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Giant bear grows on the Internet
Alaskan's enormous brown bear was a record, but it wasn't as big as its legend
By Natalie Phillips / Anchorage Daily News
It was a big bear -- its front legs spanning 11 feet from claw tip to claw tip, its skull the size of a beer keg, its paws as big as a man's chest.
An Eielson Air Force Base airman shot the record-book grizzly during an October 2001 deer hunt in Prince William Sound.
''It's an exceptional bear,'' said master guide Joe Want of Fairbanks, a 40-year veteran of Kodiak Island, home to the biggest brown bears in North America. ''It's an understatement to say that it is a trophy of a lifetime.''
Now it's an Internet legend
But perhaps equally amazing is how much the bear has grown in size and legend in just a few weeks' time on the Internet. Hundreds of people around Alaska and across the country are circulating photographs of the bear and the hunter who shot it. With each missive, the tale and the bear seem to grow.
By the time e-mail stories started reaching the Daily News in late November, the bear towered 12 feet, 6 inches tall and weighed more than 1,600 pounds. Another writer said the ferocious bear had charged the unsuspecting deer hunter, who emptied his gun, but shot the bear dead in the nick of time with his last shell.
Though this was indeed a big bear, those numbers and that sequence of events aren't right.
So how big was the bear, and what really happened?
The hunter tells the story
Here's the story as told by the hunter, Theodore Winnen, a 22-year-old crew member of the 18th Fighter Squadron at Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks.
Winnen and three hunting buddies were dropped off on Hinchinbrook Island in the heart of Prince William Sound by an air taxi on a cool, rainy Oct. 14 morning.
Hinchinbrook is a 165-square-mile island near Cordova with an estimated population of about 100 brown bears, giving it the distinction of harboring the highest density of bears of any island in the Sound, according to Dave Crowley, Cordova area wildlife biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Four to six bears are killed by hunters on the island every year, though rarely one of more than 400 pounds.
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