Lad, 19, woke up to find he was being eaten by a BEAR… and says he heard a ‘crunching sound’ as it chomped on his skull
A TEENAGER who teaches wilderness survival founding himself battling off a bear after waking to find the beast biting his head and trying to drag him away.
The 19-year-old woke up at about 4am to a “crunching sound” with his head inside the mouth of black bear.
The deadly animal was trying to pull him out of his sleeping bag.
But the plucky teen punched and hit it and other people who were sleeping nearby yelled and swatted at the bear, which eventually left.
The incident happened at Glacier View Ranch in Colorado, 48 miles north-west of Denver, a camp owned by the Rocky Mountain Conference of Seventh Day Adventists.
The teenager, identified only as Dylan, was treated briefly at hospital and released.
He told KMGH-TV that the bear dragged him ten to 12 feet before he was able to free himself.
“The crunching noise, I guess, was the teeth scraping against the skull as it dug in,” he said.
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Dylan and some other camp supervisors were near tents where campers aged 12 and 13 were sleeping. None of them was hurt.
Black bears are not usually aggressive but have attacked several people in the US in recent weeks.
A woman and her dogs were attacked on Tuesday after they apparently surprised an adult bear and her cub in a huckleberry patch in the Idaho Panhandle National Forests.
Last month, black bears killed two people in Alaska in separate attacks.
After the Colorado attack wildlife officers did not find any food that would have attracted the animal so they have set bear traps in the area and plan to continue a search for it with scent dogs on Monday.
Following the spate of incidents any bear found in the traps in the next few days will probably be put down.
Officials will test later to see if it was the one involved in the attack using DNA evidence, Colorado Parks and Wildlife spokeswoman Jennifer Churchill said.
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