Grizzly Bear Attack - Short King Colin and the Bear on Mt. Doogie Dowler

This is Mike, just wanted to give a quick producer's note, so our last episode, many of you noticed that it was only playing a small amount of the beginning portion of the episode. I'm really sorry, I don't know what happened. I tried everything I could, I re-oploaded, told everyone to refresh their feed, closed the app. Nothing was seeming to really work for a small section of you and for that, I'm really sorry. And at this point, everything should be good, the whole episode should be playing for everybody.

So go back and check that out. Imaging was an amazing guest and had so much cool information to share about snow leopard. So go check that out. If you haven't, or if you weren't able to, I'm pretty confident this issue is just a one-off thing.

It hasn't happened before. I'm gonna try my hardest to never let it happen again.

So you're safe to listen to that episode and this episode and every other episode we ever do, whatever you want to listen to it. But I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to plug our YouTube channel because you know the only platform where there were no issues, the whole episode played, start to finish the whole hour and a half was on our YouTube channel. That's just tooth and claw over on YouTube. You get to see our faces if that's something that interests you. While you listen to our non-sensical ramblings, well at least Jeff and I is non-sensical rambling.

West, he's doing a great job. Very scientifically sound as always. Anyway, just wanted to get that out there, spread the word.

That's all I've got. I've done enough talking. Let's get to the episode. Let's go.

[music] Hello everyone. Welcome back to tooth and claw podcast. We have Mike Smith. Hey, he's over there. Hey, my he's an English major. And then we got our bear biologist, West Larson. That's me. And no one can smell a bear, fast and less. Yeah, just follow my nose. I'm like that too can. And I was West's field tech with some bear work.

“I studied some business in college. Sure. If you need business advice, you should go, I could come to me.”

Uh-huh. I'm gonna get it. Yeah. Yeah. He's cheap. So yeah, that's us tooth and claw. What do you guys think of the winter Olympics? What's your vibe on the winter Olympics? Mike, I know you love the summer Olympics. No, baby. I'm gonna answer that myself before I even let you answer. I like the winter Olympics more because I feel like they're just crazy. Like I was watching that's far the ski jump like the far one. I'd for you what it's called big jumper, whatever. Yeah. And I just thought that's got to feel better than anything in the entire world.

Just launching off this ramp and sailing like hundreds of meters just has to feel amazing better than what people twist your toes and their fingers during a pedic year.

Yeah, I think it's better than that. I love that feeling. It's a lot more intense for sure. It's like summer Olympics. It's just like who can run the fastest? Who can jump the further? Who can swim the fastest?

“And this one that's like who can slide the fastest with knives on their feet? Who can go fast for a little bit and then jump as far as they can?”

And if they don't land on their feet, they lose and they also almost die. Let's go a billion miles per hour on a sled down a leash. That first. So sweet. Yeah. I love the winter Olympics. I love that it's also, it's like Norway's time to shine. You know, it's like Norway is finally like this is us, you know. Yeah. I've been loving them. I actually have really gotten into the Olympic spirit and it's been fun to watch and kind of root for Japan because we're just in Japan.

I feel like a lot of their athletes are very likable. I like their snowboarders. All right. We're going to do a bear episode and there's a few reasons I want to do another bear one. Part of it is I have a two-parter coming that has nothing to do with bears that I'm really excited about. And then we have a couple other episodes scheduled after that that aren't bear episodes. And it's going to be a minute before we have another one. So I wanted to do a fun bear episode and they're definitely the ones we have the most of.

And then also, I get a lot of questions from people saying what bear spray should I buy and I tell them they're pretty much all the same and they are. I have actually been working on my own bear spray and it is going to be an improvement over the existing bear spray. I'm really excited about it. I have some partners we've been working on it for years. That's coming out probably this fall.

“So I'm not telling people to wait to buy bear spray if you're going into bear country definitely just grab a can. But if you aren't needing to buy it, you should wait for mine because I'm really excited about it.”

Because I'm really excited about it. It's a little bit of a bad time to release your bear spray. It is a little late. It'll be hopefully before like hunting season and stuff for people, but yeah, I mean it's as quick as we probably can get it out. But I'm excited to talk more about it cherry black cherry flavor. Oh my gosh. No, it's just what I like. You know how to sell it.

I'm excited about this because you said you said what if you make $10 million me, Mike and Brent, I'll get a million dollars or something.

I think I might have said that.

“Yeah, I think I've already promised away my first 10 million if I do happen to get rich from the spares for it, which is fine. I don't think I don't think people should be that rich. Well, 10 millionaires. I think it's okay actually.”

But wow, there's really tightening that belt. Wait till he gets to 10 million and see what he says. It's going to hold on to it. I would definitely 30 millionaires. I find it. You guys would get me guys would get some money for sure a million. Why not? Oh, I actually, I don't like money at all. I'm even, I'm a better person than you because of how little I like money. I don't, it's not that I dislike money. I don't think people should hoard money.

I see when so many people need it. All right. I got a question for you guys to start off this episode. What does the name "dugi dollar" make you think of "dugi house" or "correct"? I thought it was the dollar, it's okay. I like that too. It's also a great answer. Okay. Do the house or the doggie? Who's the country? Who's the country singer that doesn't know how to do the doggie? Who's the country singer that doesn't know how to do the doggie? I don't do the doggie. I just fish and wear my boots. It's all he does. He has it. He wears for lots of the turning point at half that.

Yeah. I just want to fish and camp and wear my boots and mama grass. All right. So when I was a kid there was a show on TV called Doogie Houser and it makes me feel a little old that probably a lot of you don't know who this is. Who this is or what this was. I actually don't know who this is.

It's Neil Patrick Harris's first role and he as a child actor.

He acted as this doctor who's 14 years old and is like the best doctor in the world. He's a child prodigy, graduated medical school and he was 10. He became a full-fledged doctor at 14 and it was a weekly show of his kind of challenges being a child doctor. One of the rare moments where someone has cast as a 14-year-old and they look like they are 14 years old. He looks like a child. He looks young at 14 when you look at this.

“Anyway, that's what I thought it has nothing to do with this episode aside from the name Doogie Dollars in the episode.”

Thanks for taking us down that road. I have some sources. I have some sources here. One of my main sources was actually another podcast called Storytime with Seth Rogan. If you probably know that name, Seth Rogan. He did that as Jeff. He did this story. That's pretty much it. The episode is called The Ballad of Mount Doogie Dollars. Outside magazine did an article on this.

Readers digest, did a story on this. Those were all sources that I used in prepping this episode. Okay. Don't listen to him. Listen to him. Doogie Dollars, it's a great episode. It's really good. I do recommend it. Doogie Dollars, though, isn't a show about a teenage, Wonder Kid doctor that finished medical school in East 10. It's a mountain in coastal British Columbia near Campbell River and really near the top end of Vancouver Island. It's also named after someone who's pretty cool.

So nearby, there's a little island called Quadra Island and on that item. Sorry to interrupt. I really am.

“But so is Doogie Dollars all one word or is it two different words?”

It's a first and last name. The mountain has the first and the last name for a mountain.

It sure does, Mike. What's every is slash name or is that it's last name? Have Mark rest. Nearby Quadra Island has this little community on it, though. And in 1956, Doogie Dollars moved to the island and he started to run a small grocery store and a post office with his family.

The store became something of a community meeting point and stores like that. Little grocery stores are really the lifeblood of these tiny rural communities. And Doogie became really well known, well liked and well respected around town, which is a triple threat. You know, if you can have those three things, you're sitting pretty in a town like Quadra Island. He did a lot of hard.

It's kind of hard just to have like one of those. Yeah, well liked but not well respected. Yeah, I think that there's a lot of people like that. He did well not a lot but some. He did a lot of other stuff for this community, though.

This is both from like, you know, running the store, being the postmaster, all of that.

And a cool thing about Doogie is from the front of his store and from his house. There was a great view of this really prominent mountain that two peaks. The kind of looked like the rise and then the folds on the top of a cowboy hat. And it wasn't officially named. Everyone just called it cowboy hat mountain.

So in Doogie died in the early eight or 1980s. Some of the other prominent community members decided to name that mountain Doogie dollar. And I'm sure it had an indigenous name that they kind of just steam rolled over. But I don't really understand how you do that, how you just say like, "Hey, let's just name this mountain after this guy that just died."

“But they went ahead and did it and they went through the right channels, I think.”

Because if you look up this mountain on like Google Maps, it comes up Mount Doogie Dollar. I don't think it was just like a nickname. It's pretty cool for him. It is cool. It's a great name for Mount 2, in my opinion.

