‘I turned around, there’s a bear charging at 15 feet, full speed’: Walla Walla man recounts bear mauling in remote Alaska

A 27-year-old Walla Walla man is home recovering after a brown bear attacked him during a caribou hunting trip in remote northern Alaska, crushing bones in his face and foot and leaving him bleeding and nearly blind on the tundra.

Jadon Nicoara joined Jake Skorheim and Spike O’Neill, co-hosts of “The Jake and Spike Show” on KIRO Newsradio, to walk through what happened. He was still visibly recovering, with reconstructive surgery on his face scheduled for next week.

The attack happened on day four of a hunting trip about 100 miles southwest of Deadhorse near the Colville River. Nicoara and his cousin Daniel had spotted caribou across a canyon and were hiking along a steep hillside when Nicoara heard rustling in the brush.

“I turned around, and there’s a bear charging at like 15 feet, full speed. Its mouth is open,” Nicoara said.

‘I could hear all the crunching’

Nicoara put up his trekking poles, but the bear plowed through them. The impact sent him rolling downhill as the bear bit and clawed at him. Then it pinned him.

“It started biting my face. It bit my nose, and I could just hear all the crunching, and all the bones were breaking,” Nicoara said. “I started to see stars.”

The bear then moved to his feet, crushing one badly.

His cousin Daniel drew a handgun and began firing. Nicoara, tangled beneath the bear, screamed at him not to hit him.

“I told him, ‘Hey, make sure you don’t hit me,'” Nicoara said.

The gunfire drew the bear off Nicoara and onto Daniel, biting him too. But Daniel got his hands behind his head, preventing the bear from rolling him over. That gave Nicoara enough time to get up and fire his own revolver. The bear ran off.

‘I thought it was going to be over’

Nicoara believed he was dying. He pulled out his phone and recorded a message.

“I took a video for my wife, saying goodbye to my kids and to her,” Nicoara said. “I was bleeding really bad out of my face.”

Daniel, a doctor, checked him over and told him they had to move immediately, as bears often come back.

But Nicoara’s foot was crushed, his nose was partially detached, and a flap of skin had fallen over his eye. They crawled to the bottom of the canyon and up the other side, stopping multiple times as Nicoara grew lightheaded from blood loss.

Eventually, his vision failed almost entirely.

“He was wearing a white shirt, so I was just following like a little bit of color,” Nicoara said. “But that stuff is hard to walk in the tundra even if you can see well.”

A satellite SOS and a gun barrel that nearly exploded

Daniel activated a satellite SOS device to signal their location, then fired three shots from Nicoara’s revolver, the universal distress signal. What Nicoara didn’t realize until later: the barrel had been clogged with dirt during the climb, and the end blew off when Daniel fired.

“That was just like another mercy of God, because the back pressure can explode and throw shrapnel into your face, so that can kill you as well,” he said.

About 45 minutes later, two other members of their hunting party reached them. Twenty minutes after that, a helicopter arrived — not search and rescue, but a chopper that happened to be stationed in Deadhorse with a medic on board.

‘Just what was supposed to happen’

Jake noted the series of near-impossible breaks that kept Nicoara alive: hunting with a cousin who’s a doctor, a satellite device that worked, a helicopter that happened to be close by, and a gun barrel that blew outward instead of backward.

Nicoara said he doesn’t see them as coincidences.

“It was measured and calculated and just what it was supposed to be,” Nicoara said. “Nothing more, no extra damage that didn’t need to happen. I’m just super grateful for it. I could probably find five or 10 things that are just like, if it would have been different, it would have been devastating.”

He pointed to one detail in particular: the satellite SOS device was paired only to Daniel’s phone, and Nicoara didn’t know the password. If the bear had hit Daniel first instead, they would have had no way to call for help.

Nicoara said the day before the attack was his 27th birthday, and his wife had written him a letter saying she and their girls missed him.

“I was thinking about my wife and girls, and that kind of got me through,” he said. “I was breathing and trying to stay alive.”

The road ahead

Nicoara is home in Walla Walla and said he’s doing well. He faces more reconstructive surgeries in the coming weeks. When Spike mentioned a GoFundMe that had been set up for the family, Nicoara declined the plug.

“Our needs have already been met,” he said. “I just wanted to give God the glory for his goodness.”

He also had a Bible verse on his mind throughout the ordeal: Psalm 23:4.

“People should go look that up,” Jake said. “That’s a good one. It’s an oldie but a goodie.”

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

Listen to “The Jake and Spike Show” weekdays from noon to 3 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio 97.3