Big Red Canoe - Friends of the Boundary Waters podcast · Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness

Bear Safety in the Boundary Waters: Life-Saving Lessons from a Bear Attack Survivor

·1 hr 6 min·3 clips

Alex says the bear charge became close enough that he expected to die and still had to keep backing away.

Dave Meyer opens the episode from Big Red Canoe, a podcast from Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness. He sits down with Alex Messinger, a Duluth author and photographer who works as a communications specialist at UMD and volunteers with the St. Louis County Rescue Squad. The episode is built around one event: a grizzly bear attack Alex survived at age 17. Twenty years later, that experience is at the center of his memoir, The 29th Day. Dave keeps things practical, but the story itself stays front and center. Alex walks through the attack step by step. The bear comes at him again, bites at his leg, and swipes him across the face. In that moment, he realizes there may be nothing he can do physically, and he thinks he may be about to die. What follows is a tight, adrenaline-fueled stretch where he can still move. He checks his leg, notices it is wet with bear saliva, and starts back toward camp as quietly and quickly as he can. He is about 200 yards away as the crow flies, but the last stretch drops down a steep ridge that took him about 10 minutes to climb. He is disoriented, there is no clear path, and he has to trust he is heading the right way. When he reaches the top and gets the others' attention, the episode shifts from immediate survival to injuries and assessment. He has scrapes and bruises, some damaged toes, and the worst injury is at the top of his leg, where one canine came within a quarter inch of his femoral artery. From there, the conversation broadens into bear safety, black bears, food storage, and hanging food in the backcountry, staying practical without softening how serious the attack was.

As heard by us

A serious bear-safety episode that turns a grizzly attack into practical backcountry advice.

Big Red Canoe spends most of this episode on bear safety with Alex Messinger, a Duluth, Minnesota author and photographer who survived a grizzly bear attack at 17 and later wrote The 29th Day.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Press play for a grizzly-bear survival story with backcountry food-storage guidance.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Big Red Canoe - Friends of the Boundary Waters podcast