrafting. Wait, he made the boats by hand?

He made the boats. Yeah, yeah. It wasn't our original plan, but he's a builder. So, yeah, and we learned how to row day one of the trip. We have a lot of experience on the water, but we had never rowed before. So that was a good learning curve. Yeah. Exactly. And then we were combining drywall.

traveling by foot and using rivers and crossing the various water bodies by pack rafts, which probably some people are familiar with, but they're these cool little inflatable boats you can roll up and put in your backpack. And so they really allow you to be amphibious on the landscape. For sections, we were canoeing and ultimately really trying to match, you know, how it made sense to move in some ways, kind of like an animal, I guess, across these very vast areas. Yeah.

Many people can encounter obstacles in their life and they can make changes. You know, they can pick up a new hobby, but traveling 4,000 miles requires some personality traits that very few people have. So what was it? Because when you're on a journey like that, you don't know what's going to happen. That's the part of a real and great adventure is traveling.

the element of risk. So how did you feel when you first started off on this trip? And what do you think about yourself really made you decide to do this? Because most people wouldn't.

Yeah. So maybe I'll start with the part of the question first. How did I feel when I left? Completely overwhelmed and questioning, yeah, how we were ever going to get from Bellingham to the next town, never mind to the Arctic. But yeah, I think that the sort of drive to do something on that scale, you're right, there is a purpose.

personality. And really, my husband and I, our relationship, his name is Pat, Pat and I, our relationship was first forged on the banks of an Arctic river far from where we started in interior Canada. And we had done this trip in our early 20s shortly after we met where we decided that we would hike in with just the tools to build a bark canoe and set up camp on the side of a river and build the canoe and then float a few hundred miles north and

to the Arctic. And so that is where our relationship started. As you can imagine, on a trip like that, many things did not go right. But I think what went right and what really solidified our relationship and what became our marriage was this desire to push ourselves physically in these very wild places. And so we'd always had in the backs of our minds that we wanted to do something on a

similarly large scale, but even bigger. And so the timing was right. We thought about having a family. Doing something like that with young children didn't seem possible or appealing. My dad had recently been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and someone who I'd always look up to as kind of a physical model of strength wasn't able to continue to pursue these things and these places he really loved.

So all those, I guess, conspired to make this seem like the right time. I mean, I'm really stubborn by nature and my husband, Pat, is an incredible dreamer. And that combination, I think, allows us sometimes to push beyond what seems reasonable. Yeah, this little dream just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And that's what it turned into. And you called the memoir of the journey, The Sun is a Compass. Why?

I guess it's partially kind of harkens back to my background with birds and my fascination with migration. So, you know, birds use many things to navigate, the sun being one of them. And part of the real magic of migration is that we don't fully understand what birds know or how they know it, except that they can traverse the entire globe and know when to leave and how to get from one place to another, whether they have the

benefit of older birds to follow. But in the Arctic, you have these young birds that are hatched out, their parents leave, and then they're there figuring out how to fly to Eastern Africa, for example. So that sense of wonder and mystery that I think the trip captured for me above all else, particularly in relation to

What I'd been feeling about science, kind of looking at it at this really microscopic level, and then the real expansive nature of being out on the landscape and seeing birds move across these places, sometimes in very similar ways to what we did. And so I'd be rowing along the inside passage to going up and over these mountains and come across a tundra swan.

sitting on a glacier, for example, and just seeing how these birds kind of linked up the landscape. So that's really the heart of the title, I guess, is that idea of navigating and the mystery of migration. I mean, of course, we use the sun kind of as a compass, but we mostly use...

physical paper maps and compass to find our way. And then more often than not use local knowledge, which was meeting people in communities or following the caribou or following the tracks of other animals that knew how to get from one place to another a lot better than anything we could infer from looking at these large scale maps. Right. And when you were doing your navigating of the 4,000 miles, what kind of animals did you encounter along the way that you saw?

A few? We saw a few. Yeah, just about everything you can imagine in a northern landscape. Bears, moose, wolves, wolverines, tons and tons of birds, which for me was so remarkable to be kind of following the pulse of spring migration on our way up. That was a real gift. Caribou, did I mention caribou? We saw tens of thousands of caribou on their own migration in the fall, and we followed caribou tracks everywhere.

across much of the Arctic. So again and again, when we thought we knew the way, the caribou told us otherwise. And if we chose not to go where they went, we were wrong. And the obvious question here is, did you see any bears along the way? Yeah, we saw a lot of bears. That is bear country through and through.

I guess we have to think about what kinds of bears there are and the different danger levels. Maybe people are familiar with sharks, for example, where there's nurse sharks, which are completely harmless, but there's also great whites and tiger sharks. And for bears, there's brown bears, there's black bears, there's grizzlies, there's polar bears. What types of bears did you see along the way? And which are the ones that are more troublesome for humans?

