Bear Escapes Apparent Shooting in Girdwood

By Soren Wuerth

TN Editor

Alayna DuPont set an alarm for 3:30 a.m. to wake up early Friday morning for bear patrol. 

At 2:15 a.m. a string of gunshots woke her instead.

The report came from a parking lot near Alyeska's Sitzmark bar where a brown bear had knocked over a dumpster 24 hours earlier. She quickly texted her contact with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. No response.

So, DuPont, founder of a group called Girdwood Bear Aware, threw on her gear and drove to the darkened lot but there was no Fish and Game truck, no police cars and no bear. 

Bear photo from a surveillance camera taken on Thursday night. (Photo courtesy of Jeff Samuels)

Hours later, after a phone call to the local police, DuPont would learn that the brown bear she'd been tracking was shot by a Fish and Game officer, but ran away wounded. Efforts to track the bear were fruitless.

"A fiasco," is how DuPont put it. "We're pretty disappointed about how this unfolded. Not great."

For the past few weeks, DuPont and others with Girdwood Bear Aware had been tracking reports of both a brown and black bear roaming Girdwood at night.

Across the street from DuPont, a brown bear broke a window of a garage and swapped at hanging moose meat, according to a resident. A week later, a dumpster was tipped over. 

"What was confounding was there [were reports of] a large black bear flipping over dumpsters as if the two bears were kind of on the same circuit, overlapping. It was a very large black bear," DuPont said. "Were people just mistaking a black bear for a brown bear?"

DuPont called the Alaska Department Fish and Game. She'd always had a sort of "hotline" with the agency. For years she'd worked closely with Anchorage Area Biologist David Battle. But Battle retired earlier this year, leaving Cory Stantorf, an assistant area biologist, in his place.

And while Fish and Game can have a wait-and-see approach to black bears, it takes a hard line when it comes to brown bears, DuPont said. "They respond with lethal force."

A “bear-resistant” dumpster near the Sitzmark bar.

Dawn Patrols

Then, another garage was hit. After that, a food truck. At that point, Fish and Game took DNA samples to find out the type of bear it was dealing with.

Fish and Game biologists set up a trap, a large culvert with a metal grate at one end that drops when a bear enters.  "A large bear, a smart bear, or a skittish bear will not enter the entire way, but put their arm in and scooch out without getting stuck," DuPont said.

And that's what this bear did, according to DuPont. The trap failed to trigger and the bait, a moose leg, was gone. "This one was too smart for the trap," she said.

"I was a little frustrated when [Fish and Game] set it," DuPont said. "They weren't 100 percent transparent, they set it early and didn't notify us. There's a risk for trapping the wrong bear. It could create a dangerous situation. It felt like they took it all a little lightly."

Meanwhile, volunteers for Girdwood Bear Aware were on constant patrol. Dumpsters were fixed, cleaned and ratchet strapped. Then Dupont captured a bear on game camera and saw clearly it was a brown bear.

"Both bears were operating exclusively at night and were wary of humans," DuPont said. "Very few people saw the brown bear. On our video, it's very skittish, noises would startle it. We've seen a lot of bears and bears usually have a confident, brazen attitude and we didn't see that with these bears."

Along with rumors about the bears and break-ins, came fear, most of it irrational. 

"Just because a bear causes damage doesn't necessarily mean it's a dangerous bear," DuPont said. "There's a heightened sense of fear."

"Remember," Girdwood Bear Aware says on its Facebook page, "bears working hard to get into garbage does not equate to dangerous bears. Rather, this behavior has the potential to increase the likelihood of a dangerous situation between a human and a bear." 

DuPont, who works for National Park Service, created Girdwood Bear Aware in 2018 the same year Fish and Game killed six bears in Girdwood. A year later, a brown bear upset a dumpster behind Spoonline Restaurant. Ever since, no bears have been killed in Girdwood by Fish and Game, and Girdwood's prioritization by the agency as a human-bear conflict hotspot has been extinguished. The group's mission is to "promote human coexistence with bears".

To make the community more "bear aware", DuPont's organization has raised awareness of potential conflicts with flyers, roadside signs, and media outreach. It has held bear spray trainings, posted frequent reminders and has even helped get an ordinance passed requiring residents to have bear-proof containers for their garbage.

"Bears aren't the problem and killing bears is not the solution to the problem," DuPont said.

Despite its "high quality bear habitat", Girdwood doesn't have a "people problem", said DuPont. "Killing one bear doesn't fix the problem because it's not a bear problem. Bears are going to find food ... We 're having an infrastructure problem. Dumpsters with only locking bars, with plastic lids and metal reinforcements don't work [to prevent bears from getting inside]."

A Wounded Bear

DuPont was told by the Whittier Police Department (officers operate in Girdwood) that a brown bear was shot and wounded, that they tried to track it and failed, but said little more. She got no answers from Fish and Game, only a "text to confirm what we already knew and that we could talk more about it on Monday." 

Managers at Alyeska also had received no reply to their concerns and questions, DuPont said. 

“That's our main disappointment: zero communication, zero follow-up, and zero communication with the community," she said.

A wounded bear, in the meantime, can present some problems. It can die and leave a carcass for other bears, which have a tendency to defend their food. 

Should it survive, its senses could be impaired. 

"A wounded bear is not necessarily a more dangerous bear, but if it's in pain it can behave differently."

When DuPont arrived to the Sitz, the only sign of the bear incident was a moose leg dangling from a dumpster. (Photo by Alayna DuPont)

"The best case scenario is it was wounded and went far far away and then either lives or dies," she said. 

There have been numerous complaints about Fish and Game's response in a discussion on Girdwood's Facebook page. Local residents faulted the agency for carelessness and ineptitude, with many lamenting its inhumanity or incompetence. Others questioned whether the bear shot at the Sitzmark was the black or brown roaming the valley.

"I don't know why [Fish and Game] couldn't shoot and kill the bear ... if you stake it out, park the truck and shoot it point-blank. People heard in the range of 6-8 shots. We don't even know which direction the bear ran off," DuPont said.

A call placed late Friday afternoon to Fish and Game was not returned in time for publication. 

Bear warnings were posted at trailheads by Sunday.