A 32-year-old black bear hunter was severely injured Saturday when a brown bear mauled him in a remote area of Alaska. The victim, Tyler Johnson, also sustained a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the leg when trying to fend off the attack.
Johnson was born and raised in Sterling, Alaska, and just recently relocated to Texas. He told In Depth Alaska he was hunting black bears with his father, Chris Johnson, an Alaska Wildlife Trooper and former USFWS officer. The two hunters were hiking the Resurrection Pass Trail in the Kenai Mountains when they startled a brown bear sleeping in some tall grass. It was an area that Tyler had not hunted before.
Three days into their five-day hunt, the Johnsons were working through some dense brush when they broke into a clearing filled with waist-high grass. They were hiking quietly so they wouldn’t spook any game in the area.
“I took about five steps out of that [grass] and that’s when my dad yelled, ‘Bear!’” Tyler said. “If you’ve ever heard a grizzly, it’s shocking, to say the least. It wasn’t even like a warning growl. It just did its growl and then sprinted towards my dad… It closed on him real quick. He was yelling at the bear, and the bear put on its brakes and turned towards me.”
As the bear closed the distance between them, Tyler said he struggled to get his firearm out of the holster on his pack. Because of the stress and speed of the attack, he has only been able to piece together what happened.
Tyler Johnson/Facebook
“I suspect the bear tried to paw me, which I don’t remember, but I think it hit my backpack. I have claw marks on the external frame and on my shoulder. It knocked me sideways, and at the same time, it gripped into my right quad. I was falling backward at this time. It was like getting hit by a train.”
Somehow Tyler managed to draw his sidearm at about the same time the bear was on him, but only after the bear clawed his left shoulder and right thigh, and bit his right calf. He believes he shot himself in the left leg as he was flying backward from the impact. The bullet entered his right quadricep and exited just above the knee.
“That’s when I put seven rounds into its chest and head area, anything that I could really hit while the bear was on top of me.”
While Tyler was dumping rounds into the bear, his father was shooting from a different angle, unloading his 10mm Glock 40. Tyler believes his seventh shot must have hit the bear either in the head or the spine because he said he remembers seeing the animal change from a pissed-off bear to one that was falling over. After he crawled away from the animal, his father finished it off with a final round.
The two men immediately went into triage mode, assessing and caring for Tyler’s injuries.
“I look down on my leg. I have a bullet hole, so I take my backpack off,” Tyler said. “I bring a trauma kit with me wherever we go hunting.”
He dressed the bullet wound with QuickClot held in place with an elastic slingshot band. That’s when Tyler said he noticed that his other boot was torn apart and filling up quickly with blood.
“There were a lot of bullets flying from my barrel in a frantic way. I didn’t know if I hit myself a second time,” he said. (It turns out that injury was a direct wound from the bear, which ripped open his calf and caused heavy bleeding.)
The two men applied a tourniquet to Tyler’s leg and tied a bandanna around a gash on his thigh. Then Chris used his Garmin InReach to call for help. Alaska Wildlife Troopers received the call at 3 p.m., according to a dispatch report. It took more than an hour for rescuers to arrive. While waiting for the helicopter, Tyler said his dad made him tell hunting stories to help keep him awake and his mind off of the pain.
“The tourniquet hurt,” Tyler said. “It felt like the bear was still chewing on my leg.”
Tyler was airlifted to Anchorage and received treatment at Alaska Medical Center, according to the Anchorage Daily News, and was released from the hospital that evening.
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Tyler has a theory of why the bear stopped the charge at his father and attacked him instead. He believes the bear was just trying to get out of the clearing.
“Unfortunately for me and the bear, I was between it and escape. So at that moment, for the bear, it was trapped, and I was in the way.”
Prior to this encounter, there have been two reported grizzly bear attacks in the U.S. this year. The most recent attack occurred in July when a 72-year-old was charged by a sow while picking huckleberries in Flathead National Forest. In May, a man was mauled by a sow protecting her cub in Grand Teton National Park. He sustained injuries to his leg, back, and hand and spent several days in the hospital.