Great question. Important distinctions. So black bears are probably the species that many people listening have had

had some kind of encounter with, if any. And then there's brown or grizzly bears, which are actually the same species. And that's kind of a nomenclature thing, but we refer to coastal brown bears for bears that tend to feed primarily on salmon and tend to be more coastally distributed. And so they have access to different foods. As a result, they tend to be bigger than grizzlies, but they are the same species. So grizzlies are more interior brown bears. Yeah.

Polar bears up in the Arctic, obviously. We saw lots of black bears and brown bears. We saw lots of tracks of polar bears. We did not actually see any polar bears on this trip. I was most fearful of seeing a polar bear just

because they sort of slink out of the ocean and it's often a really foggy landscape. And so the thought of encountering a white bear in a pretty white place without having a lot of warning was always a little bit frightening. But as far as the brown bears and black bears, which were the species that we were seeing really regularly, you know, brown bears are big. And I think that they are responsible for the majority of maulings. Although when it comes to these

predatory bear attacks where a bear decides that you are food, it's actually much more common among black bears. And those are very, very rare, but they do happen. And sometimes a black bear will get in its head that a human would be a delicious thing to eat. So there was at least one experience where there was a bear that was problematic, but many bears were not.

But you did write about that one problematic day in your book, right? Correct. Yeah. And it is a really, really good point. Thank you for making it that bears are incredibly tolerant. For all the bears that we saw, we had one that caused a problem. Would you mind reading us a short piece from the book? Yeah, I'd be glad to. So we're up in the Arctic in this scene. It's August. I hear a faint rustling in the bushes behind me. It sounds large enough to be a jay, and I smile at the thought of an avian visitor.

But then the noise gets louder, and I hear the crackling of breaking branches. I turn and face the sound. Fifteen feet uphill, I see deep-set eyes, a pointed nose, and cinnamon-colored fur. The reality hits me with more surprise than fear. Bear. Running. Toward me.

Hey, I have only enough time to shut a warning and instinctively throw one arm into the air, the other reaching for my bear spray holstered on the hip belt of my backpack. This is not how I would typically respond to a bear in close quarters, where a calm voice and slow, non-threatening motions are often the best way to diffuse an edgy situation. But I realized immediately that this isn't a typical bear. What kind of bear was it?

It was a black bear, but more importantly, it was a predatory bear that had been stalking us. And what ended up happening from there? So the clues, I guess, that something was different. For one, this bear had been following us. We had just come out of a pretty brushy section, had been making lots of noise, and I knew that it would have heard our presence and the way that it was looking at me.

I knew immediately that the bear was up to no good. And I've had a lot of bear safety training in my life as a wildlife biologist. That's part of what we do. And I'd always wondered, would I recognize a predatory bear if I met one? And I really didn't know until that instant that, yes, I absolutely recognize this as different than any other bear I'd ever met. And that the bear...

wanted to eat us. It had this really strange glazed kind of look that it wasn't curious what we were. It wasn't trying to figure anything out. It just was purely intent on us. And in a situation like that, what is your response? Is it a yell? We turned into much more sort of aggressive posture. We were yelling. We didn't have a whole lot to fight back with. We had our hiking, trekking poles. We were throwing the poles at it.

We had bear spray, and at one point it came close enough that...

Pat sprayed it. Unfortunately, everything was in such slow motion that it saw the pepper cloud. So the spray that comes out is actually this capsicum pepper spray, as probably some listeners are familiar with. But you can see this visual cloud and the bear saw it and ducked its head and just caught kind of the edge of it and, you know, did not have quite the desired effect in that it continued to circle back around. And this went on for, you know, it felt like forever. It was probably about

10 minutes, but it felt like the closest thing that we had had to getting eaten by a bear. Eventually, we were able, I guess, to convince it that we were enough trouble that it didn't really want to bother eating us, and it sort of ambled off, and we made a break for the closest river and got in our boats, our pack rafts, and

paddle down the river. And that was how it ended. We're going to take a little break now. And when we come back, we're going to talk about the challenges of humans and bears sharing the same landscape together. This season, Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies like backpacks, binders and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

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Yeah, so we actually stumbled onto the property that would become our home on a kayak trip between Haines and Juneau. We didn't get very far. We'd paddled just a short distance down the coast to a place called Glacier Point. And we stopped there for the night, and it turned out it was on a piece of property that was for sale. And part of living there means living with bears most days. And after we built our cabin...

You know, we later had children and had to think about how do you coexist with bears when you have babies, too, because that can be kind of a scary combination. We are very diligent about not leaving food out anywhere. Everything's secured and locked. We later put up a bear fence, so it's essentially like a livestock fence. Of course, you know, if a bear wants to break through an electric fence, they can, but it's enough of a deterrent and it just...

just kind of helps establish boundaries of, you know, what's their zone and what's our zone. And so that helped a lot with young kids that we could

have them be outside and not be constantly worrying that a bear was going to wander through the yard, which they did very regularly. We have a big claw mark on our porch where a bear was probably just checking out what was there and gave it a good scratch. And I remember one day Pat was putting varnish on the outhouse posts and he had put a coat on and left it there to dry and was going to come back for another coat.

