In Their Own Words: Mauled By A Grizzly | 1

0:00Alex Messenger:Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of Against the Odds ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. A listener note. This episode contains explicit language.

0:21Alex Messenger jolted awake in his tent, gasping for breath, with an uneasy feeling, like he was late for something. It was the afternoon of July 31st, 2005. He was 17 years old, in the middle of a 42-day canoe trip through the remote wilderness of northern Canada. We're just shy of the Arctic Circle. So we had sun until almost midnight. We had twilight for hours. We had to sleep with eye masks for the light and earplugs for the wind a lot of times. Between the wind and the midnight sun, sleep didn't always come easy. So that afternoon, a planned rest day, Alex decided to close his eyes for half an hour, just enough to recharge.

1:05While he stayed behind, the rest of the group hiked up a ridge behind their campsite, about 100 feet up to the highest point on the island. From there, they'd be able to see for miles in every direction. My plan was to lay down for a little bit. And when I woke up, I was going to head up to the ridge and meet the rest of the group. And so when I woke up, I just knew that I had slept longer, that everyone had come down already. So that's kind of where I was headed. I was just headed to the top of that ridge because that was the plan when I went to sleep. His eyes snapped open. And with a strange sense of urgency, Alex threw on his clothes and scrambled out of the tent.

1:45The others had already come down as he started up the steep, rocky ridge. It was a clear, bright day. The air was cool and crisp. As he climbed, he let his thoughts wander, reflecting on the trip, wondering how it had changed him, whether he'd see life differently when he got home. My mind was just kind of wandering as I walked up these rolling domes of this sparse granite landscape. What I didn't know was that there was this 600-pound grizzly bear that was walking up the other side of this ridge, and we were headed straight for each other.

2:31From Wondery, I'm Cassie DePeckel, and this is Against the Odds, in their own words.

2:44In the summer of 2005, 17-year-old Alex Messinger set out on a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, 42 days of canoeing through the wild, untamed rivers and lakes of northern Canada. He expected a challenge. He expected beauty. What he didn't expect was to come face-to-face with a 600-pound grizzly bear. On this episode, Alec shares the story of what happened next and how that split-second encounter in the wilderness changed everything. This is Mold by a Grizzly.

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4:31Alex Messinger grew up in the suburbs of the Twin Cities in Minnesota. From a young age, he was drawn to nature and adventure. His parents took him and his sister on all kinds of trips, starting with car camping, then moving on to more challenging canoe expeditions. By the time he was a teenager, Alex had signed up for a YMCA adventure program called Camp Minogen. Basically, it's not archery, it's not horseback riding. You get there, you meet up with your group, who you may or may not know beforehand, and you gear up and pack out, and you go on a wilderness trip, whether it's canoeing or backpacking or rock climbing.

5:11And from that first trip, something shifted in Alex. It just completely opened my mind to how efficiently we could travel in the backcountry, how well we could eat, how well we could work as a team to put on miles that I never thought were possible. Over the next three summers, Alex worked his way up, taking on longer and more demanding canoe expeditions. Then, in 2005, when he was 17, Alex was invited on the biggest, most remote trip the camp offered, a 42-day whitewater canoe expedition through the Northwest Territories of Canada. He'd be traveling with six other guys, nicknamed the Olmstenord, including his friend Mike and their guide Dan, who was in his late 20s.

5:58There was also a girls' group, the Femmesdenord, canoeing the same route. The trip would take place the summer before Alex's senior year of high school. It promised to be the quintessential wilderness journey, an adventure of a lifetime. We'd be traveling through this amazing, remote, northern Canadian wilderness area that was just far and away more distant and more uninhabited than any of the other places that I had traveled previously. And a lot harder. 600 miles, starting in the Northwest Territories and heading into Nunavut, paddling down a series of rivers all the way to the tiny hamlet of Baker Lake, near the northwest corner of Hudson Bay.

