‘I was sure that the bear would pounce on me’ – hiker recounts attack in the Smokies

Bradley Veeder had hiked 17.3 miles on May 10 in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The experienced hiker was on day 11 of his “thru-hike” of the Appalachian Trail, a journey that would take him more than 2,000 miles on foot, from Georgia to Maine.

On a “truly beautiful” camping spot near the already-crowded Spence Field Shelter, Veeder pitched his tent and was asleep by 8 p.m., feeling “tired but happy.”

That changed 2 1/2 hours later. “Suddenly, I felt a sharp pain in my right calf and an agonizing sensation like my calf was being squeezed in a vise,” Veeder recounted in an online report of the incident. He knew what it was. It was a bear, who had bit him in the leg through his tent. “There was a large hole in the tent next to where my calf was.”

“I sat up and screamed, ‘No, bear! Go away!’ The bear let go of my leg,” Veeder wrote.

But the bear didn’t give up.

“The tent wall started bulging in at upper-body level, and I punched the bear as hard as I could and shouted, ‘No, bear! Back off!’ at the top of my lungs,” Veeder wrote.

There was stillness for about a minute. Then the bear attacked again, moving toward the entrance to the tent.

“I could hear the bear move to the place where I’d hung the socks that I’d put out to dry. The bear sniffed loudly at my socks for at least a minute, sounding like a very big dog, before the most vicious attack on the vestibule yet,” Veeder wrote.

“Seeing that the vestibule was becoming badly shredded, I yelled loudly, starting to feel panicked. Since the smell of my own blood was so strong to myself, the bear must have been driven crazy by the scent.”

After three more sorties on the vestibule, there was silence. Veeder decided “I had to move before the bear came back.”

Veeder donned shoes and jacket, grabbed his quilt and headed through the now-shredded tent entrance (”no need to unzip,” he noted). He headed for the three-sided shelter, about 200 feet away.

“It was an overcast night with very little light to see by,” Veeder wrote. “I limped toward the shelter, looking every direction, but I couldn’t have seen a black bear on such a dark night.

“Nearly hitting a tree as I scanned all around me, I decided that I had to focus only on looking forward. In some ways, that was worse, since I was sure that the bear would pounce on me from behind, pin me down, and start feeding.

“I had just seen ‘The Revenant’ a few months before, which left a vivid picture in my mind.”

Once he was near the shelter, Veeder shouted and said he’d been “attacked by a bear, bitten and bleeding.” A nearby tent camper heard Veeder, grabbed her things and followed him into the shelter. “The next morning, her tent was found to have been shredded by the bear, even though it was only about 40 feet from the shelter,” Veeder wrote.

Veeder received some first aid from a hiker in the shelter and the park rangers were contacted. The rangers would not get to the remote mountain area until noon the next day.

The the morning, a few hikers went to get Veeder’s belongings from his tentsite. “The bear had returned to my campsite during the night and moved my things 100 yards from my camping spot. It had chewed everything that I had left behind (tent, tent poles, backpack, water filter, water bottles, phone, book, etc.).”

As an experienced hiker, Veeder had followed the usual rules – securing his food and other scented items in a bag hosted on special cables at the shelter. That didn’t prevent the bear from targeting Veeder in his tent.

Veeder survived the bear attack with “minor puncture wounds to my right calf (1- to 1.5-inch deep), a very hoarse voice, and slightly swollen knuckles on my right hand.” He’s now staying with family in Montana, where his leg is healing well.

Veeder says he intends to resume his hike in July – this time, beginning at the northern point of the trail (Mount Katahdin in Maine) and walking south. “I think that I will be able to sleep well after a few nights on the trail,” he says.

[What do I do if I see a Bear? Advice from the National Park Service]

[Great Smoky Mountains National Park]

[About thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail]

This story was originally published May 26, 2016 at 7:38 AM with the headline "‘I was sure that the bear would pounce on me’ – hiker recounts attack in the Smokies."