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19-year-old Dylan woke at 4 a.m. July 9th to the crunching sounds of a bear biting the back of his skull and using its claws to grip his forehead, dragging him out of his sleeping bag at Glacier View Ranch, 48 Miles Northwest of Denver, Colorado.When Dylan awoke he started punching the bear in the face and jabbing his fingers into its eye. The bear dropped him and ran away.
“I woke up to a crunching sound and a lot of pain… The bear had a hold of my head and was dragging me across the ground.” “I just started hitting the bear as hard as I could,” Dylan said. “And I found its eye, and I started poking it with my fingers…and it dragged me for about 10 feet before I was able to get it off of me.” told Melissa Garcia from CBS Denver
“When it was dragging me, that was the slowest part. It felt like it went forever.”
Dylan told ABC affiliate KMGH, The DenverChannel.com
12-13 year old campers were sleeping in Tee Pee’s as camp staff slept outside for the night with their sleeping bags on the ground. It is reported, by camp officials, that no campers were involved or harmed during the attack and that other staff helped swat at the bear and yell at it to leave.
Dylan teaches wilderness survival at the camp owned by the Rocky Mountain Conference owned by the Seventh Day Adventists. He was taken to a nearby hospital and given 9 stitches in the head before being released. He is back at the camp and will continue teaching for the rest of the season.
Denver, Colorado Parks and Wildlife Spokesperson Jennifer Churchill stated that this was abnormal activity for an unprovoked Black Bear. In the last 10 years, Colorado has seen somewhere between 15 and 20 bear attacks. She also told reporters that the bear will be tracked and put down for showing aggressive behavior towards humans,
“Once in a while, if you have a bear get in a trash (can) and then go back to natural food, that’s understandable. But when a bear is aggressive towards a person, that’s a behavior that we can’t tolerate. It can teach that behavior to other animals. Or, the behavior could escalate.”-Jennifer Churchill