6:45In that whole time, we would be completely unsupported. We'd be dropped off by float plane. We'd be carrying all the gear that we needed, all the food that we needed, all the emergency supplies. And then theoretically, the next time we'd see someone was when we paddled into Baker Lake at the end of our route. No creature comforts, no safety nets, dehydrated meals, relentless mosquitoes. So why do it? I've always just felt this sense of, I guess, purpose when I'm out there. I also feel like I just learn so much about myself and about the people that I'm with. They're kind of these crucible experiences where you are put in a situation where you have limited resources and you've got these various parameters you're dealing with and you have to problem solve.

7:38Alex was well aware of the risks. Before the trip, the group had been briefed on potential danger. They'd carry a satellite phone and a first aid kit. But if anything went wrong, they'd have to rely on themselves and each other. Some of the bigger things we were thinking about were like whitewater and hypothermia and just kind of general injuries like a sprain or a break or something like that. And then also we were thinking about the wildlife in the area. We knew we were going to be in grizzly country. We had gone through training on how to use bear spray, which is basically like a small fire extinguisher that shoots mace about 40 feet for seven, eight seconds.

8:22Most of the training is about like, what do you do at the outset? How do you avoid an encounter in the first place? Setting up our camp properly where our food is stored separately from our sleeping space. And then we're told if we do have a close encounter with a bear, play the bear spray. If it starts charging, to back away slowly, to not run away, to speak calmly to the bear and try to show it that you're not a threat. But we've been told that grizzlies are very rare to see up there, that you're very lucky if you end up seeing a grizzly bear. So, with a mix of nervous excitement, on July 2nd, 2005, Alex and the group loaded all their gear and canoes into a twin otter float plane.

9:06Their destination? Holdia Lake, deep in the remote northern Canadian wilderness, the official start of their expedition. From that point on, there was no turning back. We got all of our stuff squeezed into this small two-engine prop plane, and the whole time we were flying there, all we saw was just unturned land all around us, just wilderness the entire way there. And when we landed, the plane circled a couple times, dropped down, and squeaked up to shore. We got all of our stuff out, we put our boats back together, and all of a sudden, the plane was gone. and it was just the six of us there in the taiga forest completely alone and that was like a whole different experience for me I'm used to you know getting to the trailhead and you know parking the car and walking our gear down to the start and if you forget something you can head back to the car and grab you know whatever it is and that like very sudden uh being alone in the wilderness was like kind of overwhelming.

10:14It was a little nerve-wracking just to be that remote that suddenly.

10:24The first thing that we noticed was the bugs were just atrocious. The black flies and mosquitoes were thick. The tigre is this kind of smaller forest where the trees just get shorter and shorter as you head north and so we were pretty close to where the tree line would end and so everything around us was pretty stunted you know bushes and mossy ground but the views were just very expansive. The first few weeks on trail you know we were kind of getting into the groove of things getting to know each other we were having a lot of fun on the whitewater we were trying to fish but we had a lot of trouble catching anything until a couple weeks in and then the fishing became absolutely amazing.

11:08And as we made our way north, we paddled down Dubon River. The rapids got more exciting as we went. We got more skilled as we went. We were eating amazing food and seeing really cool wildlife. We saw evidence of these old trapper's cabins and we'd see caribou sheds. And eventually we started seeing musk oxen basically like a cross between a yak and a bison. They're straight out of the Ice Age. They've got these enormous bony plates, and then the horns wrap around their head, and they're these big spikes. And as we were taking a break after these first three weeks on trail, I was standing there talking with Mike at this huge canyon, and we were just chatting, and all of a sudden he stopped and he pointed across this canyon, and he said, Bear!

11:57And we all looked up, and there was this grizzly bear that was meandering across this tundra. But as soon as he yelled, it heard him and it turned around and started running the other direction. And I remember turning to Dan at that point and saying, you know, that's the only way I'd ever want to see a grizzly bear. On the other side of a canyon like that and with it running in the opposite direction. It was a mixture of awe and wonder at seeing this animal that we'd been told, you know, we were very unlikely to see. but it was also this like fear or foreboding that there it was on day 28 we arrived at princess mary lake and at this point we have been on the trip for almost a month and with a 42 day trip we're kind of pretty close to the end and in a lot of ways i think as we paddled into that lake we were thinking about the fact that this journey was nearing its conclusion and things have been going really well we'd been really hitting stride with a lot of the technical things like the paddling and such and we'd crossed paths with the girls group so that was a really cool opportunity to learn more about their trip and what it was like and share some of our stories you know I'd caught the biggest fish of my life like that day or the day before And so it was kind of like all these things were coalescing into this just being the quintessential adventure that I had been hoping for, I guess.

