An extract from an article in Anchorage Daily News

30. August 2008

Included in the parcel by Diddy Hitchins, Anchorage, Alaska.

Guide likely saved bear attack victim’s life.
By Craig Medred

After a glorious week of watching herds of migrating caribou in the wild mountains of Alaska’s Brooks range, Jo Ann Staples was in her tent packing her bags to head home to Kentucky when a grizzly bear jumped on her back and nearly killed her, Gates of the Arctic National Park superintendent Greg Dudgeon said Friday.

“She’s going to have a long recovery,” Dudgeon said of Staples. But, he added, she probably wouldn’t be alive at all if not for the courage of guide Anne Dellenbaugh from Maine, a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School. A former Zen priest and head of the wilderness guiding business “Her Wild song” (www.herwildsong.com)

The time was 6.30am. She was packing in the light of a headlamp.
“The bear came through the tent,” said Dudgeon,” She had no idea what it was. She described it as ferocious. It came through the tent like a whirlwind.”
The commotion brought Dellenbaugh out of her tent.
She “saw the bear with its head essentially in the tent of Jo Ann, and the tent was in a different place than where it had been staked. She did a brave thing and ran in the direction of the bear.”
The bear dropped the tent containing Staples, stood up on its hind legs to get a better look at Dellenbaugh, then dropped to all fours and approached the guide. Dellenbaugh stood firm. Down on all fours, the bear’s head came up to near her chest.
She was joined by Sandstrum who bought the bear spray.
The sound of the spray going off and the orange cloud it spread across the tundra was enough to send the bear packing, Dudgeon said.
An initial Park Service assessment of the incident concluded there was little the group could have done to avoid the attack.
Attacks on humans in tents are so extraordinarily rare scientists can’t even posit a guess as to what triggers them. Starving bears have on occasion appeared to be going after people as last-ditch prey.