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You could sense it might go bad as soon as you heard they had packed rain ponchos instead of a tent for a two-to-three-day camping trip. Juan Duran — a soldier from Houston, Texas, now stationed on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson — might have made it over Crow Pass solo, but his wife Cindy and younger sister Dafne — the other members of the party — had never camped before.
The Crow Pass Trail is approximately 26 miles long with a 3,500-foot gain in elevation approaching from the Eagle River side. No one insisted on bringing a tent or mosquito netting, even though this has been one of the worst years for mosquitoes in a long time. None of them expected to run into a bear. The bears are what finally triggered the 911 call.
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There seems to be two schools of thought when unprepared people encounter a black bear. One hypothesis is that all bears should run away from a human. The other hypothesis holds that all bears want to kill you. The reality is somewhere in between, although seeing the bear run over the mountain is far more likely than experiencing any kind of aggressive behavior. These hikers seemed to initially believe Hypothesis 1 would carry the day. When all the bears didn’t run, the hikers downshifted to Hypothesis 2.
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The hikers made many mistakes, any one of which might have triggered an avalanche of troubles that could have resulted in a real emergency. But the final mistake they made was calling 911. They were not in any imminent danger, and they would have realized that if they had taken the time to be more prepared. By calling the universal emergency telephone number they “cried wolf,” expecting officials to bail them out of a situation that happens a dozen or more times a day in the Anchorage area: the simple, although admittedly astonishing act of encountering a black bear on its own terms.
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