Editor’s Note: “Close Encounters: Tourists in the Wild” on The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper takes us to Yellowstone National Park, where visitors behaving badly can lead to dangerous encounters with bears, bison and more. It premieres Sunday, August 25, at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CNN.
Shayne Burke let out a scream.
A grizzly bear had just taken a “good chomp right to the bone” on his leg.
The bear dropped him.
“And then she was up on my back, and then just went to bite down on the back of my head,” Burke said as he described the final moments of what could have been a deadly bear attack.
Burke and his wife, Chloe, were on day eight of a three-week trip out West from their home in Massachusetts in May 2024. They stopped off at Signal Mountain in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming to look for Great Gray Owls. Chloe went back to the car to get some water for their dog.
Burke was hustling back to the car through the woods a little later and figures he had “a generous three seconds” between spotting a grizzly bear cub and getting attacked by that bear’s mama.
He’s been deployed to Iraq, faced a brain tumor and been savaged by a grizzly bear. Shayne Burke is a survivor. He’s also an avid outdoorsman and Army reservist who believes in preparation.
His wife is a licensed EMT with an essential ability to compartmentalize, and Burke was clutching a can of bear spray when he encountered that angry mama bear.
These things saved his life.
‘I just kind of heard her huffing and puffing’
There was no time to deploy his bear spray once he spotted the charging bear, so Burke dove to the ground, he told CNN’s Ed Lavandera.
The bear bit his shoulder, and “I just kind of heard her huffing and puffing when I went down to the ground,” Burke recounted.
He covered the back of his neck with both arms and played dead, which isn’t easy when you have a “400 pound bear chomping at you,” Burke said. “I did, in my opinion, a decent enough job. I’m still alive.”
But he was still making some noise, he said, and the bear “started biting my left leg a bunch, and then she bit my right leg. … She picked me up,” he said.
He stiffened and planted his elbows into the ground in the prone position that park information kiosks post about for bear attack survival. “And I really was just trying to stay on the ground as much as I could so she couldn’t flip me over and get any of my vitals.”
The most painful bite, the one that went “right to the bone” and elicited Burke’s scream, brought the bear in for what Burke believes was supposed to be the “kill bite.”
She bit his hand and wrist, which were positioned over his neck to protect his arteries, and then he heard a pop.
“I thought she bit into my skull and then … I felt the warm sensation flowing down my face and my neck and my back, and I was like, that’s your blood. And then suddenly I hear her thump, thump, thump thump, thump. Just running away.”
Fortunately, it wasn’t blood on his neck. It was the bear spray he’d been gripping in his hand as he covered the back of his neck. The bear bit into the can. Burke believes that bite saved his life.
‘Please don’t kill the bear’
The attack lasted less than two minutes, Burke thinks. He went into “pure flight” mode, putting some distance between himself and the direction the bear had gone and managed to reach his wife by phone.
He credits Chloe’s calming and assured EMT training with helping to keep him alive. She coached him to stem his bleeding with makeshift tourniquets he fashioned out his small pack and other equipment. Eventually, he was airlifted to safety by US National Park rescue rangers.
But before he left the woods, he asked rangers what would happen to the bear.
“I was like, ‘Please don’t kill the bear.’ Like she was just protecting her cub. And I was in her world,” he said.
Park rangers and wildlife biologists investigated the scene the day after the incident.
“Based on interviews with the injured visitor and evidence found in the area, it is likely that the mauling involved an adult female grizzly bear with at least one older cub,” the National Park Service said.
NPS said the bear’s behavior appeared to be “a defensive action,” and that “no further management action is warranted at this time.”
Burke won’t let this incident dissuade him from enjoying the outdoors, he said.
“What’s the point of living without living with a little risk and really enjoying your life and being in the moment?” he said, while acknowledging that the event has shaken him.
“I would very much like, like a five-year grace period of just nothing bad happening.”
Bear country preparation
The couple got married nearly two years ago, not long before Shayne had brain surgery, and they were finally enjoying their delayed honeymoon
They had a new satellite phone that they got for their trip, and the avid rock climbers always have first-aid supplies on hand. Those two items are the only real source of regret for Burke. Chloe had the satellite phone with her when she returned to the car, and Shayne’s first aid kid was in his other pack back in the car.
But he was otherwise more equipped than most to survive an attack.
“The number one thing that kept me alive during the attack was reading and understanding what to do in the event of a bear attack and being prepared with the bear spray,” he said in a Facebook post about the incident.
Lee Whittlesey, Yellowstone National Park’s former park historian, advises people to hike in groups of at least three.
“Make noise. Don’t hike silently. Carry bear spray,” Whittlesey said. “That’s darn near an iron clad rule, these days.”
Click here for more on bear attack survival and the difference between grizzly and black bear strategies.