A grizzly bear recently attacked a hiker in Montana’s Glacier National Park, dragging him 20 feet and leaving his arm “just kind of dangling” after a severe bite. Now, he is sharing the story of how he survived the terrifying attack.
Daniel Crago, 32, of San Carlos, California, said the bear attack occurred soon after he snapped a selfie while hiking in a section of the park’s Grinnell Glacier Trail after briefly splitting up from a friend. A few minutes later, he saw a small bear cub walking by, then a large grizzly on a slope about fifteen feet above him. Then the bear charged.
“This bear, as soon as we looked at each other, it charged towards me. I think I was just so close to it, it frightened the bear,” he explained to ABC News.
“I did as you’re told. I alert the bear so you don’t catch them by surprise. I said, ‘Hey bear! Hey bear!’ As soon as it looked right up at me, it charged me and leaped. You could hear the roar. I just stuck my arm up, and I kind of thought … this is it.”
According to a National Park Service report, “the sound of loud rushing water made it difficult for either the man or the bear to detect one another.”
He was fortunate that one of the hikers who found him was a doctor
Then, after dragging him about twenty feet, the bear just left him in the snow. Luckily, two hikers were in the area and helped him. One of them was a physician, who began treating him right away until help arrived.
“I don’t know if I [would have made] it if [the doctor was] not there,” he said, adding that he was “so extremely lucky and grateful.”
After being airlifted to a hospital in nearby Kalispell, Montana, Crago had numerous surgeries to repair an open fracture of both bones in his forearm and will likely need at least one more procedure while he recovers.
“Thankfully it missed the major artery, missed the major nerves in the arm so I can still move my fingers a little bit, can still feel all of them,” Crago told NBC San Diego. “But the forearm was completely open, and both bones completely broken. There was some bone loss.”
Crago says that despite the pain and trauma, the bear attack has not diminished his love of the outdoors and he hasn’t ruled out going back to Glacier National Park.
“I think I would,” he told Backpacker. “It’s not going to stop me from exploring and being out in nature. Maybe I’m not going in May again, when they’re freshly out of hibernation and a little more aggressive and hungry.”