'I went down like a sack of potatoes': Irish paddler recounts bear encounter in Yukon backcountry

Eight days into a solo canoe journey through the Yukon backcountry, Dermot Higgins met a bear.

It went badly for both of them — but it could have gone much worse.

The adventurer from Dublin, Ireland, had spent the first week of July on the Yukon River in the early stages of his quest to paddle more than 3,000 kilometres to the Bering Sea.

He spent a night at a campsite by Selwyn near Carmacks. 

Though Higgins says he was careful to secure his food, he noticed a mess left behind by others — empty wrappers and human waste. He cleaned up what he could and set up his tent.

Early the next morning, he woke to the sound of something hitting his tent, snapping one of the poles. Looking through the mesh of the tent, he saw a black bear and cub a few metres away.

"I was nearly paralyzed with fear, really. You know, a lot of thoughts went through my head really quickly," he said.

Exiting the tent would mean turning his back on the bear. Instead, he pulled out a tin whistle and a bell. He started making noise "not very melodically."

But bell and whistle seemed to make the bear angrier. It circled the tent with cub in tow, climbed onto the picnic table and then, snarling, charged toward him.

Higgins had one tool left: a can of bear spray.

He got the bear square in the face.

"The bear recoiled really quickly. And then, actually, because I sprayed [it] through the fabric of the tent, I got a lot of bear spray in my own face, too — a lot," he said.

"I don't know how much went to the bear, how much went to me. I was choking and I couldn't see, and I started vomiting."

And then he fainted.