His kids in the school. Yeah, yeah. He's confused by the two names. Mount Doogie does sound pretty good. I kind of like Mount Doogie Dollar, though.

I think he is. I'm coming around. You know what, I'm sold. I'm back in boys. All right.

Doogie Dollar's back on the map. So Doogie's kids and his grandkids grow up on Quadriland as well. And one of those grandkids was Colin Dowler. And Colin really seemed to love growing up in a place like Quadriland. He's incredibly outdoorsy.

He's fascinated by the natural world and wildlife and pushing his body.

And even like the TV they had in their house had a really flimsy antenna and was always malfunctioning.

So we hardly ever watched TV and just really spent his entire childhood outdoors. He's also a short king. I could only find articles that said he's shorter than 5/8, which is a real short guy way to tell someone you're height. Like when you start just using a benchmark that you're a shorter than that, you're probably like 5/5/5/6. I'm 5/8.

“I think I'm right on the, I'm right on the like crux of what you could call me short.”

I would say I'm short. Hmm. I don't really ever, I never thought of you as like a short person. Yeah. I think I ever did.

I was like, wow, notably short growing up. But yeah, I don't feel that way. Anyway, he only weighed about 125 pounds as well. So this is like he's a pretty small dude. But everyone just talks about how tough it and scrappy and just kind of wild he was too.

So you kind of got that mental language. Yeah, I think he's very similar. This story takes place when he's about to turn 45. And if he's a pretty, he's a pretty good short king, right? He's a short king.

For sure. We're going to have our favorite short king category. But I think smiggle's a great entry into that. Spoiler, my answer is smiggle. Yeah.

What was he again?

“He's like, he's a halfling, but was he a hobbit?”

I thought he's a hobbit. But it's like some different group of hobbits. Yeah, I think that's what it is. So at this point, Colin had married. He had a kid.

He'd moved to a bigger town on Vancouver Island, Campbell River. But he still thought about Mount Doogie Dollar all the time. And part of the reason was because it was named after his grandpa. And part of the reason was because no one had ever actually summited Mount Doogie Dollar. And Colin and his brother Paul.

Yeah, they wanted to be the first. And it's a pretty imposing mountain. And I get why no one summited it.

It almost always has snow on it.

It's very steep. They tried in their twenties, but they had to turn back because of bad weather. And someone else had tried when Colin was young. And they fell a hundred feet to their death. Oh, holy.

If you've ever been to British Columbia, coastal British Columbia, there are so many mountain peaks. And so many of them are wild. Like there's no infrastructure, no trails. Just thick, thick, brush.

Unbelievable thick and thorny brush to get through. And then really treacherous rocky slopes to get up to the top. But in 2019 Colin and his brother decided they would start making plans to summit the mountain. And July of that year, just a few days before Colin's 40th birthday, he told his wife he was going to take some time off work

and do a short reconnaissance trip to Mount Doogie Dollar. And try and find the right route for when he and his brother would climb the mountain. He would require a boat ride, a kayak ride, a bike ride, and then a long hike and some night camping alone. The bike ride would be on one logging road that ran eight miles up the mountain.

But that was it. How they bring a bike on their kayaks? They just strap it to it. And it's just Colin doing this. He just kind of had some free time and decided you do it on his own.

And why was that a tiny bike? Because he's a little one of those little clowns.

I think it'd be easy to get one of those.

I don't do a kayak. But does he have a tiny kayak too? You know? Like that's a shoe. Oh, gosh.

Everything scaled down. This bear's going to eat him in one bite. All right. There. Yeah.

I mean, I already spoiled that. All right. His wife had a really bad feeling about this trip. And she told Colin not to go.

And when they're talking about it, he even said, I never really read any statistics.

“It's say you are more likely to be attacked by a grizzly by yourself than with other people, right?”

And his wife said, yeah, I guess I have any there. Now, if any of our listeners ever say that, I'm going to come to your house. I'm going to pinch you. I'm going to pinch you hard. Because is that true, Jeff?

That he hasn't read those statistics. Do those statistics exist? Does it say that you're not more likely to be attacked by yourself? You are there is a lot of statistics out there that say, if you're by yourself, you're going to get attacked. You're not going to be by your much more likely to be attacked. It is one of the biggest factors in grizzly by your attacks.

And I'm going to kind of do things different this episode where there's not going to be a break to go over like biology. But as we go through the story, I'm going to remind people about some of the bear safety stuff you've learned over the years with two thin cloth. And that's the first reminder that groups of people are much less likely to be attacked by a grizzly bear, especially groups of three or more. If you are by yourself, you are taking a much bigger risk than you would be with even just one other person with you.

But who even made up those statistics? A bear biologist that have worked closely with these attacks and have learned a lot of good insights from them. What if it's three kids in a trench coat all stacked up on each other's shoulders? I don't think that would be effective, but I think it would maybe be confusing for a minute for the bear. I think it's worse than three kids.

Yeah, I think that's worse than just having three kids that are like a young giant. Yeah, I don't know. I'm just saying these are good questions. I don't think we have any data points for that. Like if you're going to an R-rated movie and you're a child, and you can actually go on the way. Trust these scientists and the statistics, they haven't tried that.

Yeah, that's a good point. What if it was three regular sized adults on each other's shoulders in a really long trench coat?

“I do think that would be intimidating to a bear. I think it would be like, what am I dealing with here?”

Yeah, there's plenty of studies for all of you kids out there who are aspiring to be a bear biologist. And I think there's not a lot of work to be done. Yeah, just think outside there's a lot you call it a bear. You call it a bear. You call it a bear.

You call it a bear. Yeah, call it a bear. And that regular sized coat for all of you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right.

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That's Rocket Money.com/claw. Rocket Money.com/claw. And please put in the class so that they know we sent you there. All right. So he decided to go even with his wife's misgivings.

And as he left the house, he said something akin to what he always said,

which was if I'm not back by eight o'clock Sunday night, you can start worrying about me. So he would always give her like a time and a day where she could start worrying. Colin had put this trip together pretty quickly and he wanted to travel lightly. So he brought a little bivie instead of a tent. He brought minimal food, his backpack and a bike.

That would take him to the right bay on the mainland.

“But he didn't have time and he decided he really didn't need bear spray.”

Because he had seen countless black bears on his excursions and only a couple grislies. So he wasn't really worried. That's a bad reasoning. Yeah, I've seen tons of bears. But I don't need bear spray.

But for a guy like him, he sounds like he's tough and he's scrappy. Like against a black bear, I'm taking Colin. He knows bears pretty well too and he knows that the chances of being attacked by a black bear are really slim. But what he might not have known is that mainland British Columbia just, you know, right across the straight from where he lived on Quadra Island was really great grizzly bear habitat.

So even though Vancouver Island isn't and Quadra Island probably only had black bears, just across the straight, there are prime grizzly bear spots. So prime, in fact, that the grizzly bear viewing industry is doing really well in this area. It's not a spot. I would want to be traveling and bushwhacking alone without bear spray.

There are definitely a lot of grizzly bears around. For him to just, I feel like when you are in nature that much, when you're outdoors that much and you, like he's encountered a lot of bears. He's gotten a little too comfortable type of thing. You know, it's like, sure.

It happens to have been close to bears before they don't bother me. I don't bother them type of thing, you know. Exactly. I can relate. I mean, even us, like there's been plenty of times where I've gone fishing and I realize

as I'm on the way that I'm entering grizzly bear habitat and then I forgot bear spray. And sometimes I just go for it, you know. And like, that's not right, but it does happen. So I do understand how this happened to him. But I will say, if I was like bushwhacking up a mountain and camping by myself,

I would feel very, very uncomfortable without bear spray with that. I only ever bushwack by myself. You know, I'm doing the company of others.

And you always have your bear spray.

Yeah. Right, just in case my mom bursts in the room. Yeah. Detir her ghost. Oh my gosh.

You're going to be always watching me. Yeah. You're going to need a proton pack for that, not bear spray. Is she's in there watching you? Yeah, of course.

She did die in the house you're in, right? She did. Yeah, she's in the walls. So it could be like, she's got stuck in their type of situation. All right.

So Colin takes his little boat to this bay where he's getting to the beginning of this logging road. And he's actually completely astounded because he runs another people there. And he really shouldn't be because this is out in the middle of nowhere. But specifically, he runs into a cook that is from a logging camp.

And it's actually interesting. Yeah. It's like if you were to go, you know, way up into the Bob Marshall wilderness. And as you're starting your hike, there's a camp where you didn't think you would ever see anyone.