And in between that time, a bear had come and decided to rub its back on the post. And so we still have this bear hair kind of memorialized on our outhouse post. So bears are there kind of all around us. And so I think that strong sense of being aware and knowing that you don't just walk outside without bears.

Looking around first, you know, we carry bear spray with us everywhere we go. We make noise and we've taught our sons who are now six and eight that bears deserve their space as do all wild animals. And these days, it seems there's more and more encounters between humans and bears with the warming climate and our cities getting bigger.

Do you think there's more to it or is it just because there's a lot of people and a lot of bears and the world's changing? I guess I'd love for you to speak as a wildlife biologist about this changing environment and how we're sharing the same ecosystem.

From the climate standpoint, beyond food, you know, there's other sort of extreme weather events that are pushing bears to have challenges. One example is flooding in dens. So you might get these massive winter rain events. And so dens are getting flooded out. And so that, of course, causes disturbance and pushes bears to wake up and be on the landscape in places and times that you wouldn't expect them to.

It's harder to make a living as a bear these days than it used to be. And I think that's true for a lot of wild species. And we don't necessarily have precedence for what this might look like in 10 or 20 or 30 or 50 years, but we know it's changing. And so as much as we can be proactive now, I made this point in the article, it's a whole lot easier not to lose something than to try to get it back after the fact. Wise words.

With Barton and his friends, they didn't really do anything wrong, right? They were backcountry skiing and they woke a sleeping bear while hiking. As humans and bears are increasingly sharing the same space, is there any way to avoid these sorts of encounters?

I think Bart's encounter was really unlucky and in the unlucky that everyone turned out okay. But the unlucky part was just being in a place where they weren't expecting to find bears. Anthony Krupe is a wildlife biologist who works out of Juneau and does a lot of work on bears and brown bears in particular.

And he created a kind of a cool app that backcountry skiers can use or any other folks who are out recreating in the backcountry to identify where you might be most likely to see bear dens. So, you know, if you see something that looks like where a bear might have dug and is sort of a mound, you might.

think instead of like, oh, there's a hump on the ground. Could this be a bear den? But you're right that, you know, in Bart's case, there wasn't anything about climate or other pieces that we think contributed to that encounter. They just happened to be out skiing and happened to travel over a bear den. There's an app for literally everything. And I think we just proved that again today. So generally when bears and humans meet in these sorts of situations, how does it normally go for the bears?

Generally, it goes really badly for the bears. I mean, of course, we hear about all the times when it goes badly for humans, and I don't want to diminish that possibility. But more often than not, bears are the losers. They're often killed, pushed out of town, sometimes relocated. But generally, yeah, a bear.

bear becomes a problem, a bear is dead. And how has their population been affected by this? So in and around Haines, the information is actually relatively recent as to population size, but over the course of the season, I guess, in which Bart's encounter happened, there were almost 50 bears that were killed, kind of combination of allowable legal hunting harvest and then defensive life and property, which basically was

was a whole variety of different incidents where bears came into a community or had some kind of interaction with people and they were shot. And I think it really turned into a bear catastrophe, as described by many people in Haines and myself, that it was terrible for bears. And what sorts of things did the people of Haines do?

There was a bear task force that was formed and I think became increasingly active. There's been a push for securing things like fruit trees in the community, setting up electric fences, helping people find resources so that they know what is considered an attractant. So that could be anything from trash to food storage to freezers that are unlocked to chickens that somebody's keeping in the backyard.

bears learn very quickly. People were storing things like 10 pounds of fudge or whatever in places that were not very secure. And so not surprisingly, when a bear had the opportunity to eat that, it thought, well, maybe I'll come back for more. With an electric fence, you know, it's not the only thing to keep a bear out, but they learn very quickly that

to change where they move, they're not looking for trouble for the most part. And again, that, you know, just the fact that bears are individuals, they're not all going to do the same thing, but there are some tried and true methods for helping to keep them and us safe.

Caroline, thank you so much. I really enjoyed telling the story and I really enjoyed for the listeners as well to hear this whole other side of this bare human dynamic. So I want to say thank you so much today for the interview, as well as helping us with this series here on Against the Odds.

Yeah, it was my pleasure. And thanks for taking the long view and sort of pulling in all the different pieces. It's quite a gift to be able to work with a show that is focused on wanting to understand the context and not just the sensational part of it. So thank you. Thanks so much.

This is the final episode of our series, Alaska Bear Attack. Thank you to our guest, Caroline Van Hemert. To learn more about her adventures in Alaska, we recommend her book, The Sun is a Compass, My 4,000 Mile Journey into the Alaskan Wilds. I'm your host, Mike Corey. This episode was produced by Polly Stryker.

Our interview episode producer is Peter Arcuni. Our audio engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Our series producers are Matt Almos, Alita Rozanski, and Emily Frost. Our senior managing producer is Tonja Thigpen. Matt Gant is our managing producer. Our senior producer is Andy Herman. Our executive producers are Jenny Lauer-Beckman, Stephanie Jens, and Marshall Louis for Wondery.

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