Joe Rogan STUNNED By Bear Attack Story

Good to see you man. Good to see you. I purposely didn't ask you or talk to you about the grizzly bear attack because I wanted to save it. You wanted, you wanted. What is it like to have survived literally being two feet away from an attacking grizzly bear? Pretty close. Yeah. Like you could have grabbed it. Yeah. Oh yeah. Easily. Easily. Oh, it was, that was just nuts. It was one of those things. I thought about it a million times. I'm sure. How long ago was this? This was, so that would have been early October or mid October. So you've had three months. Three months to kind of think about it. Somewhere around. Yep. And yeah, man, it's just one of those things that I've thought about it so many times in my head. And I've always been, I think Steve was the same way. Like, oh, it'd be pretty cool to survive a bear attack. It scratched up a little bit. Through that experience, I thought to myself, if that never happens again, I'll be okay. Yeah. Steve used to always say, Steve Rinoa we're talking about from the Meat Eater podcast, and he has a two part series on this particular bear attack. But he always say he wanted to get clawed across the chest and have like, not a tattoo, but like a big claw. I'm like, what? A little bit of marking. Like, what are the odds that that happens? Yeah. I think that in order to get that, you have to go through a really, really horrible experience. There's guys that have had those attacks, or there's guys that have had those attacks a lot. But I mean, I've been around a lot of wild animals and seen a lot of things and been charged by bears. And this was just different. It was that kind of attack where while it's happening, you're going, this is not gonna pan out well. Somebody's gonna die. Something, you're just looking at this bear and it's coming in hot. It's a weird experience. Your memory's a little foggy of it. Everything happened so fast, but it felt like it was so long. So the adrenaline just overwhelmed the brain. Yeah. And you don't even think about, I just remember, it was a weird situation. So maybe I'll just kind of recap the story. So we're on a fog neck island and we're hunting. And a fog neck island is in Alaska. So a fog neck island has some of the largest bears in the world. They're brown bears. They are big brown bears. They can be over a thousand pounds. So we're hunting elk there. My brother and myself have hunted elk on that island before and it's just a miserable place to be. What's a fascinating hunt, the way you guys were describing it, because just the fact that you would choose out of all the places you can go, you pretty much can go anywhere you want. Yeah. You can go on this brutal adventure hunt because it's so difficult. Exactly. Because once, is it because, like, Ronella was talking about this once and the way he described it is like, there's things that are fun while you're doing them, but they're not fun later, like roller coasters. Yeah. And then there's things that are terrible and awful, but you'll think about them forever and look back at them fondly. Yeah, that's exactly what this is. It's that, oh, after the fact you think back and you go, in the moment you go, I will never do this again. And then about a year later you go, I should do that again. It's weird. And what is it about the place that's so miserable? Well, it's just, it's hard to walk through. It looks easy hiking and there's just this big mountain where you can get to with a plane. You've kind of got to climb this big mountain and the vegetation is so thick and it's so steep that it takes forever to go somewhere. So to put it in perspective, to go, say, a mile might take five hours. Whoa. That's how much verti-, like a map mile. Yeah. So the way the crow would fly, if you're just going a mile. And then another distance could take you half that time or a quarter of that time, but there's a big mountain in between where you need to go plus the vegetation and it's really steep. So you've got all that kind of working against you. Plus you can't really walk in just a straight line there. You've got to navigate around all kinds of stuff. And there's you from, well, place them in this, Jamie. That was, uh. I'm going to get destroyed and this is just a rough day. Real rough. So that was after the bear attack. Right after. Yeah, I'll have to figure out, because I, I put right after the bear attack, I pulled out my phone and it was just kind of like recording everyone's reactions. And then I, I put it on my Instagram story, but I'll, I'll try to find it tonight and I'll post it onto some, I'll figure out a way to stitch it together. Yeah, Instagram stories, they let you save them now. Now they do. It's like three weeks before that, unfortunately. So this place is miserable. It's rainy all the time. Rainy high winds. Thick, thick, dense vegetation and literal monsters. Yeah. I mean giant bears and then big, um, the elk are probably, what they weigh, they weigh, they can weigh up to 1400 pounds. These elk. So the size is way bigger. Yeah. It's like the size of two normal elk weight wise. Cause like an average elk would probably be around 500 pounds in most places. A really big one. Like we were talking about the California ones at Tahoe and sometimes can get to a thousand. Yeah. This is another 400 pounds. Exactly. It's a lot. It's a big animal. And there's bears that eat those giant animals. So those bears are giant. The bears can be over 1200, 1500 pounds themselves. 