Oh, I know. This seems like extreme than that. Yeah, this is even more so. But they chat. He tells him what he's doing.

And this cook actually asks him if he needs anything. And Colin says, yeah, I actually need some bear spray. And the cook brings him a brand new bottle. And calling stuff. Yeah.

He stuffs this bear spray into his pocket.

“So let's talk for a second about where you should carry your bear spray.”

What do you guys think? Your bear spray holster on your belt. Yeah, but then sometimes it's. So really what you want it. What you want is to carry it in the same spot every time you go.

And it needs to be somewhere where you can quickly grab it and somewhere it's secure. Those are the three things. So for me, I really like having it on my belt on my right hip.

That's just where it's always at.

It's where I carry it when I was in Yellowstone every single day. And I just have that muscle memory of that's where I would go. If you have a chest holster, that's fine. If it's on your left hip, that's fine. It can be in your pocket.

But as we're going to learn, that's not always the best place for it. Can get caught as you're pulling it out or it's maybe easier to lose. So the main thing those you don't want it in your backpack or somewhere where you can access it really quickly. So the things to remember is always in the same spot. So you have muscle memory and then somewhere where you can quickly get it.

Okay, this cook actually offers him a ride up this gravel road, which is like eight miles. So it saves him a lot of time. He gladly accepts it eight miles.

“Yeah, I think that's where they're probably in Detroit right now.”

They have a rap battle. Yeah, they had a rap battle before they had the bear. Yeah. He doesn't need his bike to get up there. Wait, something.

But cook drove there. The cook, yes, they take a boat to this logging road with like they're trucking everything on it. And then they had a eight mile logging road that just goes up into the mountain.

And it was to take their crews up to the top so they could log and then bring them back down.

“And then they would send logs out on boats and barges and stuff.”

Gotcha. So he takes calling up to this top of the road, calling stashes is bike and the bush is right there. And this cook grabs this camera to take a picture of calling. And he says to put on the milk cartons in case you don't return, which is, you know, kind of a bit of a, yeah.

I don't know what the word is. Forshadowing. Forshadowing. Yeah. Harbinger of doom.

Harbinger. A bit of a harbinger of doom. Yes. A bit of a foreshadowing. So I would call that guy.

All right. So Colin starts hiking up through this really thick brush. And almost immediately is noticing a lot of bear sign. And a stepping over a lot of fresh piles of bear scat. He's making plenty of noise.

He's yelling out, he's continuing to make his, continuing to make his way through the forest and uphill, but it's really slow going. And the brush was so thick, he couldn't even see his feet. So he has to take a number of breaks to rest and get his bearings. When you see fresh bear scat on a trail, you're on.

What's your, what's your advice at that point?

“You just turn around, go home or, no, veer off in another direction or what?”

My advice would be you increase your alertness. You may be take your safety off your bear spray. You just become a little bit more alert or maybe carry it in your hand from there. It depends on how fresh. Like if it's steaming, you know, if I know a bear was just there,

then I have it in my hand and I'm ready to go. But if it's like, looks like it's maybe a few hours old. I'm just going to, I'm just going to be aware then that there's a bear in the area and that I have to be even more alert than before. If you, if you see the bear going to the bathroom actively,

do you what, turn around and give them the privacy or you keep your eyes on it. Just to make sure you're safe, you know. I keep my eyes on that mic, you know. That's just, then you can answer that question. That age-old question does a bear shit in the woods.

You finally have your answer.

You want to be, all right, I witness. So during one of these breaks, what Colin is sitting on a fallen log and looking as GPS, his bear spray slips out of his pocket and he doesn't notice. Oh, that's not good. Colin hikes a good way before he realizes he lost his bear spray

and he doesn't want to go back down and look for it. But things still probably find it on his way back down the mountain. So he hikes until around 5 p.m. and as he's starting to get into the sub-alpine country, he stops, makes his camp and goes to sleep.

You guys think this is going to be a campsite attack

“or is it going to make it through the night without any problems?”

campsite attack. I'll go, he makes it through safe. He makes it through safe. Get some night. Oh, no way.

Oh, yeah. On to your Jeff. I won. Yeah. I'm a winner.

Oh, you $100. Nice. That was for $100. I forgot to say that at the beginning, but that was $100. But in the morning, he breaks his camp down and starts heading down the mountain.

Careful to look for his bear spray along the way. It continues to see a lot of bear sign and a lot of berry bushes that had obvious signs of bear foraging, but still no bears and no bear spray. And by around 11 a.m., he'd made it back down to the top of the gravel road where he'd stashed his bike.

And he gets a little euphoric getting onto his bike. The hard part of the trip was over. He scouted out this route. Potential route to climb the mountain. And he's cruising pretty fast down the road.

Thinking about his birthday tomorrow about hanging out with his wife and his kid about having a few beers. And as all of these thoughts are passing through his head, a grizzly bear walks out onto the road about 80 feet in front of Colin. Wow.

Now, this may seem kind of ironic to people that Colin spent all of this time in thick brush

in great forest and never saw a bear.

But then as soon as he got onto this logging road, he ran into one. But it actually makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah, because milk cart in line was more ironic. Yeah, that is made to you. Isn't it ironic?

Right on your wedding day. Bears in wildlife often use roads, especially roads that don't have hardly any human traffic like this one. Like this road sees hardly anyone on it. Because they offer really effective obstacle free way for them to move through their habitat.

So like in Yellowstone, there's places where there's power lines running through the park and they'll be a clear cut around these power lines so that the power company can access them. And it was actually a place we would always look for bears because bears would walk that clear cut because it's just like a really easy way for them to move through their habitat.

And it's also like usually pretty good food in those spots. It's productive habitat where there's good berry bushes, roots, grasses and a lot of other food sources. What's best one? Good thing about deforestation.

For grizzly bears do really well in disturbed habitat.

Like you still need some forest, but they really like the edges of forest because it creates

“this really good productive habitat for them.”

Jeff, I know you were joking there, but in a way there have been some studies that show that these places that have like pocket deforestation. So it's still like a wild ecosystem, but there's little pockets where they've deforested that bears do really well and they use those areas because the stuff that grows up after you take out some of those trees is often food.

Well, and it makes sense because they weren't necessarily mountain animals until we made them that, right? They used to be more in the plains and more in open spaces when they could. Yeah. And they really like foraging, digging for roots, digging for grass and forbs, all these different

things that they can find on the ground, and those things often sprout up in places that have lost their primary cover. Do you ever think of bears? Go ahead. I was going to make a real stupid joke, and now it's over.

And I do it.

And we've said it the exact same time in the island.

No. I was glad to bail because it was going to be real stupid. So it's all you.

“I was going to say what if they found hidden treasure?”

Oh my god. Are you serious right now? Exactly what my joke was going to be. Oh. I tried to let you say it's fine.

I'm trying to figure out how that thought popped into both of your heads. And it's not really making a lot of sense to me. What does it mean? I feel like if I dug as much as it grizzly bear digs. Oh, actually.

Eventually. But then if I'm a grizzly bear, I probably wouldn't understand the value. Right. I think that's probably very true. All right.

All of this is to say an old logging road is actually pretty great habitat for a grizzly bear. To a grizzly bear. It's valueless. You right. No.

We got to stay on this for a minute. Because what? Who does that belong to? It's the bears by right. I would say.

Yeah.

“In the county monikerist where he finds all that treasure, he becomes the richest man in the world.”

He gets his revenge. If that was a bear, the bear would be like, this isn't food. Yeah. I've only the bears understood the basics of economy, money, of using treasure. They could exchange treasure for goods and services.

They could buy one. I'll just give me a car when they're done with it. I'll be right. And keep going. Do we talk bears to ride unicycles?

We could teach one to give a cashier a coin for blueberries. That's a good transition actually. For blueberries. Because he's on his bike and the bears looking at him right now. I didn't finish my sentence last time.

I'm looped. I know I said I was going to let this run. It's course. But I am going to cut it off. An old logging road is great.

I have a tap for grizzly bear. I would expect to see one more on this road than I would bushwhacking in dense forests. This is the kind of place you would see them. And calling pretty much immediately knows that this is a grizzly bear. Because he had seen so many black bears.

This bear looked bigger. Different with a more rounded flat face and a pronounced hump.

Also, black bears in this area are almost always black.

And this was a brown colored bear. And I wanted to take a second about bear ID because something I've been thinking about a lot lately is how many bear professionals myself included. Tell people colors and you shouldn't use color. You shouldn't do that.

