Jake: How to survive a bear attack

If you somehow missed it, two teenagers had a very bad afternoon on Mount Si this week. A group of teenage hikers ran into a black bear and her cubs on the trail near North Bend, and when she charged, one kid got claw marks and a scratch.

Trails closed, search teams went out looking for the bear, and the whole mountain turned into a news story. I’ve got friends who live right near there, and the second I read it, I fired off a text telling them to be careful.

The good news: both kids survived, and from what I’m reading, their injuries aren’t life-threatening. The other good news, if you want to call it that, is that this is exactly the kind of attack you’d expect — a mama bear protecting her cubs. That’s about the only scenario where black bears get aggressive with people. They’re not stalking you. They’re not hunting you. You stumbled into her living room, and she reacted as any parent would.

The color-coded survival rule that’s stuck with me for years

Which brings me to the chart. I’ve seen this floating around for years, and it’s stuck with me because it’s simple enough to remember in the half-second you’d actually need it:

If it’s brown, lie down. If it’s black, fight back. And if it’s white, good night.

That last line is a joke, mostly. There’s almost no surviving a polar bear encounter, but unless you’re doing something very unusual with your vacation plans, that’s not a Pacific Northwest problem.

Grizzlies aren’t really our problem either, but they’re not nothing. Get out to Wyoming, Montana, parts of Idaho, or even far eastern Washington, and there’s a chance, albeit a small one, you could cross paths with one. And good luck having the composure to lie down in that moment. Every instinct in your body is screaming at you to run. Turns out that’s exactly the wrong move — grizzlies don’t waste energy chasing something that looks dead.

They’re not interested in things they think have already given up the fight. But if you start running, you’ve just told a several-hundred-pound predator that you’re alive, you’re scared, and you’re prey.

If you’ve seen The Edge, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Anthony Hopkins, Alec Baldwin, and a grizzly that hunts the survivors of a plane crash one by one through the Alaskan wilderness. If you haven’t seen it, watch it tonight. It does for the woods what Jaws did for the ocean — you will never look at a tree line the same way again.

Grizzly warning sign cut our Yellowstone hike short — and we don’t regret it

A couple of years back, we took the family to Yellowstone, and I lived that movie in real time-ish. We parked, started a hike outside West Yellowstone, and about 200 yards in, we passed a sign warning that a grizzly had been spotted recently in the area. We had bear spray, we’d done our homework, and we were about as prepared as a tourist family can be. Didn’t matter. That sign plus a head full of The Edge was enough. We turned around and walked straight back to the car.

We spent the rest of that afternoon at the Old Faithful Inn instead, watching the geyser do its thing right on schedule from the upper deck with a drink in hand. Genuinely one of my favorite parts of that whole trip. Sometimes the smart move is also the better one.

Here’s the perspective check, though: your odds of being attacked by a bear in your lifetime are roughly one in 2.1 million. Compare that to getting struck by lightning, which is about one in 15,000. Nobody cancels a hike because of lightning, even though it’s a far bigger threat statistically. So don’t let an extremely rare event like the Mount Si bear attack talk you out of getting outside. The Pacific Northwest is too beautiful to sit out of.

Just throw a can of bear spray in your pack, and keep the rule in your back pocket: If it’s brown, lie down. If it’s black, fight back. And if it’s white — good night.

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