Facedown in the dirt, with bear bites on his back and rump, Dennis Van Denbos wondered how this would end.
It wasn’t looking good. “When I [got] that third bite … I thought, ‘They are just going to eat me,’” he said. “It wasn’t a fearful thing, it was just a recognition that this was going to happen.”
The year was 2007, and Van Denbos had taken an early walk in Grand Teton National Park that had turned perilous after he happened upon a sow grizzly and her three cubs as they fed on an elk carcass.
Death felt imminent but fate intervened, and Van Denbos survived the encounter.
That sow, meanwhile, went on to become one of the most famous wild animals in the modern era.
In fact, when Van Denbos encountered her, Grizzly 399 was doing precisely what she would become so beloved for: raising cubs.
All told, the sow gave birth to 18 known cubs over two decades in the Grand Teton National Park area. Because she raised them in proximity to roads — a strategy that kept them protected to some degree from aggressive boars — human fans were able to delight in watching her raise litter after litter.
Many felt connected to the bear. But no one shared a moment of connection with Grizzly 399 quite like Van Denbos. Long before 399 had more than 60,000 followers on Instagram and the nickname Queen of the Tetons, Van Denbos experienced a horribly close encounter with the bear and her offspring.
What unfolded in those terrifying moments left Van Denbos with indelible memories and painful evidence that she was above all a wild animal. In the wake of 399’s recent death in October, as the world mourned the loss of the great mama bear, he shared his story with WyoFile.
Paths cross
Van Denbos, a Lander-based climber and teacher, traveled to Grand Teton National Park in June 2007 for a conference at Jackson Lake Lodge. He was 54.
Van Denbos enjoys early exercise, and on the final day of the conference, he decided to go for a walk before the 7 a.m. breakfast. There were reports of an active bear, and staff warned visitors to avoid grounds north of the facility. So Van Denbos decided to stay close to the lodge on a two-track dirt path called Wagon Road.
He had left his bear spray at home, figuring perhaps naively he could simply borrow some from the lodge. But when he found out he would have to purchase it from the gift shop, he declined.
It was cold when he set out around 5 a.m. Things got exciting almost immediately; a cow and calf moose burst out of dense woods, running flat-out in a southern direction. He had never seen moose run in the national park. He soon climbed a small sage-covered hill. From the top, he saw the moose pair, along with a couple dozen elk.
All eyes pointed in his direction, looking at Van Denbos. Or so he thought.
After watching the sun come up around the animals, Van Denbos was satisfied he had gotten his fill and turned back. Soon he encountered another strange-acting animal. A cow elk was standing right in his way, not grazing or even spooking when he walked in her direction.
The animal hints would make sense to Van Denbos later. The behavior was related to the presence of an apex predator, Grizzly 399, who was shielded among nearby trees with her cubs, feeding on an elk calf that likely belonged to the cow.
Van Denbos, unaware of these critical facts, strode along the track — directly toward the bear.
“Which is when she charged at me,” he said.
The grizzly emerged onto the road and ran at him. He remembers two things from that moment: The image of the grizzly sow running very low to the ground straight for him, and, in the trees behind her, the faint figures of three cubs.
“It’s the sow and cubs,” he thought. “Oh, shit.”
He yelled and stepped back, and the bear skidded to a stop to his left. Time slowed down. He saw the sun illuminating the silver-tipped hackles on her shoulders. She turned her head away from him, like a dog might during a fight.
Neither moved. The bear seemed hyper-focused on him, Van Denbos said. He weighed his options and decided to give her space. He took one slow step back. Then another. Because he was so focused on the bear, however, he didn’t realize he was backing toward a drop-off at the road edge. When he stepped off it, he lost his footing, scrambling as he slipped down. He also lost his threatening position above her.
“I just remembered this look at me, and then, charge.”
He dove to the ground facedown, tucking his arms under his body. “She misses me, and then comes right around, and I feel this bite in my back. It’s just a really hard hit.”
He didn’t move. If there was pain, he doesn’t remember it.