And I don't think that's necessarily true. I do think color is your first really good clue about what bear you might be looking at. And sometimes it is enough. Like if you see a jet black bear, it's almost certainly going to be a black bear if you're in North America. If you see a bear that's brown with really light blonde colored tips,

there's a very good chance that it's a grizzly bear if you're in Grizzly bear country. If you see one that's like cinnamon colored, it's probably a black bear. So there are, that's your first really good clue. If you see a white bear, it's probably a polar bear. It could be a black bear though.

Depends or it could be a grizzly. There's been white grizzly too. Yeah, spirit bears though are like a, yeah, much more common than a white grizzly. For sure. It could be a, a panda if you only see like a very small portion of it through the bushes. Yeah, maybe here the color blind and you can't see black or maybe you're all blind.

Yeah, that's true. Then it could be any can see anything might be a car get out of the way. Oh gosh. So this is a relatively large grizzly bear and calling immediately yells, hey bear to let it know that he was there. But instead of running away, the bear just turned and looked at him.

Colin mentally was pleading with this bear to just go back into the brush and leave him alone.

“And then it turned and started walking straight toward him.”

Wow. It's interesting.

This is our first real story where someone's on a bike.

Yeah, that was why I wanted to pick this one actually. It's kind of an interesting scenario. And we're going to talk about that a bit. He's in a bit of a pickle because he knows that he has to try and discourage this bear from approaching him. So he swings his backpack onto his front.

He grabs his hiking poles and he extends them and starts knocking them together and banging them on his bicycle and yelling. But the spirit keeps coming and it's kind of swinging it's head and huffing while it walks towards Colin. When this bear's about 30 feet away, he starts getting nervous and he didn't want to be on his bike like straddling it because he felt like he had a limited time. He had a limited range of movement. So he hops off the bike and that movement actually makes the bear do a tiny little bluff charge and scrape its claws on the gravel.

And then it stops for a second.

But then keeps coming when Colin stands there frozen in place, holding his bike. Then this bear walks to where it was just a few feet from Colin and his bike. And then as he stands there totally still, it slowly walks by him and the bike, close enough that he could reach out and touch it. Wow. Which he doesn't do but he could have.

He can't believe what's happening and he kind of feels like this grizzly bear is just going to pass him a few feet away and then he's just going to have a hell of a story to tell. And he gets home that no one's going to believe. And as this bear is as it's but is just inches from passing the end of his bike, it flips 180 degrees around and comes a Colin. And he has just enough time to get one of his poles in between him and the bear and push it the bear's forehead with it. And so it kind of like puts this hiking pole right against the bear's forehead and then pushes.

And it kind of seems to work like this bear hasn't fully launched a charge yet. Or just still investigating him so he's keeping pressure on it and kind of keeping it away from him. And it's working a little bit and then suddenly the bear just rolls his head snaps into this pole and breaks it and kind of pulls it away from him a bit. So it's broken in the middle and they're kind of doing this tug of worth thing with it. And Colin says out loud, "Oh come on now, we don't need to do this. I'm your friend."

This is so interesting. A bear that's like 10% like "I might attack you." Yeah, I'm sure it gets elevated even more but just like at the start.

“It just feels like the bear is kind of winging it, you know?”

I think you're right. I think this bear is investigating him as food. I really do. I think it is thinking, "I'm going to check this out. This might be food." And it's still little nervous and not totally sure what it should do at this point. So is this hiking pole scenario?

I know we've talked about with like sharks and stuff. They always teach you to put something between you and the predator, the animal that's, you know, posing a threat.

Is that a thing for bears at all if you have like a sword? You had or some kind of like a spear or something? Is that going to deter them or are they just going to like not really understand what that would signify? It's last resort is what I would say. Like sure if you are completely out of options in this bear is not leaving sure. But I also think you run a pretty big risk of just antagonizing it by touching with anything.

That's the same with sharks. Like if you actually make contact with the shark, it might actually charge in and bite you because you're antagonizing it. What about in like 1700s, Japan, a samurai where there's grizzly bears?

“Yeah, I think the samurai should probably try and use his sword.”

That's all yes. Yeah, that's worth it. We should have asked them samurai while we were there if they did that. Yeah, you should have. Okay, next time.

So the bear drops the pole and moves toward calling again and calling decides that he's going to have to get a little bit more aggressive to deter this bear. So he throws his backpack on the ground near the bear. There's some food in this backpack still. So he's hoping that it might go for the pack. And when that doesn't work, he picks up his bike, which is tiny.

So you know, I'm sure he picked up her little easily. And he throws it at the bear. And that actually kind of is enough for this bear. It decides it's going to go ahead in the tack. So it clears the bike in a single lunge.

It bites into the colon side between his hips and his ribs and lifts him off the ground. Kind of like a mic bit into a big hot dog sideways.

Not the best strategy for speed, but I'm not going to try that.

You know, there's a funny little blip on social media was that like one day where someone dressed up as Justin Bieber and Aida burrito sideways. Oh, yeah. And everyone, like Justin Bieber doesn't know how to eat a burrito.

“That's so funny that that's what you decide to do.”

But that is, I mean, it worked. It's perfect. I didn't realize that was a fake Justin Bieber. I still thought that was the same guy dressed up as him and Aida looked like that's her lead in a burrito. Yeah, so picture that.

That's what this bear's been calling. He's being actually carried in this bear's jaws toward the brush. He says he thinks his foot may have been dragging, but aside from that, this bear has him totally in the air. It's carrying him in his jaws. Yeah, toward the brush.

And he said that he had this thought that if the bear took him off of the road and into the brush, he would probably die. So as they're making it toward the brush, the bear sets him down on the side of the road, kind of in this little ditch. And bites into him again, sinking its deeper into both his back and his abdomen. And then it starts moving him toward the brush once again. And I do again think now that this is a predatory attack.

“I think this bear is trying to get him to a spot where it can dispatch him and eat him that isn't so open.”

So Colin decides he's going to have to fight back, which is appropriate in this circumstance you do want to fight back. He starts trying to gouge the eyes out of this bear. He pulls on the hair on its face. He's doing everything he can to try and annoy this bear, and it does kind of work. It drops him and then it moves down to his leg where it can kind of chew on him and bite him without him being able to reach it as well. And it starts biting into his leg repeatedly.

And at this point, I think it's kind of antagonized because it's doing these aggressive bites that are leaving puncture wounds. But it's not necessarily at this point stripping away big pieces of flesh like it's eating. It's just doing these really aggressive bites. And it would bite one leg mostly every once in a while would bite the other one, but it's mostly focused on one of his legs. And Colin decides what he's going to do now is reach down, put his hands in the bear's mouth.

It feels like a very Jeff coded thing to do to this bear. Yeah. How? It's good. And try and peel its mouth off of his leg. So he shoves his fingers into its gums and tries to peel it back with all of his strength and the bear bites into his hand. Right into the ball of his thumb and then goes back to chewing on his leg. So in this case, Jeff, it wasn't a very effective way.

I would say just for anyone who tries that, I would recommend having bear spray and sticking your hand down its mouth with the bear spray. Just firing it halfway down its throat.

“Like we always say, you should have bear spray before you do that.”

You should have bear spray, yeah. We will talk about kind of while we're in wrong and right in this. This episode of Tooth and Clause brought to you by Graza. So I've recently been in a little bit of an unspoken competition with West. I don't think he even knows what's going on, but we both started cooking for ourselves a lot recently.

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Find out why Neutrophil is the best selling hair growth supplement brand and Neutrophil.com spelled N-U-T-R-A-F-O-L dot com promo code 2. That's Neutrophil dot com promo code 2. All right, so Colin can actually hear the teeth of the bear grading against his bone in his leg. He said it was like the sound of a dog chewing on a big bone, which does sound like you can really hear that when they're chewing on bones. And he started yelling stop and why to this bear.

He wasn't yelling for help because he didn't think anyone would be in the area, but he was yelling stop and why. And he started to think about his family and feeling remorse because he thought he was going to die out there and abandon his family. And he's also thinking about his death and how they're just going to find his rotting corpse in the brush. And then as he's thinking about all this and things are getting pretty dark, he remembers his pocket knife. It was a buck knife that his dad had picked up at Canadian tire for 80% off.

Have you guys ever been to a Canadian tire? Uh-uh. It's kind of like the Canadian version of Walmart, but a little bit. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

No, it's just like a huge, I know, because you see it and you think tires, like this is an amazing story.

“No, they sell like everything there, but they also sell tires, I believe.”

