What to Do when You Encounter a Bear in Alaska

Alaska: Bear Country

With 39 mountain ranges with some of the highest peaks therein (at least 17 out of 20), Alaska's 365 million acres has a lot of forests, a lot of natural habitat for one of the most misunderstood and underestimated creature on the planet, the bear. Alaska is undoubtedly bear country, with all three species of bears of the North Americas present. Brown bears, black bears, and polar bears, all remarkable animals worth watching, but nonetheless dangerous, can be found in substantial numbers in forested areas of Alaska. And with Alaska being the largest state, that's a lot of forest space, and relatively, a lot of bears!

Overview of bear encounters

The history of bear-versus-human encounters in Alaska has been recorded from the early 1900s to present, and the data present an alarming fact: bears attack humans and the severity of the injuries sustained by humans range from the slight to the moderate, and from the severe to the outright and ultimately fatal attack.

Records show that most bear-human encounters were recreation-related, with 65% of such encounters made during tourist activities, camping and hiking, sight-seeing and touring the wilds of Alaska. And these humans in the encounters are local tourists and out-of-towners who are out for a brief escapade from their jobs and are touring the Alaskan outdoors for a brief period. Next in the line of the encounters are hunting-related, again for recreational and full-time hunting. These encounters in hunting come to a fifth or 19% of the total bear-human encounters. And as bears are not normally hunted out there, these hunting incidents are secondary as the hunters tend to hunt for deer and other game, not bears primarily. The least incidences are work-related, whereby forest rangers or loggers are merely going about their official and regular functions, and voila! A bear encounter.