By TIM MOWRY
, Staff Writer
At this point, Brett Carlson hasn't thought too much about trying to make a buck off the giant grizzly bear that was killed when he and two others found it hibernating in his restaurant on the Dalton Highway last week.
The Fairbanks tour operator has been too busy trying to get his adrenaline to stop pumping, not to mention absorb the financial damage done to his restaurant by the big bruin, to get his entrepreneurial juices flowing.
In one of those only-in-Alaska kind of stories, an old grizzly bear that climbed into the window of a closed-down restaurant of the Dalton Highway to hibernate sometime this winter was shot and killed Wednesday when Carlson and his companions found it sleeping in a "nest" of blankets in a dark hallway.
"It was pretty intense," said Chad Conklin, the 30-year-old tour guide who shot the bear twice at close range with a .300-caliber Winchester magnum rifle and once with a 12-gauge shotgun. "It was pretty nerve-wracking."
It was last Tuesday night that Carlson got a phone call from Alaska State Trooper Curt Bedingfield in Coldfoot instructing him that someone had spotted a grizzly bear climbing into one of the restaurant's windows as they drove by on the road.
The restaurant, an old pipeline construction camp consisting of a series of ATCO units patched together, is located at 56 Mile of the Dalton Highway about 150 miles north of Fairbanks. Carlson bought the camp a year and a half ago as part of his tourism business, Northern Alaska Tour Company. It sits just north of the Yukon River bridge and is closed during the winter.
While the report seemed odd, considering that grizzly bears aren't usually seen in the middle of the winter, Bedingfield told Carlson he might want to check the situation out, especially since there had been a couple of reports of bear activity in that area two months ago. The trooper advised Carlson not to go alone and to be prepared to encounter a hibernating bear. If they found the bear inside, Bedingfield told them to shoot it rather than risk getting cornered by a mad grizzly.
Early the next morning, Carlson rounded up Conklin, one of his tour guides, and Ed Colvin, a cook, and made the 120-mile drive down to the restaurant. They arrived at 8:30 a.m., strapped on snowshoes and tromped the quarter mile to the restaurant. All three men were armed. Conklin carried a .300-caliber Winchester Magnum rifle, Carlson, who had never shot a gun before, had a 12-gauge shotgun loaded with slugs and Colvin carried a .44-caliber pistol.
They were 100 yards from the restaurant when they spotted the window where the bear had entered the building. Snow had drifted up against the wall, allowing the bear to reach an office window, Carlson said.
The window was ripped off and the snow in front of the window was covered with urine and feces, he said. The office was trashed but there was no sign of the bear.
"That's when we thought, 'It's going to be dark and he's in here,'" said Conklin. "That's when the heart started pumping."
Removing their snowshoes, the three men entered the building together and began a frightening, room-to-room search for the bear with Conklin in the lead. All three men wore headlamps and Carlson carried a spotlight.
The first thing they noticed was that all the merchandise in the gift shop had been pulled off the shelves. There was a "nest" of T-shirts, sweatshirts and fleece coats built near a door to a back storage area where the bear had obviously been sleeping and the men were expecting it to be around the corner.
"My thought was he was going to be right around corner," said Conklin, the most experienced outdoorsman of the trio. "I had the safety off."
But the bear wasn't there.
As they made their way to the kitchen and passed a hallway leading to rooms in the back of the building, Conklin noticed "a huge mound of something" in the hallway. He told Carlson to shine the light down the hallway.
"All of a sudden you could see the two eyes and I said, 'Whoa, he's down here,'" said Conklin. "He poked his head up and started looking at us."
The bear started to stand up and, with Carlson shining the light on the bear, Conklin fired the first of two shots with the rifle, hitting the bear in the chest. The bear dropped but was still moving so Conklin fired again. Heeding the advice of locals they had consulted before the mission, Conklin shot the bear in the heart with the shotgun to ensure it was dead.
"Everybody told us to keep shooting it until you know it's dead," Conklin said.
The three men were in the building probably only about 10 minutes before they found and shot the bear, but "it was a very long 10 minutes," said Carlson.
How long the bear lived in the restaurant is a mystery. There were reports of bear tracks being spotted around the Yukon River bridge back in December and Bedingfield received a report from someone in Stevens Village that a bear had chewed up the seats on a pair of snowmachines parked in a pullout on the highway just before Christmas.
"Long enough to make a mess and have a few digestive cycles," said Carlson on the extent of the bear's stay.
The only food it found was some split green peas, which it deposited on the floor in the form of feces, he said.
The bear probably did anywhere from $10,000 to $50,000 in damage, depending on what needs to be replaced, Carlson estimated. The bear ripped out a wall to get into the freezer and tipped over ranges, refrigerators and glass cases.
"He basically demolished the place," said Carlson, who doubts insurance will cover it.
The three men dragged the bear out of the restaurant and back to their van on a plastic tarp and delivered it to Bedingfield, who skinned and measured it. While the bear's hide squared at 7 feet, 3 inches, big but not huge for an Interior grizzly, the skull measured almost 26 inches.
"That's big for an Interior grizzly," Bedingfield said.
It's not uncommon for bears to take up residence in a cabin or building in the winter, according to wildlife biologist Harry Reynolds, who has studied grizzly bears at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game for more than 30 years.
During construction of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, bears were known to hole up in sheds and buildings in pipeline camps and grizzly bears in Prudhoe Bay have been found hibernating in and under buildings, Reynolds said.
What is unusual is that the bear would be wandering around the middle of the winter, the biologist said.
"Once they begin hibernation they usually don't come out," he said. "There's something that brings them out. It could be they're old and skinny."
The bear was definitely old, probably close to 20 years old judging by the poor condition of its teeth, Bedingfield said. The bear's incisors were ground down to the gums, one canine was busted out and the others were "rounded off to nubs," the trooper said.
While the bear is dead, there is still a rumor alive that there may have been a sow and cub spotted in the same area this winter by residents in Stevens Village and some truckers, Carlson said. The most radical rumor he's heard is that the sow and cub were sleeping in the restaurant when the big boar came along and chased them out, which would explain the two beds.
Residents in Stevens Village also are convinced this is the same bear that has been terrorizing fish camps along the Yukon River for years, said Carlson.
At this point, Carlson is planning to have the restaurant open in time for the tourist season. He plans to open sometime in April and he's hoping to go in and clean up much of the mess before things thaw out.
"With all that bear feces and urine in there, it's going to reek if it thaws out first," he said.
In retrospect, Carlson said he probably should have boarded the windows up but the thought of a grizzly bear taking up residence in the restaurant never occurred to him. Next year Carlson said he'll probably board the place up.
"It's like anything else in rural Alaska, you roll with the punches," said Carlson.
Things could have been worse, he noted.
"We got lucky. We got the jump on it instead of it getting the jump on us," Carlson said. "It could have been a bad deal. I'm just glad nobody got hurt."
Unfortunately for Carlson, he won't be able to display the bear's hide or skull in the restaurant because the bear was shot in defense of life and property. The state took possession of the hide and skull and will sell them in an auction next year.
The only thing Carlson has thought of is to clean up some of the T-shirts, sweatshirts and fleece jackets the bear used for a nest and sell them as bear-stained novelties.
"They might have added value, who knows," he said.
News-Miner staff writer Tim Mowry can be reached at tmowry@newsminer.com or 459-7587.
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