“The next thing that happens is I get this bite in my right butt cheek,” he said. “She just clamps onto my butt and kind of lifts me a little bit. It was very powerful.”
He felt a paw rest on his left calf. Then another bite, this time in his left butt cheek, more of a tearing movement. He later surmised by the bite marks that this was a cub.
That’s when he found himself on his belly, injured and confronting the likely outcome of his death. Instead, Van Denbos heard a male voice yelling, followed almost immediately by vehicle sounds. The paw left his leg. The bears were gone.
Aftermath
When a man had noticed the scene from nearby cabins, he ran down the hill toward them hollering. At that same moment, the lodge cook and her assistant were driving a truck up the two-track, heading to their breakfast shift. They saw a group of bears, then saw the man yelling and running. The cook stopped the truck, and the bears ran off.
Van Denbos stood, and the people quickly assessed him before loading him into the pickup. He rode on his hands and knees on the passenger side to protect the wounds, the extent of which he still didn’t know.
“I think it definitely has given me, subconsciously, a different perspective on life.”
Dennis Van Denbos
The driver started backing up down the track. Van Denbos remembers looking out the window as they retreated.
“The trees kind of have this arc around the road,” he said. “There’s 399 sitting on her haunches right in the middle of the road. And there’s three little teddy bear heads peeking out from behind her.”
His rescuers took him to the lodge infirmary. Once an ambulance arrived, Van Denbos was taken to the hospital in Jackson and rushed into surgery.
He was lucky — the bear’s teeth hadn’t punctured his lung and had only damaged muscle. But concerned about infection, doctors packed his wounds with a specialized material, and the dressings had to be changed repeatedly over the next couple months.
At some point immediately after the attack, he said, a park service employee interviewed him about the encounter.
“And so one part of that was she asked, ‘What do you think should be done with the bear?’” he said. He replied plainly: “I don’t think you should do anything with the bear. I had no sense that this bear was out to get me. I just saw that she was trying to feed her family, protect her family.”
He felt a sort of compassion for the sow, he said: The encounter distressed her too.
“She had a moment that was different than my moment, but in a way the same,” he said. “We were very unsure what was gonna happen.”
Even if he had lost his life, he said, “I don’t think that she should have been euthanized for that.”
After investigating the incident, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service determined Grizzly 399’s surprise reaction was “natural aggression” not meriting action to remove her from the landscape.
A decade and several litters of cubs later, and 399 was a sensation. A fan club of avid followers tracked her movements in and out of the den and visitors began to seek her out in the Tetons, part of their Wyoming bucket list. She became an ambassador for the species, helping spur bear-wise initiatives in the area. News of her progeny made headlines around the globe.
Takeaways
Van Denbos stayed three days in the hospital before returning to Lander. A couple months passed before his dressing came off. He spent a lot of time on his stomach.
He was able to resume rock climbing and regained his physical strength. But Van Denbos stopped hunting until after dark, and never leaves his bear spray behind.
As for the bear? It wasn’t long after that he heard of a group of volunteers who would alert park rangers to charismatic megafauna sightings. A Facebook page for Grizzly 399 came next. The rest is history.
Van Denbos spotted her in the years since, while driving in the Togwottee Pass area. He’s thought about her a great deal, replaying the encounter and imagining how it was for 399.
The bear was busy feeding and raising her cubs, he said, when suddenly there was an intruder. “She’s gonna do whatever it takes for her to protect herself and her cubs, but she doesn’t realize that I’m no threat to her. So we share this moment of intense apprehension of what’s gonna happen next.”
Van Denbos was on a climbing trip in Greece when 399 died, but friends and acquaintances reached out to tell him the news.
He too was saddened. Like the other people who cared about the bear, he felt he had a connection with her. “Obviously, I feel my connection’s a little different.”
Few people experience such an interaction with a wild grizzly and live to contemplate it. Even all these years later it’s hard to articulate, he said, but it changed him.
“I think it definitely has given me, subconsciously, a different perspective on life,” he said.
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