I would hope so. But his dad hardly ever gave him gifts just out of the blue like this, but he had given him this knife recently and he had it in his right hand pocket. And the bear, as it's chewing on him, is essentially laying down on his stomach, so they're like belly to belly. And he had to kind of push his hands through his and the bear's stomach like that tiny gap. To try and wiggle them into his other side, as the bear's like tearing into his legs and now pulling off strips of flesh.

Uh, but as, you know, the bear's doing that, he manages to get his hands into his pocket. Get this knife open it with both hands. And then with all of his might, he swings it back and stabs it into the bear's neck. Oh, where would, is that where you would aim if you were in this situation? It's going to happen.

Probably.

I think that, like, I'm trying my hardest to never get into this situation because, you know, we had our episode not long ago about the hunter that killed one with the broadhead arrow.

And now we're talking about this knife. And the reason that these stories have trickled to the top is because they worked, but there are plenty of other people out there that have been attacked by bears that have used weapons to try and stop them. We're nothing, it just absolutely has no effect. Even guns can sometimes have no effect at this point. So I would probably aim for the neck or the eye or something, but, um, I don't know.

It would be really hard to pick a target. The 127 hours guy would probably just cut his arm off. Yeah, cut his own leg off. Let the bear get with the knife and then run away. Which is maybe that would work.

So he does this. He, as he stabs this bear in the neck, the bear actually does stop biting. It pulls its head back and rather than stab the bear again, he just waits to see what would happen next. And I think that's smart. His reasoning there was like, it did what I wanted it to do.

It stopped biting me. So I'm not going to stab it again because it stopped. And what actually did happen next was a huge gush of blood came out of the bear's neck and splashed on the colon. And now according to colon, I'm putting that in big letters. He says, now you're bleeding too, bear.

That's a good line. Which is a great idea.

“I think he came up with that on the spot.”

On the Seth Rogan show, when he said that, Seth Rogan said, Did you actually say that? And he said, I actually said it, and I'm very proud of it.

I'm going to give him, I'll give him that. Yeah.

“The bear pulls away and slowly walks away from colon, looking at him and then looking back into the brush.”

And then colon takes a second to look at his leg and when he looks back up, the bear's gone.

So colon at this point knows he needs to do a little bit of wound management quick. So he tears off his shirt sleeve and he makes a turnic hit to tie around his leg. And when he looks at his leg, he kind of sees these weird folds and bumps and he thinks maybe his pants are bunching up. But what he realizes is that this bear's puncture wounds have brought out a bunch of meat. And he has meat that looks like raw hamburger from his own leg that's laying all over his leg.

And that's what he's seeing. And it's funny because this isn't funny. That is, I need to stop seeing that. One of my colleagues that I trapped Grizzly bears with when we were doing research with Grizzly bears. He had actually flown a little too close to the sun once while he was trapping and a bear bit him in the arm.

And he didn't really even realize he had been bit because it happened so quick. And he looked at his arm and he thought he had a piece of raw chicken on his arm.

And what it was was the muscle and the tissue that the bear had pulled out with its tooth.

When it had been him and he was trying to brush it off and then he realized what it was. Crazy. All right. So as we've mentioned quite a bit, Colin is a smaller dude. And at this point he was actually really grateful.

Yeah. We need to cut some of that up. At this point he's really grateful for that because he's pretty small and he had small legs. And he called them himself like chicken legs. And I know that pain. I got smaller legs myself, but the nice thing about it was that this sleeve that he had torn off would have been too big.

Had he had bigger legs, but it was just big enough that he could get a granny knot in it and tie it over his legs and make a turn at kid. That's easy.

Yeah. So he's kind of like really happy at this point that something his wife had always made fun of him for his skinny legs was actually kind of a life-saving thing.

Yeah. Yeah. What did she call him Wednesday legs?

“Because she would say like, when's they going to break or something?”

I forget it was like a funny, funny thing. Yeah. But if he's bigger, he got bigger sleeves too. That's true. Yeah.

But if you got those big old like tree trunk legs like Mike doesn't matter how big your sleeve is. I just cut the waist of this shirt. Yeah. Maybe he did have huge arms. That's true.

He could have been 103 pounds. Yeah. But if he's like three feet tall, then that's a big torso. I don't know. He should have just given us his height because now my imagination is running wild.

He may have in one of these articles, but they all just said that I read said less than five eight.

“What other great benefits are there to have in short legs with?”

Plain rights are great. Yeah. You're just comfortable. I've said this before I think on the podcast, but being short kind of sucks when you're in like high school and maybe like college after that it's just great. You just fit everywhere nice, you're nice and comfortable all the time.

Everything is easier when you're short. I think besides like maybe grabbing things on high wedges or whatever, playing basketball. Okay. So he decides that he's probably not going to survive waiting for the logging crew. They might take them hours to get up there even days.

So he's worried the bear might come back to and he starts crawling toward his bike. But the gravel on his kneecaps is really bothering him as he's crawling. Which he admits is kind of funny because he's completely ripped to shreds by this bear. But the gravel on his kneecaps is bothering him and his kneecaps are fine. That is funny.

So he flips over and he uses his better leg to scoot him on his butt back to his bike. But now he has another challenge. Getting on this bike was not easy. So he tries to use his pole to push himself up and onto the bike. But the pole bends and breaks and he crashes back onto the ground.

And then he manages to find the climb onto this bike and he starts to pedal and he immediately face plants on the other side of the bike. No. But he's not going to give up again. Con is really tough and he crawls back onto this bike. He managed to stabilize himself and start pedaling. And he really only pedals with his good leg and he just uses his mango leg to keep weight on the other pedal.

So it's this really lopsided clunky bike ride. But he's making time. He's getting through it. And during the ride he can feel his pants and his bike seat getting warm from all the blood that's spilling out of his body. But he just keeps focusing on getting to the three kilometer mark because that's where a big downhill starts and he can coast down to this logging camp.

It'd be like snow in former. He's the rapper probably because.

Oh, wait. Do they use kilometers in Canada? I'm not sure. They do. Yeah. I was just trying to think of a wide Canadian rapper. Even when it was eight miles, I was kind of like, I don't know if it's worth the effort of kayaking your bike out there.

Eight kilometers.

“It's like, what do you bring a bike just for that eight kilometer road, but it worked out?”

It seems like it's like such a nice grade on the way back though that it was just kind of fun to ride it even. But yeah. It's a really harrowing bike ride as you can imagine. He has to focus on every pedal and concentrate on the horizon and reading about this part. It seems like he had to summon like a pretty unreal amount of determination and courage to make it downhill, but he finally does. And he coasts down the hill and he pretty much crashes on the front porch of this logging camp, main tent.

The men rush out to a really horrific scene. His entire body is covered in puncture wounds and big long gashes. It looks like Freddie Kruger had dragged his hand down his back. His legs are full of large holes that have all this meat hanging out of them. And his side had a huge chunk missing.

And you could actually look into his body cavity and get a clear view of his kidney. No way.

Yeah, which was a new experience for all these loggers. They had never seen anything like that before.

Holy cow. Yeah. That's that tracks. It'd be weird if they had. There's like a guy that's like, oh, I have something to say. That's not that.

They rushed to patch him up with their first aid kits and while they're also calling rescue services. And they talk about it like it's kind of that scene in Vegas vacation where Chevy Chase is plugging holes in the dam. And every time he plugs on, another one starts spurting. That's kind of what's happening. Yeah.

“That's what's happening with his puncture wounds is as they cover one another one would start bleeding more intensely.”

And they're kind of playing whack a mall with his puncture wounds. Colin calls his wife, but she's at the lake, so he just leaves a message or no, he doesn't leave a message because he didn't want to scare her. And then he calls his brother and tells him that if he died, he wanted him to know that he may have killed a grizzly bear with a pocket knife, which is like a very brother thing to do. I think that's probably what we would say too. When the paramedics do arrive, they're able to give Colin blood and they stabilize him and load him onto the helicopter.

And he sets off for a hospital in Vancouver. And they do think if they weren't able to give him blood in the field, he probably wouldn't have made it to the hospital. Meanwhile, Colin's wife is getting home from her lake trip. It's almost a PM on Sunday. She turns the corner and she sees that Colin's truck wasn't in the driveway, but his brother and his mom's cars were both there. So she gets out of her car. They rush outside. They tell her not to panic.

But that Colin had been attacked by a grizzly bear and already being operated in a hospital, which is like... ... kind of panic when someone says that to you. Especially if they're rushing out to me, if someone's like running at me, yelling at me, to not panic, I'm like, "Well, I'm like... ... kind of panicking, I'm fixing the panic." Well, and it's not fair to her, too, because if she doesn't panic, they'll probably be like...

