I'm out of words. Why go camp in the Alaskan wilderness on a "mining claim" (to mine for what exactly?) without a high power rifle and place to store food? Who is this codger who got extremely lucky?
He was sleep-deprived and nearly out of ammunition, alone in the wilderness of Alaska. Well, not really alone.
For several nights in a row, the man had fended off the tenacious advances of a grizzly bear that had attacked him a few days earlier at a mining camp some 40 miles outside Nome.
There was no way to phone for help. But then help found him.
En route to a mission on Friday, the crew of a Coast Guard helicopter saw the man waving both hands in the air, a widely recognized distress signal, the helicopter’s pilot said. On the tin roof of a shack, SOS and “help me” had been scrawled. The shack’s door had been ripped off.
The crew took the man to Nome to be treated for bruises to his torso and a leg injury that was not life-threatening, according to the Coast Guard. So ended a weeklong ordeal that could pass as a sequel to “The Revenant,” in which Leonardo DiCaprio was mauled by a computer-generated grizzly bear.
“At some point, a bear had dragged him down to the river,” Lt. Cmdr. Jared Carbajal, one of the pilots of the Coast Guard helicopter, said in an interview on Wednesday. “He had a pistol. He said that the bear kept coming back every night and he hadn’t slept in a few days.”
The Coast Guard did not identify the man, who rescuers said was in his late 50s or early 60s and had been staying in the shack since July 12 on the small mining claim. It was not clear how the man had reached the remote camp, which has no cellphone service and is in a river drainage area.
Commander Carbajal said that the Coast Guard MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter had changed its course by about a mile to avoid some clouds when something caught the eye of his co-pilot.
“He said, ‘Hey there’s a guy down there and he’s waving at us,’” Commander Carbajal said. “I said, ‘Is he waving with one hand or two hands?’”