Outdoors with Jason Fox Part 2.

[Music] so last time we saw each other in person do you remember the story you shared in the pub back when pubs were a thing it was the bear story all right yeah can you tell the best yeah you want me to tell the best story that year was just filled with anxiety for me because let's the start of the year or even before the start so we're in like 2018 christmas and all i just felt this sense of impending doom because i had i was going out to afghanistan to film that documentary and it was a worry i was i was getting continuous intelligence updates of incidents that were happening within afghanistan there was like ied strikes contacts with the enemy people getting kidnapped like on a daily basis basis and i was like oh my god what am i doing anyway get out to afghanistan and then the next while i'm out there you're sort of in the moment you don't really worry about what's going on in the moment but the the next thing was i had shaun messaging me constantly because we were in the we're in the final stages of organizing the yukon and all i kept thinking about was bears i was like yeah really sort of like worried about this bare situation and i kept asking him you know can we get a shotgun you know can we you know and he's like mate we can't we can't get shotguns we can't get anything we're not licensed and we don't really want to use and i was like no i don't but you know just he said we're just going to use bear spray that's what we normally but what is bear spray and when when they when i first got explained to about bear spray someone said it's like a big fire extinguisher and it jets like the propellant out it comes out like thick tar and i'm like wow that sounds actually sounds decent and he said and we get bear bangers which are like mini flares that make noises and get the old air horn bear horn and we should be good to go and online okay so we so we get out there but i'm still like you know i am worried about wildlife i'm worried about wildlife more than anything else and you know it is a worry and then we get to skagway which is the start point for our 40 mile nile 49 mile hike to you know the source of the yukon or one of the sources lake bennett and before you go on the the klondike trail the sort of chill coop trail sorry you have to you have to get a brief off the wardens off the park rangers to go down to the park ranger thing and you have to you have to pay for the brief and then they give you a permit to go on the trail you can't just nearly crack on and they give you an hour's presentation on bears and like what you need to do and they obviously talk to you about you know your admin on campsites and when you're pitching upside camp when you where'd you put your food there's bare bins you have bourbons and stuff like that on the on the um trail and then we were told on that on that trail sort of just over halfway there's a there's a well-known bear that hangs around what the place called what they call lindeman's city it's not a city it's like an old campsite and uh so we're like and i'm like constantly like looking for this bear didn't show up thank god we get down we basically didn't really see much for a while that we were always on edge you know when you're at night trying to get to sleep you can hear things moving around outside the tent and you know sometimes you weren't you weren't able to we always used to try and pitch up camp on a you know later on on a sand bar or an island because there are a lot of them but at the beginning when the river was narrow it was you know it was a very young river you couldn't we had to pitch up basically in the woods and uh so it was a little yeah it was a bit unnerving and you know there wasn't much sleep got anyway you get into it we're like 40 odd days in now and we're sort of seasoned and we've seen bears but from a massive distance so i was like not really felt that throughout not didn't feel threatened anyway we had a night we had a really good night on this sand bar yeah i can't remember the name of the town that we could see could see it from the sandbar but it was an amazing night but because it was so clear everything got piss-wet through you know just there was it was like condensation everywhere and like we got up in the morning it was still too cold to dry anything so we packed it away damp or quite wet actually and you're always a bit like would have been you know normally before the mornings were quite you know the weather was good and you'd actually dry mostly cow before we even set off on this occasion it wasn't to happen so we cracked on paddling but the day was really nice and i was like that just was paddling along and i'm like mate let's find a really good spot for lunch and the lunch the detail for lunch was normally get yourself onto a decent sandbar with you know it's normally like quite smooth sand and you can just chill out and we'll just unpack the boats peg everything out get it drying in the sun and then we'll have out we'll do a lunch routine which consisted of making coffee and eating snacks ham and cheese and what have you and then normally have a little solid plan yeah it definitely won't go wrong wouldn't go wrong and and you know we always had a little siesta you know we could be getting on these have lunch and doze for about half an hour and then you get up stretch off and on this occasion pack up so we've done we've found the sandbar it's actually it was massive it's huge it was more an island it had sort of undergrowth you hide bushes low trees that sort of thing and uh check the area straight away we'll give it a quick once over looking for bear tracks and all that sort of thing and we were right by the water's edge pulled the boats up and then there was a like a sand bank it's a little bit of high ground and then it dipped over into some what we call dead ground where it disappeared from out from our site because we obviously sat down at lunch then had a bit of a doze and shawn's sort of like gone up and he's he stood on the the sort of like this the bank he's just like looking surveying the scenery because it is awesome and i've heard him go oh what's that over there and i'm like what's he like what's he banging i don't know it looks like a moose or a bear and like this like shawn would do this on an hourly basis for the entire trip and it would every time pretty much 100 99.9 every time it would end up being a a log or a tree yeah or a fallen tree or a stump drama what's he banging on about now so far go and have a look so as i've walked it has literally walked about 10 yards up to where shawn is and uh as i've got level with him he's just bolted past me shut up it's a grizzly i'm not what that like looking in the distance my heart rate has gone up a little bit and then i can't see i'm looking into the the far distance or the middle distance couldn't see it and then something caught my eye i just looked down and there was this yeah it was a grizzly it was it was his head was like that and it was about 50 50 yards away 50 meters it was just like skulking towards us sort of like low in what looked like a bit of a i don't know sort of like um stalking yeah yeah and uh i honestly my backside fell out everything that the rangers had told us was basically don't run stand your ground stand tall don't look it in the eye look above its head and then get ready to deploy the bear spray and that just completely went out the window i turned around screamed like a ten-year-old and sprinted towards the boat we sort of grabbed a bit of kit on the way stuffed that into the cockpit and then i plonked myself in ass first feet hanging out and basically just back paddled away from the shore shawn was doing the same and then we just sat out about you know was it was it like chasing you as you're running it was coming to what i didn't i don't know i didn't look yeah but i got into the boats and we sort of hung off the shore about i don't know 30 meters and we just held station in the river just waiting you could see it skulking about sniffing around wow and then it disappeared and we were like when do we go back in you know we still had kit lying around so we sort of like went in bear spray out and i was like covering sean and then he got out actually and went and grabbed the last couple of bits of pit and then we sort of like paddled up there was like sleeping bag hanging out and all sorts we just paddled down to another about two miles down the way to another island and then you know sorted ourselves out but it was later on you know after the event you like that was it wasn't it but it was later on we got to a place called um pilot station um inuit uh indigenous village we got chatting to some of the locals and we're like look we think we had a bear encounter and they're like oh yeah if you where were you and we sort of like pointed on the map and they were like yeah yeah that's yeah we've been after that one he's trouble oh god yeah he's definitely trouble we want we need to get rid of him because he's a nuisance he tries to attack people all the time [Music] you

Channel: Osprey Europe

Views: 8,762

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: h98vOlBZYUc

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021