Hungry: Thea Thomas was attacked by the brown bear hiking on Heney Ridge Trail (file picture)
Thea Thomas tried to step off the trail as a brown bear sprinted toward her, chasing a friend's dog that she had brought along for a hike in Cordova on Tuesday afternoon. Yet in an instant, Thomas was flat on the ground, face-to-face with an angry bear that bit her repeatedly during the mauling on Heney Ridge Trail.
"By the end, I was thinking, 'I could die here," Thomas said from an Anchorage hospital Wednesday, where she was medevaced after the attack.
Thomas, a 57-year-old commercial fisherman, has lived in the Southcentral Alaska community of Cordova for 32 years, she said. "I hike those trails all the time."
Heney Ridge Trail is a 4.1-mile trail that follows Hartney Bay before climbing up through spruce-hemlock forest, salmon-spawning streams and a mile of steep incline up above the treeline, according to the U.S. Forest Service website.
The trail "is probably the most common place over the 30 years I've lived there that I've seen bears," she said.