11 feet or more. Yeah. 11 feet. 11 feet. It's nuts. 11 foot bear. No. This one that attacked you guys, how big do you think it was? Have you had a guess? I would say, well, I would say it's 11 and a half feet because, um, I know because actually after we went in there, my friend who's a pilot there and dropped this off, he called me about a week or two later and he's like, they shot that bear that went after you guys. Somebody went in there, same place, bear attacked him. They killed it in self defense. It was 11 and a half feet and I think almost 1200 pounds. So there's very good odds that that was the same bear. I would imagine that it was, there's very, I mean, because it's the same area, same area. Probably had taken over that area. Seemed about the same size. When I, when it came in, I thought that's a big boar. It wasn't one of those ones you think, oh, that's a, it looked like a big mature animal in the, in the piecing together, what happened in my mind later. But yeah, so we're hunting elk on this Island. Steven's up getting an elk. We hang it in a tree. We do all the stuff you're supposed to do, get the meat away from the carcass, but we had yet to see a bear up until this point. And when my brother and I went in there a few years earlier, we just saw bears every day. We'd see six bears a day. So your mind's just bear, bear, bear. When you're seeing them all the time, when you're not seeing them all the time, you get a little lax and that's where we really screwed up. The attack went down. No one was prepared. We were just sitting around having some sandwiches and one of, so we're, we're filming and there's six of us altogether. And I think that large group, that six is what saved us because when the bear ran in, it was six of us sitting kind of in like a semi-circle, a strange circle. And when that bear came in, we did that scatter effect. And I think that scatter was kind of like if a lion's going after a zebra, they use their numbers and stripes to confuse the lion. It was that scattering of things just going everywhere that caused confusion for the bear. So I think the bear went in thinking, whatever's under that tree, I'm going to kill it. And it thought it was one thing. And then when we blew up into six different pieces, it just tried to kill everything at once and couldn't actually get one person. God, that's so lucky. Yeah, it was crazy because we're sitting down, we decided, oh, we'll have lunch before we hike back. Because the day before we, we hiked a long ways. We got back to camp at three in the morning or something. I can't remember, two or three in the morning. We'd barely eaten. So everyone was just thinking, let's have lunch, regroup, hike out. So we're, Pat, one of the other guys that was with us, brought the jet boil to boil up some coffee. So I was going around collecting water from everyone to get coffee, going around. And when I sat down, I took my pack off and the whole week I'd been doing this thing where I take my pistol from the pack belt and put it on the holster on my body when I dropped my pack. And it was that weird deal where I took the pack off and I'm thinking about switching. I'm like, no, it's fine. And I thought I'll just sit because there's few times I'd set my pack down. I was like, I'll just sit, I'll lay on my pack as a chair, a backrest, and then I'll flop the, have the pistol right there. So it's within arm's reach and I'll be sitting there while I go around and get the water. And then someone had moved kind of where I was sitting. So now, so I sit down across from the pack where my pistol is and then thinking, and I was thinking about, oh, hand me that pistol. But I just was like, you know, you don't want to be that guy. Like, oh yeah, the guy that needs the pistol all the time. Yeah, exactly. Not everybody had pistols. Just me and Janis had a pistol. And then, and then Pat's behind us. He goes, I hear something. And I look up and that's, that bear's like dead set. So Steve would be where you are, the bear behind Steve. So like Steve was between me and the bear. His back was to it. Like how far away? Not far. I don't know, 30 yards or something. So the first time you see it, it's 30 yards and is it running? Yeah, it's dead run. Super fast. I'm just locked eyes with this thing. I mean, I see it coming in the whole way, just beady eyes locked in on me. And I think this thing's going to kill me. And so I'm thinking, you know, when I say I'm thinking, I don't know if I'm thinking. I'm just, I just remember what I, what was kind of going through my head at the time. I thought, oh fuck, I'm going to die. And my protection's right there. Like I'm going to die. This is that situation where I'm dead and they talk about it and he could have saved