... what's wrong with you? Why aren't you taking just more serious?

“That's why you should be like panic a little bit, but not like that much, but enough to know that we know that you care.”

To find that perfect little middle-ground of panic. By the time she does get to the hospital in Vancouver, Colin had already undergone over six hours of surgery, he had over 50 wounds and gashes the doctors had to use over 200 staples and stitches to patch him up. His femoral artery and his leg had to be fixed. They couldn't stitch it back together. They had to use a vein transplant from elsewhere in his body to stitch it up.

And then the bear had come millimeters from rupturing his kidney and some of his other internal organs. Following the surgeries, he reunited with his family and got the bad news that the bear had done a large amount of nerve damage to his leg.

And the doctors told him he would probably never walk normally again, and probably would never be able to walk on a trail without some sort of brace.

This happened in the summer of 2019, and in the fall of 2020 Colin had already run a full half marathon. Hell yeah. This guy is sweet. He's amazing. He also has tried to summit Mount Dugi Dalar again, but wasn't able to because of whether I think he's pretty, pretty freaking tough. Yeah, I'm pretty impressed by him.

Yeah, that's amazing.

After successfully evading capture for a while, British Columbia Wildlife Officials managed capture in youth and ice this bear.

It was a four or five year old male bear that weighed about 350 pounds and was in good condition. It most likely would not have died from this stab wound, but I do think the knife saved Colin's life. They do think this was a predatory attack that people that investigated the incident. Yeah, so you think it was the right decision to... I did this bear out of there.

“Yeah, I think the fact that it approached him when he's on the road.”

And you know, doing, they were plenty of distance for this bear to turn around and run. The fact that it approached him and then did attack him, that's not typical behavior. It's not atypical, but it's not typical either. So, do you know what's crazy is Americans were still... We're game to use millimeters.

Yeah. We don't really have a smaller, like a universally acknowledged measurement smaller than an inch. So we have to just go to centimeters and millimeters. That's true. We got to get on board figure out the imperial, a little like in the other direction.

Yeah, I go back and forth on that. Because in some ways I like the imperial system, especially for temperature, I think it makes more sense. And I know we're going to have so many comments of people being like, "Zero degrees though, that makes so much more sense." Yeah, I like how fine-grained the imperial system is, but I agree. For like millimeters and centimeters, we don't have an answer for it.

We got to come up with a new word. Yeah, with Celsius, what temperature is it, like, hot outside? Like, man, it's so hot. Like, 40 is like when it's unbearably hot to most people. That's like when you're close to 100, right? See, that's where it's confusing to me.

It's like 40 doesn't sound hot. A hundred sounds hot. Yeah. But to them, 40 sounds hot. I don't know if you're up with it.

A hundred means their waters are boiling. Yeah, that means they're dead. All right, so I want to do a quick recap of what Colin could have done better at what went wrong. Obviously, he tried to have bear spray. He lost it. That happens. You know, you want to have it somewhere secure. You want to make sure that you're thinking about it, making sure it's there.

But that's, you know, stuff like this can happen. But having a deterrent is definitely the number one thing. This encounter would have ended at the bear approaching him on his bike. Had he had a deterrent. It would have been enough to convince this bear.

I'm very confident it would have been enough to convince it to leave. Because you can kind of tell it was approaching him in a measured way. It wasn't, you know, just full on like this his food. It was kind of trying to figure it out. And a blast of bear spray to its face would have been enough to be like, okay, this isn't food.

This is a threat, a bad threat. No, if threat I want to run away from. So that's first. Sometimes we things that are a threat to us, like the puffer fish.

Sure. Food people like that. It's worth it. Yeah. It's like puffer fish.

Makes it better. Yeah.

I mean, this could be the one in a million bear that just goes through the spray and still malls him, you know.

“Another thing that I think, I think the big crux of this one that is the big question mark”

is what he should have done with his bike when the bear was right there. And it was super close. I, I tend to think like writing away from this bear may have worked. Had had he just like, as it was kind of getting close. Had he just jumped on his bike and tried to get by it and write down the hill.

It may have worked. I don't know though. Again, you're at a point where it's kind of like you don't have any good options. So I don't disagree with his plan to throw the bike at the bear. But he didn't have a good option at that point.

It's what I'm trying to say. Yeah. No, that's, I don't know. Almost feel like just try to fly by on your bike. Yeah. It may be what I'm looking for.

I know that could trigger. That's like definitely hindsight. Had the bear split decision to attack them. We'd be like, oh, you shouldn't have gone flying past it on your bike. Yeah.

But then it's like, I don't know. Maybe that would have worked. Yeah. And up until that point, aside from not having to turn, he'd kind of done things right. He had yelled, he had let the bear know he was there.

He tried to be really big and kind of, you know, intimidating when the bear was approaching him. I don't think this was a bear that was just trying to walk this trail and get by him. In that case, what he would have wanted to do is just kind of move off the, the road or the trail and let the bear have it and get up into the brush and let it go by.

“I think this bear was investigating him.”

So there wasn't a good option because he didn't have a deterrent.

And this is why you always need something to give you control.

So Brown bears one of one of the strategies is to slowly back away and not break eyesight.

Don't worry about the eyesight. But like slowly moving away from so had he maybe left his bike and backed away just his body. Would that have been something you would recommend maybe had I been in this particular situation. I think what I would have done had a yell in the bear just kept coming. I would have tried to throw something from my backpack grabbed some food really quick and thrown it to try and distract it.

I probably would have taken my bike with me just because it's like a faster mode of transportation. And I would have backed away slowly.

So the three things I always tell people are group up get your bear spray out and get it ready and back away slowly.

But if you have a bear that is potentially predatory which we know is incredibly rare. You are going to have to deter that bear. That's not a bear that like backing away is going to work or grouping up might work in that situation but backing away isn't really going to.

“So you need that's what you need deterrent is if in case you run to this kind of bear which doesn't happen much but it does happen.”

Also listeners there's some hammering I'm in my closet and there's no walls connecting to it. So I'm tripping out that someone's like on the ceiling or something. I don't know where this hammering is coming from if you heard it that's on my end. Maybe my mom is in your place now. Tired to watch and me.

Liz's always hammering. She's like she better. She sits there on his computer doing nothing all day. We got to go find someone new to hunt. That's who you need to hunt.

Like someone who just watches watches stuff. Let's move on to our categories unless you guys have any other questions. Yeah, no that is a really interesting one. Yeah, I like that story quite a bit.

Colin seems just like the type of person that I always admire and I always feel like that couldn't be me.

You know like way too much way too intense but also like really admirable. How much he just needs to be out there doing all that stuff. So like the I think the hindsight stuff's interesting on it where it's like. Obviously the bears losing the bear spray and not going and finding it was the biggest mistake. And as interesting too because he was new that he messed up by not bringing some.

And then he was given that lifeline just to lose it again. So I know I solved the problem and then I got myself right back into where I was. Yeah, but then yeah, like I think he could have maybe flown past the bear. I think he could have maybe like used the bike as more of a barrier than to like throw it at the bear. There's things you could nitpick but that being said for not having bear spray.

It's like that bear was acting really strangely too. It's just kind of brushing up against him not attacking him. So it's kind of like you don't want to do too much but you also like can't just like do nothing. Right. And like we've talked about there are things that are going to work for almost every bear out there.

“But there are still going to be bears that act differently and that's why you need something that works for all of them.”

And that's what a deterrent does for you is it gives you the upper hand in you know 99.9% of those encounters. And there still could be a bear that deterrent doesn't even work. But if we pretend that bears a human first act just or like under the same laws as humans. He kind of attacked first the bear kind of self defense. Yeah, in a way I guess that's true.

Like the bear never attacked him until he chucked his bike at it.

Yeah. It's a good point. Okay. Extreme. I'm a carriage of justice that this bear was put down I think.

That's not exactly what I'm saying by it. I do think it's interesting like just hypothetically what would have played out. How do you not throw on the bike at the bear? Hmm. Yeah. Every group has someone who insists on doing things the hard way. I'm trying to think if that would be me, Wes or Mike. Probably me honestly.

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See website for details or restrictions and important safety information. Actual price will depend on product and subscription plan. Okay, let's move on to our categories. I asked you guys first your favorite short king. This can be from real life, from movies, from TV, whatever you want.

Yeah, if I'm going to take it real literal, I'll probably say like, "Joffrey, or from Game of Thrones, or..." "Joffrey's favorite short king." I get what you say. Yeah, Napoleon. He wasn't a teacher.

Emperor.

He was, for a little bit, wasn't he?

