Welcome back to Scary Bear Attacks.
Today’s episode takes us to the remote and nearly untouched Glacier Bay National Park
& Preserve with its iconic glaciers and fjords.
The park is located in SouthEast Alaska along the coast and presents some of the most beautiful
scenery on earth.
The forests are lush and green with giant pines and all kinds of berry bushes.
The bay itself lies to the east of where our events that we are discussing today occurred.
This area is remote and rugged.
Help is not close nor is it fast in response.
Most people who travel to this area understand that if they get into trouble, they are on
their own.
On September 10th, of 1976, 25 year old, Alan Precup arranged for his backpacking trip into
the preserve through the visitors office.
He was up from Illinois and had quickly embraced the Alaskan lifestyle.
He established his travel route and timeline so they would know where he was planning on
visiting and when he would be back.
When September 13th rolled around Mr. Precup did not meet officials at his pick up time
and location.
A search was immediately launched to locate him.
On September 16th, a party including Charles Jackson, Leilani Vega, Peter Talbot and Colin
Milmer were hiking into the White Thunder Ridge area just above Muir Inlet.
The group had been briefed on Mr. Precup and agreed to keep an eye out for him.
They were only planning on staying a single night and being picked up on the 17th, but
it made them a little more comfortable to know there were search crews in the area.
The group began setting up their camp to prepare their soup lunch and hot chocolate.
The fresh air rejuvenated them as they embraced their short lived experience to the fullest.
It was a little after 11:30 AM when Talbot noticed a brown dot approaching in the distance
along the lake.
It could be a caribou, or maybe a moose.
It didn’t look big enough to be a moose though.
Slowly the brown dot approached and the friends discerned it was a smallish brown bear.
The group decided to take some proactive measures to make sure this bear knew they were there
and were not prey.
They grabbed pots and pans and anything else and clanged it together and yelled to frighten
the bear.
Each time they did this, the bear would stop and look around, seemingly confused, but then
continue heading toward them after a few seconds.
The party now decides that the safest thing they could do is to pack up their food items
and hike over to a shelf of cliffs, in a respectful attempt at getting out of the bear's intended
travel route.
He would probably just walk right past them and go be a bear somewhere else.
They labored to the cliff tops and found trees to cache their food in.
As they looked down upon their camp, they could see the bear trashing their tents and
biting anything he could find with human scent.
Then the bear dropped its nose, like a bloodhound, onto the group's trail.
The bear sniffed along the exact path they used to get to the safety of the cliffs.
They immediately decided they needed to make more space between them and the bear so they
headed further away from camp along the cliff.
They looked back at their food stash, expecting to see the bear pulling in their food bags,
but the bear kept his nose to the ground and followed their trail.
He wasn’t interested in the food cache, but the people.
They half ran, half walked the steep cliffs surrounding the lake and arrived back at their
camp at a quarter past one.
The bear had followed their scent trail the entire time.
The group decided to seek protection on the hill above their camp and began hiking in
that direction.
The bear followed them now a mere 20 feet from them.
They had removed jackets and ponchos and anything else needed to cool themselves as the exertion
from the pursuit made them sweat.
At the top of the hill, there was a large swale that separated the bear from the campers,
not only about ten feet apart.
The danger and fright of the situation had well set in with the group, and they decided
they must defend themselves.
They had very fews weapons of any use in defense, so they armed themselves with rocks and began
pelting the bear.
Seemingly confused from the yelling and chaos, the bear walked a short distance away and
laid down, putting his head on his paws.
It observed every movement anyone in the group made.
A bush plane flew over during the incident on the top of the hill.
It circle around 5 times or so and the group felt confident they had been seen.
They expected the pilot to buss the bear and run him off, but they were wrong.
They had not been seen by the pilot and their predicament was unnoted by anyone.
They decided that they would use the cover of the plane to go down the hill to some other
campers in the area.
They quickly dropped down the hill and discussed the bizarre situation with their new friends.
The now larger group looked on as they watched the bear crest the hill and carefully sniff
out each of the human tracks.
Now looked like a great time to beat feet back to the Forest Service boat, which they
safely arrived at about half past three in the afternoon.
The rangers listened with concern and alarm as they described the bear's behavior.
The authorities immediately dispatch park ranger James Luthy to investigate by helicopter.
Luthy’s ranger crew flew over a destroyed camp and radioed down to hiking rangers to
investigate.
Luthy prepped himself to be lowered from the helicopter to look over things himself as
well.
Luthy witnessed many of Precups possessions with bite marks and damage from a bear but
couldn’t locate Alan.
He reboarded the copter and left while they waited for the rangers on foot to get to the
scene.
The rangers observed bear scat and large perforations in just about every item at the camp.
The bear basically bit into everything that had human scent.
The rangers encountered the bear near the camp and pelted it with rocks and eventually
drove it off.
After searching the area, they located the grim remains of Alan Precup.
The bear had efficiently picked Alan's bones clean in the few days since the attack.
His clothes lay beside his skeletal remains and his ribs were strewn about the vicinity.
His arms were torn or chewed from his body and his skull was completely defleshed and
set where his neck would be.
His nearly intact scalp lay nearby and his right hand lay beneath a page of a book apart
from its arm.
His feet were still in his socks and boots.
Alan's remains were removed from the area and returned to his family for burial.
There was no conclusive link made, but authorities are sure the bear that ate Alan was also the
bear that chased the Jackson group around the lake.
I could find no record of what became of the bear and assume that it had escaped after
confronting the rangers.
Authorities determined there was an abundance of berries and salmon in the area that year