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Polar Bear Alley is a real place but not this place. It is a strip of white sand beach along the coast of Hudson Bay near the former site of the Churchill garbage dump. A beautiful place for a picnic if you know how to handle a shotgun. This version of Polar Bear Alley is created by Kelsey Eliasson in Churchill, Manitoba, Canada - specifically at Camp Nanuq -a 'cottage suburb' twenty kilometres (15 miles) east of Churchill. I run a tour company called Polar Bear Alley Expeditions and write a few books, including the Polar Bears of Churchill guidebook, when not chasing polar bears off my porch. |
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The
latest urban legend/email forward is the polar bear attack images
of the scarred man and the dead polar bear. I have seen about
six different explanations of these, most commonly that it was
one camper in the Yukon, but this is the real one.
The
polar bear attack took place about 45 minutes outside of Kimmirut,
Nunavut (a small community on Baffin Island). It occured on September
3, 2003 when Kootoo Shaw, an Inuit Guide, was leading a group
of American caribou hunters.
It
is a fairly classic polar bear encounter, occurring early in the
morning (4am) with the bear sneaking in just before dawn. Once
it had breached the guide's tent, it clawed at his neck and jumped
on his chest, three or four times with his front paws. He had
several 
claw
wounds, some broken ribs and required 300 stitches to re-attach
his scalp.
There
are two basic reasons for the severity of this attack: the Inuit
guide thought that new gun laws required him to have his firearm
unloaded when it was idle and the fact that there were no dogs
at the camp to warn the hunters. 
Also,
from the pictures, it looks like this was a younger polar bear,
likely between three and five years of age - big enough to be
dangerous but small enough to have a tough time competing for
food with larger bears.
There
is also another picture associated with these showing someone's
foot with a large hole in it. However, this has also been circulated
with a story about an accidental shotgun discharge. It does not
really fit with the rest of the pictures, not to mention that
this foot has pretty fair skin!