He was Emperor. Yeah. Okay. I wasn't looking for an actual king. Favorite short guy from movies or TV.

I didn't find a king, but I did find a prince. His name is a prince. Oh, yeah, prince was pretty short.

“He's tiny, he's like five, five, two, I think.”

Which isn't tiny, tiny, but he's a little guy. And sexy. Me too. Yeah, man. I love that guy.

He transcended being short and not being sexy, you know? I think plenty of people are out there doing that. Yeah. I picked Josh Hutcherson, Hutcherson. Peter from the Hunger Games.

He's a short guy. He's like five, five, five. And I don't know. I've always liked him. I think whenever he pops up in a movie, I kind of get happy.

He's there. I think he's a fun actor. And I think he's great in those movies. So that's why I picked. Well, Josh.

Hold on. I just had one. I liked a lot. And then that. I'll throw out some name.

Bruce Lee. Jeremy Renner Short. I don't like it. Very sad guys. Kendrick Lamar's pretty small.

Tom Holland. Oh, Muggsy Boz. Muggsy Boz. Muggsy Boz. Muggsy Boz.

Yeah. He was like five feet tall. And he was a starting point guard in the NBA. A little taller than that. But he's like six.

Right. Yeah. Space Jam. Yeah. He's got supreme talent if the monsters are trying to steal it.

That's true. All right. Next category. If you had a kid that's a 14 year old mega prodigy kind of like Dugi House.

“What would you want him or her to be really good at?”

Pitching a baseball left handed specifically. I think that's the way. It's like a non-contact sport. Pictures. I don't know.

It just seems like a good lifestyle for each. Your child to have. And hopefully they'll kick back some of that ace picture money. Our way. Since we treated him very nicely.

And we're very supportive of his athletic endeavors.

They couldn't really monetize that at 14 though. They'd have to wait until they're like 18, right? To join the MLB. I guess that's true, huh? Shoot.

I mean, I have to rethink that. Coking. Ooh. That's a good answer.

Like I just had an incredible chef that's just running it on real restaurant.

And then they're 14. People would come from all over the world. Yeah. Like that. Curling.

Curling. Okay. I need to say good answer. Interesting.

“Yeah. I think like the long jump would be thrilling.”

I would be thrilling. The kid, this kid who I love so much. Just jumping a 200 feet. And I'm just terrified every single jump. But it would be like not a prodigy, but like a superhero.

It's kind of way different. Well, they jump like a 180 feet. Not they long jump. Oh, like a sking, so. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Sure.

That would be fun. Yes. I don't think I said that. Yeah. Like the long jump in the winter Olympics.

If he could just like, it'd be heart racing for sure. Be kind of. Really fun. I picked free diving. Like I just think it'd be cool if a kid, like a little kid,

could just free dive deeper than anyone else in the world. That's kind of boring answer. I like Mike's answer the best. I think a chef would be pretty cool.

Well, I always think it's cool and really little kids are just amazing at skateboarding too.

And I always think they have good parents to give them such a cool hobby to get into at a young age. Because it's cool. And then it's going to make you like popular if you're really good at skateboarding. You know, or if you had a prodigy hacker, it'd be safe from dinosaurs. She can like, classic that are labeled chess prodigies are always fun.

It's like a little kid playing like some that's true. I like that. Like a painter would be cool. Anyway, all right. Next one.

“What's the most useful present you ever got from your dad?”

Mind boring. But I couldn't think of anything better than my first car. That's what I was going to say too. Yeah. It's a really good one.

Well, and my first car was your car. No. And syruses as well, the convertible Mazda. Didn't you add a red car for your first car? Hold on.

My first car was your car. And a syruses. And then when syruses drove it to give it to me. It's like the engine exploded and it was told. And it's like my parents still paid for it.

But they were nice enough to still give me a car that I actually could do. It says a red Toyota Salca. Yeah. One thing I really liked about our parents and my dad specifically is that he wanted us to have fun cars for our first car.

And not necessarily expensive. I had a 1980 Camaro for my first car. But it costs 900 dollars that had a hole in the floor that water would splash up through. But it was so fun.

And I loved it so much. And it had a lot of character. And I really, really appreciated that he didn't just buy me like a knee on or something. You know, like something or what's a boring car. Rathly.

Yeah. I do. I have a rat for now and they are boring. Yeah. Mike, what's your answer?

Mine. You guys can tell me if this doesn't count.

“But I truly believe the best thing my dad ever gave me was just the emotional support”

to pursue and do whatever I wanted to pursue and do. Like, obviously not criminal activity. But they were he and my mom also. But my dad very specifically.

He was always really excited and very supportive and wanted me to pursue new experiences

and try new and different things to things dad. You're the best. All right. Jeff, this category is just for you because I know you're going to have the best answer. I want to hear your Instagram pic from this story.

What part of this story do you want a photo from to post on your Instagram? Yeah. Oh, man. Because like a video of it walking right by you would be really cool. Like it'd be like you could get a pretty funny picture of the bike in the air like going

at the bear. That's true. I like that. That'd be a good idea. He wish he had a camera when it was walking by him.

So that's kind of what I thought too. But you're at a video would be much more. I think I want a picture of me hanging sideways out of the bear's mouth. But it would be kind of a fun thing to be able to show people. It's like, here's the bear.

And this is me. Yeah. That'd be the funniest like taking a video of yourself. Like not living in the moment. Yeah.

You're just like on your phone taking a video of him. So look at this bear. So you're probably wondering how I got here.

He's not even experiencing it.

World out here buddy. Yeah. All right. I want to do a quick it came from Quora. Part of me just feels like dying a little bit when I'm a bear by all

just I'm typing can you kill a bear with a knife in a Quora. But here's the answer I got that I like the most. You probably could kill the bear if you could get inside it without just a little weird to say without striking you with a cut or two or bite they would kill you later. Not likely though.

Forget about direct confrontation. Here's a way that it might work. You have baited the area with berries and yams. Make make everything smell like berries and yams. Or make everything smell like female bear, which easy to do.

Climb on top of a deer stand or high up in a tree and wait. Have your knife ready. If the bear gives you an opportunity to land on its back then take it. Jump down on its back near the neck and gut its neck. Cut its neck.

“You have to be quick or you may not get the chance.”

Now in all caps it all caps. I wouldn't do it but if you insist how does that sound? Well I got a little bit back to the end. Back to the other case. You can make an extremely long ladder like spear out of the knife that allows you to

spear its neck from high up. Back to all caps. That sound better. That's the end of it. I like that.

Yeah. It's great. From came to Quora on this line. That's a really good idea. Yeah.

Get whip out your essence of female bear and spray your hand. Paris and yams. Two bears like yams. I guess they would. I'm sure they'd like it.

But my favorite is just ending in all caps. That sound better. It's just pretty antagonistic. I feel like it's a thing to wear bears like in cartoons and whatever. Like jam.

“And I think they just confuse jams with jams.”

Yeah.

It sounds like maybe not a first language English speaker.

But I also just love. I wouldn't do it. But if you insist how does that sound. Yeah. With the exclamation point and a question mark.

I need to follow that Quora user. You see what other questions they're answering. This was user Marcus Mitchell. Comic bookbuff. Group reading comics.

Watching them. etc. All right. I've got what. I've got your favorite thing in the month.

So just to kind of. I want you guys throughout something you've been really enjoying so far in February. I've been really having a good time with those dots pretzels. Specifically the cinnamon ones. Have you guys tried those?

Oh my gosh. They're all good. Like every flavor is good. Yeah. There's just like a bag of I know dots.

Yeah.

“And for some reason the cinnamon just never made sense to me in my brain.”

I finally like sprung form because it was the one flavor I hadn't tried.

Yeah. It's like kind of my favorite. They're really, really sweet and sugary. But just a small handfuls. Like heaven.

Heaven on the old home. Oh. So I hate being in like a winter city where there's no winter. So Salt Lake. This winter kind of sucks.

Like it's just ugly and not warm. But one nice thing was. It has been playing golf. So like yesterday I went to the golf course. And normally you couldn't ever play this time of year.

But you can right now. And I just went on. It's like the in the summer. Salt Lake. It's so hard to get tea times.

Like it they fill up so fast. And then it's like I'll have to play with random people. And I don't really want to do that. And it's just like a whole annoying process. And so yesterday I just showed up.

And I was like, hey, can I play golf? And they're like, yeah. Can you you want to go on right now? That's like sure. And I go on.

There's no one in front of me. No one behind me. It's just the entire course of myself. And it was like really fun. Just to have like do whatever you want on a golf course.

