A grizzly bear pulled a woman from her tent in a small Montana town in the middle of the night and killed her before fellow campers could use bear spray to force the bruin out of the area.
Leah Davis Lokan, 65, a registered nurse from Chico, California, was on a long-distance bicycling trip and had stopped in the western Montana town of Ovando when she was killed early Tuesday, according to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks officials.
It was the bear’s second visit to the site where Lokan and two fellow bicyclists were camping near the post office, officials said.
The approximately 400-pound grizzly first awakened the campers around 3 a.m. They took food out of their tents, secured it and went back to sleep.
Surveillance video from a business in town showed the bear about a block from the post office about 15 minutes later, wildlife officials said.
Around 4:15 a.m., the sheriff’s office got a 911 call after two people in a tent near the victim’s tent were awakened by sounds of the attack, Powell County Sheriff Gavin Roselles said. They discharged their bear spray, and the bear ran away.
The bear is also believed to have entered a chicken coop in town that night, killing and eating several chickens.
Officials searched by helicopter for the grizzly but couldn’t find it.
“At this point, our best chance for catching this bear will be culvert traps set in the area near the chicken coop where the bear killed and ate several chickens,” said Randy Arnold, the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks regional supervisor in Missoula.
If found, the bear will be killed, said Greg Lemon, a spokesman for the state agency.
Investigators said they have obtained the bear’s DNA from the scene of the attack and will be able to compare it with any bear they are able to trap.
Lokan, who had worked at a hospital in Chico, had looked forward to the Montana bike trip for months, said Mary Flowers, a friend from Chico. Lokan had taken previous long-distance bike trips andwas accompanied by her sister and a friend, Flowers said.
“She loved these kind of adventures,” Flowers said. “A woman in her 60s, and she’s doing this kind of stuff. She had a passion for life that was out of the ordinary.”
Grizzly bears have run into increasing conflict with humans in the Northern Rockies over the past decade as the federally protected animals expanded into new areas and the number of people living and looking for recreation in the region grew. That has spurred calls from elected officials in Montana and neighboring Wyoming and Idaho to lift protections so the animals could be hunted.
Ovando, about 60 miles northwest of Helena, is a community of fewer than 100 people at the edge of the sprawling Bob Marshall wilderness. North of Ovando lies an expanse of forests and mountains, including Glacier National Park that stretches to Canada and is home to an estimated 1,000 grizzlies. It’s the largest concentration of the bruins in the contiguous United States.
Fatal attacks in the region are rare. There have been three in 20 years, including this latest one, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
In 2001, a hunter was killed by a grizzly with two cubs while the hunter was gutting an elk at a wildlife management area west of Ovando. The three animals were shot and killed by wildlife officials days later.
Over the past 20 years, there have been eight fatal maulings of people by grizzlies from a separate population of about 700 bears in and around Yellowstone National Park. In April, a backcountry guide was killed by a grizzly bear while fishing along the park’s border in southwestern Montana.
Bears that attack people aren’t always killed if the mauling resulted from a surprise encounter or the bear was defending its young. But the bear involved in Lokan’s death is considered a public safety threat because of the circumstances of the attack, Lemon said.