13:33And I started to feel this sense of loss that it was nearing its end and just kind of recognizing that on the horizon.

13:45The next day, July 31st, was our 29th day on trail, and it was going to be another layover day. We were going to stay in camp. We weren't going to travel at all. And like any other day of rest, you just go from meal to meal to meal. You make breakfast, you hang out, you make lunch, you hang out, and you make dinner. So it's kind of like this feasting day alongside a rest day. When we woke up, we were going to have cinnamon rolls. We'd done some trading with the girls to get the right ingredients because we were low on a couple things. And they were going to paddle past us on their way out. but as they were paddling by they suddenly turned and they went right to our camp and they started climbing up this enormous hill at the base of the island they were waving their arms and yelling and uh when they got up to us they started talking about what they'd seen they'd seen these really big mammals right around the point of the island they were describing them as like this herd they were brown they were tall they had skinny legs and as we started talking to them and asking questions you know they were describing the musk oxen that we'd seen absolutely this was their first time seeing them so we thanked them for the warning we were happy that it wasn't bears that were there and they went back into their canoes and continued on and we went on to making our breakfast which despite all of our anticipation instead of cinnamon rolls we'd accidentally traded for allspice so they were allspice rolls which was very disappointing later in the afternoon the rest of the guys decided to go explore the island we were camped on this enormous island on princess mary lake it was like five miles across we were kind of halfway up with this huge ridge behind us so they decided to go up this ridge and see what was up there i was really tired at the time and i decided to just stay back at camp and take a nap so the rest of them went up I laid down and I fell fast asleep and the next instant I remember I was waking up gasping just filled with this feeling that I was late for something I got all my stuff on it was cool so I put on a bunch of different layers I had long underwear on and fleece and threw some chacos on my feet because that was what we usually wore when we were in the boats to try to give our feet a chance to air out.

16:07I climbed outside. Most of the guys had already come back and they were in the bug tent. I just felt this compulsion to climb up the ridge and get to the top. It took me about 10 minutes to climb this ridge. There's a lot of crumbling ground and grass and so you kind of zigzag your way over. And at the top is just this lunar landscape of granite and scrub grass and boulders and small rocks. I started just kind of walking in that direction with my head down, just thinking through what I wanted to do while I was up there. I had my summer reading book in my pocket from my coming year of high school and assignment and decided I didn't want to read that.

16:52I had my camera in a pelican case on my hand. I was thinking I'd just head up there and kind of take in the view. when you're up there it's the highest point of land around the island's taller than everything on shore and you can see lake after lake after lake and it's just this 360 degree view from up there so as I'm walking I'm watching the ground just kind of daydreaming and just out of the corner of my eye, the very top periphery of my vision, I see this kind of brown form crest the ridge. And somewhere in the, you know, lizard brain of my mind, I recognize that that's not supposed to be there.

17:44That's something moving. My body just immediately tensed. I felt my pulse start racing. I felt this surge of energy that just went all the way through my body. And this crest of brown fur kept coming and growing. And at first I thought, oh no, this is one of those musk oxen. It's 30 feet in front of me. It's way too close to be running into a big animal by yourself in the wilderness. And as it kept coming and as I kept kind of moving forward, because I still had my momentum going, we crested into each other's line of sight and I saw that this wasn't a musk oxen this was a grizzly bear its eyes just locked on mine and we both stopped and we both had this like moment of surprise and my body's just racing through this adrenaline response and I'm recognizing that this is the worst case scenario.

18:47I pictured pulling the bear spray out of its holster. I imagine taking the safety cap off, aiming the canister and pressing the lever and firing and that 40 foot spray of mace enveloping this bear in front of me. But I didn't have the bear spray with me. It wasn't our practice to carry it on our person every time because we assumed we would be surprised by a bear while we were sleeping. We kept it in the tent. When you're up in this country, there's no trees you can see for miles. And the idea of stumbling upon one was just not part of our scenarios necessarily. So I couldn't use that. And also in playing in my head was the fact that I could not run.

