HELENA, Mont. (AP) — A grizzly bear attacked and killed a 38-year-old mountain biker as he was riding along a trail just outside Glacier National Park, Montana authorities said.
Brad Treat and another rider were in the Halfmoon Lakes area of the Flathead National Forest Wednesday when they apparently surprised the bear, Flathead County Sheriff Chuck Curry said.
The bear knocked Treat off his bike, and the second rider left to look for help, Curry said.
Authorities found Treat’s body at the scene, but not the bear. Wildlife and law-enforcement officials were searching for the grizzlyWednesday evening.
Treat was a law-enforcement officer with the U.S. Forest Service.
“Brad was an integral member of our area law enforcement team and a friend to us all,” Curry said.
Treat grew up in nearby Kalispell, where was a standout distance runner in high school, his former coach, Paul Jorgenson, told the Flathead Beacon newspaper.
“He was a really good runner but he was also a kind-hearted person who cared about people,” Jorgenson told the Beacon.
The second rider, who was not identified, was not injured. Authorities have closed the area, which is about 3 miles away from Glacier’s west entrance, for public safety.
Grizzlies in the Lower 48 states have been designated a threatened species since the 1970s, but their numbers are increasing and so are conflicts between humans and bears.
The grizzlies in the Glacier area among about 1,000 bears in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, which also includes the Bob Marshall Wilderness south of the park. At least 700 more grizzlies live in and around Yellowstone National Park, which is roughly 360 miles south of Glacier.
Six people have been fatally mauled by bears in the Northern Rockies since 2010, but those deaths were mainly in the Yellowstone area. Glacier officials say there are usually one or two non-lethal encounters between bears and humans each year inside the park.
Before Wednesday, there had been 10 bear-related human deaths in Glacier since the park was created in 1910. The last was in 1998, when three bears killed and partially ate a park vendor employee while he was hiking.
In the most well-known Glacier attacks, bears killed two people in different parts of the park in a single night in 1967. Those attacks became the subject of a 1969 book by Jack Olsen titled “Night of the Grizzlies,” and later a documentary by the same name.
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That sucks. A friend has been pestering me for a couple of years to do some crazy-long ride on the Continental Crest. Think my appetite for this exploit just took a nosedive. Even on a fast downhill all the advantages are with Mr. Bear.
Yeesh. I spent a day fishing in Glacier years ago. That same griz might have eyed me up, asking itself how hungry it felt. The presence of bears in country like that just adds to the fascination, and they mostly avoid humans. But sometimes that switch in their head flips, they decide humans might be prey after all, and oooh man that’d be a nasty way to go. If one perceived a mountain biker as fleeing from it, that’s all it would take.
One suspects that they likely surprised the bear - all too easy on a bike, and regarded with disfavour by the bear. Agree it would be an ugly way to die, and forget the old bromide about ‘doing what he loved’.
That’s it, lets #banthebears…
(Agree with all posters above – poor guy, horrible way to go. But bears are bears, sharks are sharks, and wolves are wolves. Now somebody has an excuse to go out and shoot one…sheesh.)
Grizzly bear attacks are almost always due to the bear being surprised. They seldom hunt humans. Ninety percent of Black bear attacks, on the other hand, are predator-prey attacks. A large percent even attack through tent walls. Black bear attacks are very rare, of course. Why is this important? Because Black bears attacking humans must be hunted down and killed. Once a Black bear loses its fear of humans, they will repeat the attack. The attack in this article was almost certainly due to surprise, and the bear is of no threat, so should be left alone. That’s one of the big reasons people shouldn’t feed wildlife. As bad as it sounds, it’s important that animals fear humans.