himself, but his gun's on the ground. And I think that that was like go for the gun was my whole thing. So I start to go for the gun. Yaunas would have been here as I remember it. And so I start to go for the gun and realize, fuck, I don't have time to get to my gun. And it's three feet away. That bear's like right there coming down on me. So fast. So I kind of do like a football juke move left, right, and then wheel around, right. Do like a spin with my back and then start running to the left. And at that point, Yaunas, I didn't know this at the time because I looked at some pictures afterwards kind of piece everything together. So Yaunas was sitting right next to me. I think he got up to turn. There was some trekking poles right here. He grabbed the trekking pole. So probably while I was juking, he reached around and grabbed the trekking pole, swings around hits the bear in the face. So then the, I see the bear running off and I see someone going down the mountain with the bear. I'm thinking he's got someone. So I grabbed my pistol, start going down the mountain yelling, oh, count off. I guess I yelled, I yelled count off. And everyone's like one, one, one. I'm like, oh shit. Who's missing? Right. And then Garrett pops up out of the bushes and his, he's like wide eyed. So Garrett AKA dirt myth was the one who was on top of the bear. Somehow he's on the bear's back. So I think when the bear wheeled around, he like hit him and he ends up on the back. So I saw just legs and bear going down the mountain. I saw his legs on the back of the bear. So you thought like maybe the bear had him in his jaw. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I mean, who would think he'd be riding a bear. Like if that was in a movie, you'd be like, get the fuck out of here. You're not riding a bear. I think what was that? Anchorman where the guy's like riding the bear in the zoo. That's exactly like it. Yeah. And then we kind of circled up around the tree and the real scary part was that bear. It was so thick, you really couldn't see. You could see maybe as far as the wall is from us with the trees. Eight feet. Yeah. And just real thick brush and you'd hear the bear charge in again. And we only had the two pistols, Janice and I, and the wind was so strong, there's no way we could have used bear spray. So we hear the bear charging in and me and Janice are like pistols out ready waiting for this thing to pop out at point blank range. And then it would stay in your order yelling, bear, bear, hey, hey, hey. And then that thing stops and then it would just, you'd crash off and then it would charge in from the other direction. So you got to like circle around the tree the other way and did that I think three times. That was just under, it's like a horror movie where it keeps coming in from different angles. It was weird. It was not a fun feeling. You just felt so small. So you guys had come back to the carcass that was hanging in the tree and it had probably claimed that carcass? We don't know. It knew the carcass was there. I assume. Now the weird thing was is it came in with the wind. So the wind was blowing pretty stiff and say into our face and the bear came in with the wind. So he wasn't going into the scent. Normally they go around, they catch the scent and they charge in. So I don't know if he'd heard something, if he was there. We saw what slightly looked like bear sign, both Steve and I kind of pointed it out, but we weren't, we were thinking maybe it was something older. When you say bear sign, you mean bear shit. Yeah, bear shit in the base of the tree. And so I think we did some things that were wrong, but in the instance, what saved us all, now if we were to do it a hundred times over, I would say I would do it differently, but it worked out how it worked out. So I obviously wouldn't, I would never opt to just have nothing and have this weird scatter effect. But I think that what saved everyone from getting, anyone from getting hurt, which is a miracle, was the fact that when we scattered it just confused that bear. Cause he kind of had this look after he started, he started wheeling around kind of like trying to pick a person, trying to go, and he couldn't target one individual. And then things started hitting him and somebody's on his back and I think it just freaked him out and he went off to regroup, keep charging back in, but never made that full charge all the way back in again. Wow. That's crazy. How many people have ever gone through a bear attack unscathed like that in a group of six? Yeah. And the thing about it was it wasn't just a bear attack, but had looking at it later, had someone even been grabbed and mauled, not to death, but injured. I think that it would have been very unlikely that that person was survived because we, the weather that came in was so bad, I don't know if it was a hundred mile an hour winds. You aren't getting rescued in a hundred mile an hour winds, I wouldn't think. Right. I don't know. Those coast guard helicopters, I'm not really sure what they're capable of. Maybe someone would say, yeah, we'd go, but that would be a very hard thing.