19:31It was the one thing I wanted to do in this situation. I wanted to turn around and get away from this grizzly bear. But I knew that if I did that and started running away. I could run at about 17 miles an hour and the bear could run at about 36, much faster than me. So then I defaulted back. My brain just played out Dan's voice in my head going through our training and what you do when you run into a grizzly bear. And he said, hey bear, whoa bear, it's okay bear. So I started to back away slowly, tried to avert my eyes, tried to not make eye contact with it, basically trying to get rid of any sort of threatening posture, said, hey, bear, whoa, bear, it's okay, bear.

20:13And I was trying so hard to keep my voice calm and to not let this incredible terror that I was feeling come through in my words. Hey, bear, whoa, bear, it's okay, bear. I don't think I was very successful. I'm pretty sure that my voice was shaking a lot. and I kept backing away slowly, and it didn't turn around and leave. I had to stand my ground while slowly giving it up, slowly telling the bear that I wasn't a threat, and it was processing, it was watching, and it launched onto its front paws with a grunt, just, and I kept backing away slowly, and it did another stationary bluff charge like that a couple of times, which just would launch forward.

21:06I faded from saying hey bear, woe bear to yelling obscenities as it faded from stationary bluff charge to a full speed charge.

21:19When it's 15 feet away from me, I'm in this deep stance. My hands are behind my back and I'm just kind of yelling no at this point and yelling help. Trying to get the attention of the guys who are 200 yards away as the crow flies, but they might as well have been on the other side of the lake. The other side of the province, they had no idea anything was happening. When it was 5 or 10 feet from me, I can feel the ground shaking under my feet as this 600-pound apex predator is barreling towards me, this 17-year-old, 150-pound kid. I still had that pelican case in my hand, my camera. I, just on instinct, just wound back and threw it underhand right at the bear.

22:03It plays out in slow motion in my mind. I can see the camera case tumbling towards this bear's face, and it hit it square in the nose with enough force to turn its head all the way to the side, and the camera case went flying over its shoulder. The bear grunted, and for a couple of its steps, it couldn't see where I was, and I was able to jump out of the way and dodge it, bullfighting style, just barely missing me. Its claws swiping at me, its jaws snapping at me, and as soon as it realized that it missed me, the bear turned around and came at me again, and I've never seen anything change direction as quickly as that bear did.

22:43It's this huge mass, but all of a sudden it was coming at me again, and I was able to jump out of the way again. And so each time it came at me, we got closer and closer and I'm yelling no and help and just trying trying to survive in this moment where this bear is swiping at me and biting at me it was getting me with its claws on my arm and my back and each time it came it would snap at me with its jaws it's so incredibly terrifying my brain is decoding things faster than I can think Everything is playing out in these milliseconds of reaction, this terrible, terrible dance that I'm having with this grizzly bear.

23:34It smells like a dog that's never bathed. It's just this rot and dirt and fur, and it's growling and swiping. The claws are moving so fast, they're burning the fleece that's on my back instead of cutting through. and so after a few times of successfully dodging it the next time it came at me it bit at my leg and I had to pull my leg out of the way at the last second it snapped shut just inches away from it and then at that same moment it reached up with its paw and I remember seeing this grizzly bear's paw when it was inches from my face. It's just this image that is seared in my brain. It's this wide palm with lines on it, just like a human's, and these fingers and these enormous claws, and then this huge halo of fur.

24:33And I remember thinking, oh no, this is what the grizzly bear uses to take down caribou and muskox. It's this blow that we had talked about at some point, just the power of a grizzly bear being kind of exemplified as they swat at an animal and take it down with that one hit and when it hit me it was like the bear was swatting a bug out of the air my head whipped to the side and I went flying to the side and I'm still in midair haven't hit the ground yet and it had that same paw up and it threw me down to the ground hard on my tailbone and it had its head right at my hip as I hit the ground and it instantly has its teeth around my leg and it clamps down and I just feel this excruciating pain, this tearing and pressure and it is so overwhelming and I'm screaming and at this point I'm just so certain that I'm about to die and all I can say is no, this isn't how it's supposed to happen.

