Last Monday, Chris Lubell encountered a black bear on the Lower Shinglebolt trail.
The animal could have killed or crippled him, but the only contact was when it nuzzled him with its nose.
Two days removed from the frightening incident, Lubell’s cuts are healing, his hoarse voice is recovering, and he’s pondering just what happened on that trail.
“I have a lot of respect for those animals, so much more now that I’ve had an actual connection with one,” he said.
Lubell, a 35-year-old financial adviser, had just passed two groups of female hikers during an uneventful Monday morning run.
“I turned the last bend before a straightaway … and the bear was sitting there.”
Numerous media outlets, including the North Shore News, reported the bear’s weight at approximately 200 pounds.
“I’m 200 pounds,” Lubell said, estimating the three-year-old black bear was at least 400 pounds.
His first instinct was to warn the hikers he’d passed.
“I turned around and ran and immediately the bear started running after me – and I know, I know you’re not supposed to run from a bear.”
He yelled, “Bear, bear, bear! Go, go, go!” and led his lumbering pursuer away from the hikers, tearing up the embankment and heading into the wooded area off the trail.
The bear stayed on his tail, prompting a realization: “running away is not going to work.”
He turned around and saw the bear was less than a metre away.
“I swear to god we sat there and stared at each other for at least five minutes … whatever it was, it seemed like an eternity.”
Lubell tried to back away. The bear followed.
“He did come right up to me and he started sniffing my groin.”
Lubell screamed at the top of his lungs. He wasn’t sure he was even forming words, he just knew he had to be loud.
The bear stopped moving forward. Its snout dipped.
Judging from bear encounters he’d seen on TV, Lubell thought it was a sign of submission.
From there, Lubell would back up, the bear would approach. Lubell would yell, the bear would retreat.
He guesses he covered more than a kilometre like that, unsure if the bear was being aggressive or playful.
“Really, what I was doing was just maintaining some sort of dominance and control over the situation in the only way that I thought possible.”
When the bear sat down to excrete in the woods, Lubell saw his chance to escape.
He rounded a corner, waited a couple seconds, started running, and fell.
The bear moved over top of him.
“I was on my back and I was looking at this bear’s face. I could smell it.”
But all the bear did was look.
“There were multiple times this bear could have just totally eviscerated me and it made a decision not to.”
In the midst of the pursuit, a passerby heard Lubell’s screams and called 911.
Lubell was near the end of the trail when arriving officers on a nearby trail yelled down to him.
“Before the bridge the bear looks at me, looks up to where the voices are, and just starts off into the forest,” he said. “That’s the last I saw of it.”
Conservation officers set a trap for the bear on Monday and were debating destroying the bear.
If someone else had stumbled on the bear, if it had been hungry, if it had been provoked or startled, Lubell acknowledges the situation could have been different.
“I think bears are majestic, wonderful animals and that they shouldn’t be treated like cattle and shot to death,” he said. “I hope in my heart though that they would just relocate it.”
Lubell still plans to go running in the trails, but said from now on he’ll have an air horn or other bear deterrent within reach.