No like yeah. That's like when you have a movie theater all to yourself. Kind of. Yeah. Yeah.

I hit a bad drive guess what? Just hit another one. No one's watching. Yeah. Is that my mom?

I. I'd a friend recommend a show to me called a culinary class wars. It's a Korean show. It's kind of like physical 100. If you've seen physical 100, but it's for chefs.

Oh, and I find this. Yeah. On a lot of these shows. They're kind of like on cooking shows. You're kind of getting these real like mid tier chefs and stuff.

And the entire country of South Korea. And sometimes the chefs that are from South Korea, or cooking in other places.

And they have them competing against like really up and coming amazing chefs from South Korea.

And it's grabbed me like no other cooking show really has.

“And I think part of it is because they are making food that looks.”

That is disgusting to me because I hate seafood and I like don't want. They'll be like making the most delicious looking like noodle ball. And then they'll be like, and my next ingredient is sea cucumber. And they pull out this like slimy sea cucumber and chop it up. But they make it look really beautiful.

And it's just giving me a new appreciation for as Korean culture and cooking. And it's made me want to cook more too, which is good for me. So yeah, culinary class war. Plus you know me, I love a class war. Yeah, so why is it called a class war?

They have like the white rob chefs that are like the really, really amazing chefs that have like Mr. Starrson stuff. Yeah. And then they have the black rob chefs that are like, They all own their own restaurants that have like lines out the door and their amazing chefs.

But they haven't gone quite to that level and they compete against each other. Like they literally put the white rob chefs on like a higher level and they're looking down on them.

Like in the first episode.

It's a fun show. I haven't finished these in one yet, but I'm having a really good time with it. Yeah. Okay. I got a few listener questions today.

We haven't done them for a minute, so I wanted to catch up on a few from our subscribers. This one's from Crystalin.

“Crystalin says, "What non lower the ring's character?”

Do you think could handle wearing the ring?" Ooh. Captain America. Yeah, that's a good pair of heart. Yeah.

Loufie. George Washington. Jesus is an interesting one. Jesus, sort of deep. I mean, if everything we've heard about him is to be believed,

I think he'd be a pretty good candidate. I wouldn't risk it though because if he becomes corrupted, then like, aren't we all pretty much damned? That's true. Like get lost.

He wouldn't want. He didn't want any of that. Yeah. He needed like a small, diminutive little. You need someone like Collin to be honest.

Give Collin the ring. Doggy. Doggy. Doggy. Yeah.

Doggy could wear it. No. He's like misdevious. He's stealing stuff and spy on people already. Yeah.

How about Dumbo? You know, Dumbo would be a good ring bear. No. I don't remember Dumbo. He can fly and he's like a nice little elephant just kind of peer of heart.

I think he'd be great. He just fly right into the volcano. That's true. He just fly right into that magma too. He doesn't care.

No. That's all right. That's a good question. Well, about like Woody from Toy Story. Now he's too powerful.

To do his strong. He's a little neurotic. Yeah.

“If anything, the dog from I think any dog.”

Slinky. Yeah. Imagine corrupted Woody. That you be on a war path. Well, that's what I was thinking.

It's like I'm not that threatened by him. That's true. Just crush him. But think of the buzz light use. They'd be in trouble.

Yeah. All right. This one's from Jessica Jessica says regarding Japan. Mike, what's your favorite anime figurine you bought? Wes, what's your favorite bird you saw?

Jeff has a traveler and an adventure. What was your favorite thing about Japan that you haven't experienced anywhere else? I'd so figurine anime figurine. I don't know if I've ever actually bought one of those for myself. But I will say, this is maybe done a road a little too far removed from that chance of this question, legitimately.

But I bought a bomber jacket with the final fantasy 7 insignia on the back of it. It's like a little muggle riding a choke about. And that's like my favorite purchase. I've made in maybe my heart life. I wanted it.

If I didn't know the symbol at all and then it's perfect for Mike. Also, I kind of bought it. Wes, do you want to hear how we settled our debts? Yeah. We kind of cut you out of it for just establishing settling our own debts, right?

Yeah. And I paid a lot more than Mike paid for Japan and then a bit more than Brent to you. But we didn't really know exactly how much and instead of like looking through it all, I was just like, let's pick four numbers and then we smash for it. So like we did a thousand eight hundred seven hundred and five hundred with Mike.

And seven hundred the second least he would owe me one.

Yeah.

And it was actually like pretty like had a thousand one that would have been about fair. Yeah. And then with Brent, we figured he owed me about three hundred dollars. And I put the lowest option that I owe him a hundred dollars. And that would.

So I paid Brent a hundred dollars. So it's spotted them a hundred more dollars. Yeah. I'll get you back, Jeff. I know you're going to say, no, it's fake.

No, it's fake. Anyways, in Japan, one of my favorite things was just finding a random building and just writing the escalators. Because every single floor would just have like pop up shops and then like restaurants.

“And then just like all there's just so many like cool stores that you have to kind of discover.”

Yeah. But that was my thing that I was like Tokyo without seeing everything.

My suggestion would be don't go too hard on there's a million Instagram people suggesting what you should do out there.

But like make sure to just like try to find some hidden spots yourself too because I lost that. Yeah. My favorite bird I saw. I didn't do much birding in Japan, but I saw an azure winged magpie that I really liked. So that was my favorite.

It does ducks a lot too. Yeah. But these are winged magpies, my favorite. Okay. What were the ducks? There's redheads, I think. But I'm not sure.

This one's from Christa. Twofold question for all three of you. But I'm actually just going to say the first part of it. Sorry, Christa. Would you rather be attacked by a bear while you're wearing a scuba suit, a snow suit, or a fancy business suit?

No. Business suit. I'll say scuba. I'll say scuba. I'll say scuba.

“Do you have like the BC and the tank and everything else on?”

I can imagine.

So that's beautiful to have some of those.

Yeah. The little sprayer at it. Exactly. I feel like the paramedics are going to go a little faster to get me help. To your fancy.

Yeah. Yeah. If you look like it, I'll be a priority. Yeah. Okay.

I think I got one more here. This is from Shana. Hey, fellas. If you're being mauled to death by an animal, what song do you want to be mauled to? Oh, that's a good one.

Yeah. Bingo. Boom. Boom. Kendrick.

Kendrick. Hmm. I like that. I mean, another one bites the dust is what my mind went to. But that's kind of cliche.

Um, but I'll just say that because I didn't really think about it. Mike, what are you picking? Uh, it's a raining blood by a slayer. That's a good one. Yeah.

Waiting bleed by slipknot. There you go. Hmm. All right. Malu says, Wes, can you explain why people are taking frozen iguanas in South Florida?

I watched videos of people getting like hundreds of them. Is that legal? Do they eat them? I'm very confused and upset. Uh, I understand why you're upset.

But these green iguanas are actually highly invasive in southern Florida. They are doing very well down there. And they're really kind of pushing a lot of the native wildlife out of the same habitat. So people are encouraged to remove iguanas in Florida. And when they when it gets too cold, they literally just kind of fall out of the trees.

Yeah, it's creepy on lawns and stuff. Yeah.

“So that's what people are doing is they're removing them. It is kind of sad.”

And you can't eat them, I believe. And I think they actually taste pretty well. But it tastes pretty good. But uh, yeah, that's what's happening. Yeah, it's one of those things where it seems like something you should shame someone for.

Like, why are you killing all this wildlife? But it's like, they're kind of protecting the native wildlife. And maybe they're being a little disrespectful about it. Ultimately, it's kind of a good thing. It's crazy how many fell out of trees.

I saw people with like 50 iguanas and stuff. Yeah, it's pretty wild. There's so many iguanas down there now.

So really, there are never going to not have a iguanas down there anymore.

But okay, well, that is it for the story. Uh, like I mentioned, we have a really fun to part of coming up soon. We have some fun guests on the horizon. Really excited about the next few months for our podcast. We're going to Antarctica, which is going to be all three of ours.

Last continent, um, which is exciting. And yeah, Jeff just did a really fun review of the movie "Primate" on our Patreon. Uh, and our Apple Gris Club. It would definitely went off the rails, but it was really fun episode that I really enjoyed. So check it out.

Even if you didn't see the movie, it's a fun episode.

“I think I'm going to follow it up with it.”

Like my next subscription episode is going to be real chimpanzee stories too.

So cool. That'd be great.

All right, follow us on YouTube too.

How about that? Yeah.

“We'll get to see our faces when we do this kind of thing when we record face.”

Love you guys. Bye. Love you. See ya. [BLANK_AUDIO]