‘I went down like a sack of potatoes’: Irish paddler recounts bear encounter in Yukon backcountry

Eight days into a solo canoe journey through the Yukon backcountry, Dermot Higgins met a bear.

It went badly for both of them — but it could have gone much worse.

The adventurer from Dublin, Ireland, had spent the first week of July on the Yukon River in the early stages of his quest to paddle more than 3,000 kilometres to the Bering Sea.

He spent a night at a campsite by Selwyn near Carmacks.

Though Higgins says he was careful to secure his food, he noticed a mess left behind by others — empty wrappers and human waste. He cleaned up what he could and set up his tent.

Early the next morning, he woke to the sound of something hitting his tent, snapping one of the poles. Looking through the mesh of the tent, he saw a black bear and cub a few metres away.

“I was nearly paralyzed with fear, really. You know, a lot of thoughts went through my head really quickly,” he said.

Exiting the tent would mean turning his back on the bear. Instead, he pulled out a tin whistle and a bell. He started making noise “not very melodically.”

But bell and whistle seemed to make the bear angrier. It circled the tent with cub in tow, climbed onto the picnic table and then, snarling, charged toward him.

Higgins had one tool left: a can of bear spray.

He got the bear square in the face.

“The bear recoiled really quickly. And then, actually, because I sprayed [it] through the fabric of the tent, I got a lot of bear spray in my own face, too — a lot,” he said.

“I don’t know how much went to the bear, how much went to me. I was choking and I couldn’t see, and I started vomiting.”

And then he fainted.

“I went down like a sack of potatoes,” he said.

Flight down the river

He regained consciousness about half an hour later. The bear and her cub appeared to be gone, but Higgins wasn’t sticking around to find out.

He threw everything into his canoe and made tracks down the river. He paddled all day and then kept going into the wee hours, hoping to run into other paddlers with whom he could camp.

“I was really traumatized by the whole thing,” he said.

Eventually, he made it to Dawson City.

Bad campers

It isn’t clear if the garbage left at the campsite is what drew the bear.

Adam Henderson, a Yukon conservation officer, confirmed they had received a report about the incident, but noted there was a lag time between when it happened and when it was reported, so the information they have about the bear is limited.

Higgins said aside from the mess he’d found at that campsite, most of the ones he’s visited have been “pristine.”

Sebastian Jones, a wildlife analyst with the Yukon Conservation Society, said hearing about the state of the campsite was concerning.

“That bothers me,” he said. “It’s really bad when that happens. There’s no excuse for doing that whatsoever.”

If you pack stuff into the bush, you should pack it home again, he said — and if you don’t want to carry out your feces, bury it.

“Not doing that is inconsiderate and rude and potentially, as in this case, very dangerous. This guy could have been badly hurt or killed,” he said.

He added that with the amount of paddlers who use the Yukon River, there are things that could be done to “make it easier for people to do the right thing.”

He pointed to what’s being done at the river between Lake Laberge and Carmacks, where the Laberge Renewable Resources Council is putting out fire pits and outhouses to reduce the waste left by paddlers and campers.

An experienced outdoorsman who has lived and camped in the Yukon for decades, Jones said he’s had close encounters with bears but never a dangerous one.

He said it’s a good idea to take training for how to use bear spray, like any other weapon.

As for Higgins, the encounter made him seriously think about whether he wanted to continue with his voyage.

With some time and space between him and the bear, though, he posted an update on Facebook on Tuesday to say he has decided to keep going.