25:47This isn't how this is supposed to go. At that moment, my body was completely overwhelmed. That pain hit my kill switch and then I blacked out.

26:1017-year-old Alex Messinger was deep in the northern Canadian wilderness on day 29 of a 42-day whitewater canoe expedition. That afternoon, he'd hiked alone to the top of a ridge behind their campsite, a short climb to take in the view. Then, suddenly, a grizzly bear appeared. It lunged fast. Alex dodged once, then again. But within seconds, the bear was on him, sinking its teeth into his thigh. And everything went black. Then, slowly, his awareness began to return. So the next instant I remember, I realize that I'm sensing things. I don't really know what I'm sensing, but I can tell that I'm there.

27:00And I start to get these little flashes of light. And I'm suddenly aware that I'm on top of the ridge. And I'm realizing that I have woken up after this bear attack. Instead of dying as I thought I was about to, I am alive. and I am just filled with elation. I'm so excited that I am not dead. And I track along the horizon and my world's just expanding with each moment. And I see that the bear is actually still there. And I freeze. I look away. I avert my eyes. I had been playing dead very effectively when I was unconscious. And now I have to do it consciously. and I'm looking away, trying to convince it that I am not back in this fight.

27:56And it's watching me as it's running away. And it's running at a trot back up over the ridge. Its head's turned over its shoulder and it keeps switching side to side, but it's looking at me. And I'm just hoping and hoping that it doesn't come back. And I wait for it to go back over the ridge and it disappears. and I wait. I sit there. I'm holding my breath pretty much, just hoping it doesn't hear anything. It doesn't change its mind, knowing that if it comes back, I will not survive another round. And once it's gone over the ridge and I've waited long enough that I know if it kept going, it wouldn't be able to see me if I stood up.

28:38I put my hand on my leg and I realized that it is wet like oh no that's a lot of blood and I peel my hand away and I look at it and it's not blood it's covered in bear saliva all gooey between my fingers which was very encouraging the blood hadn't gotten through all my layers yet so watching that part of the ridge where the bear disappeared I get up and I grab my book that had fallen out of my pocket because for some reason and I felt like I needed to grab that. I grabbed my pelican case, and I start running back to camp as quickly as I can. I have my sandals on, and my adrenaline is on the red line.

29:22It is masking all of my injuries, but I can tell that something is very wrong with my leg. It hurts. It's not working right. And I'm limping terribly, trying to be silent so that the bear can't hear me. and I just know that what I need to do is I need to get to the group. I need to get to the point where I'm not alone anymore because alone, if it comes back, I will die. And if I get back to the group, I'll have a chance. And so I'm going as quick as I can, just hoping that I'm going in the right direction. And when I get to the ridge, I see the shoreline down below, and I see our boats. and then I take that next step and I see the tent and the guys are down there and I look back over my shoulder to check to see if that bear is still there if it's come back and I turn back to the group and I say bear and they're like whatever Alex like no bear a fucking bear they thought I was joking I'd only been gone a couple minutes the whole encounter was probably 30 seconds I was like, I do not care if they believe me or not.

30:34I'm getting off this ridge. I'm not gonna be up here when this thing comes back. And the entire time I'm running down this ridge, my adrenaline rush is waning, and my ability to move my leg is just decreasing with each step. And by the time I was about 10 feet above Dan, I couldn't move my leg anymore with my leg muscles, and it's holding it with my arms to keep making my way down. The assessment starts as he's approaching me. You know, we're conversing and yelling back and forth. I'm like, I got attacked by a bear, and I got hit in the face, and I don't know if I'm cut, and I got bit in the thigh, and there's blood on my foot for some reason, and I don't know why.

31:14So he knows that I have a functioning airway, at least for now. He was very concerned about where the bear was at that moment, if the threat is still out there. and it was but as far as we knew it had been going the opposite direction and so he carries me down and then the rest of the guys are there they have a sleeping pad they lay me down on and Dan starts doing his full assessment head to toe and I've got scrapes and bruises all over I have the tips of the first two toes on my left foot got sliced off from something who knows what my face has the start of a bruise, my ears bleeding from where one of the claws got it from that swipe.