Daniel Crago had one moment to react. As a massive grizzly bear rushed down at him across a Montana snowfield, the 32-year-old hiker raised his arm in self-defense and thought to himself: this is the end.
Two weeks later, Crago is alive. He has undergone three surgeries, his right forearm bears bite wounds where both bones were broken, and he was dragged roughly 20 feet by the animal before it bolted. Yet he walked away from one of the rarest encounters at one of America's most dangerous parks for bear encounters.
The attack happened May 28 on the Grinnell Glacier Trail at Glacier National Park in Montana. Crago had split from a hiking companion to photograph a snow field. When he turned to walk back, he spotted what he thought was a bear cub. Seconds later, he looked uphill and saw an adult grizzly about 15 feet away.
"This bear, as soon as we looked at each other, it charged towards me," Crago said in an interview with ABC News this week.
The bear gave him no time to deploy the bear spray he was carrying. The area along the trail sits near rushing water that muffled sounds in both directions, preventing either animal or human from detecting the other's presence until they were nearly face to face. Crago called out to alert the bear, following standard protocol, but the noise of the water drowned him out.
When the grizzly leaped forward, Crago heard the roar and thrust his arm upward. The bear's bite shattered both bones in his forearm. The animal then dragged him across the snow before running off.
Crago's friend and other hikers on the trail rushed to help. A doctor among the group applied a tourniquet to slow bleeding. A helicopter transported Crago to a hospital for emergency treatment.
Glacier National Park sprawls across nearly 1,600 square miles in the Rocky Mountains and shelters close to 1,000 bears, both black and grizzly. Fatal bear attacks there are extraordinarily uncommon, though the park remains a statistical hotspot for encounters. The odds of being injured by a bear anywhere in the United States are roughly 1 in 2.1 million. One month before Crago's mauling, park rangers discovered a hiker's body believed to have been killed by a bear, the first fatality from a bear attack at Glacier since 1998.
Crago now faces additional medical procedures, possibly including a skin graft. He has turned to crowdfunding to help cover the mounting costs. But his focus has shifted away from the debt and toward simple gratitude.
"Whatever else is going on in life, I'm alive," he said.
Author James Rodriguez: "Crago's story reads like a worst-case scenario that somehow became a second-chance narrative, a reminder that split-second decisions and the luck of a bear deciding to flee can make the difference between a survivor's tale and a tragedy."
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