Shayne Burke was on his honeymoon this past spring with his wife, Chloe. The couple were ready for the adventure, and their preparation included briefing themselves on the dangers of bears in the area. That preparedness would prove to be life-saving.
A Massachusetts man who survived a grizzly bear attack in Yosemite National Park says there are many reasons he is still alive today, but chief among them is luck.
Shayne Burke was on his honeymoon this past spring with his wife, Chloe. The couple were ready for the adventure, and their preparation included briefing themselves on the dangers of bears in the area.
"Prior to this whole trip, bears were a big concern of mine," Burke tells Inside Edition.
“I was doing a lot of research on my own and that's why we bought the bear spray for the trip," he continues. "I practiced taking the safety off, putting it back on to make sure I knew how to do that. But I mean, a grizzly bear can run 35 miles per hour so they can close 30 yards in one and a half seconds. At most. It's fast."
During their trip, Shayne went off on his own in search of a rare owl he wanted to photograph. Chloe stayed near the car with their dog, Cadence.
As he searched for the owl, Shayne spotted a bear cub. Immediately, he knew he was in trouble, but before he could do anything, the cub's mother was on top of him.
“So the most dangerous bear is a grizzly mother with a cub nearby, so she definitely let me have it,” he says. “As soon as I saw the cub, that's when my day just got flipped right over. And all of this happened in what I would say microseconds, like saw the cub, spray’s out, taking the safety off. I look up and mom is just a few feet away at that point.
“I knew it wasn't an if, it was just when and where is mom, and she just suddenly appeared really fast,” Shayne says.
He knew he wasn't going to be able to shoot his bear spray in time, and so instead, he focused on trying to protect himself as best he could.
"(The bear) was pretty much right on top of me at this point. She jumped up and I turned 180 and she bit me right on the shoulder and tackled me," he says. "At that point, I basically just locked my arms, my hands and arms behind my neck and just tensed up my body as tight as I could. There's no way that if that bear could have done anything it wanted to me, there's nothing I could have done at that point really to stop it."
Shayne says that once the bear bit his shoulder, he let out a “bloodcurdling scream, and then I just buried my face in the dirt and she kind of stopped and walked around me and then came back on top of me, and then she bit a leg and I just, what's it called, locked my jaw really tight and just paused as much as I could.”
Then suddenly, there was a pause and things went quiet. The abrupt end of the attack left him wondering if he was still even alive. But then, he saw the bear running away. Knowing he needed to move, Shayne went further into the woods.
Despite his traumatic injuries, he was able to call Chloe.
“It's definitely surreal," Chloe says. "I think in this case, my past work as a first responder, as an EMT, definitely offered me some protection from the overwhelming panic that you get when you get a phone call from your husband saying that he's been attacked by a bear."
Since Shayne didn’t have a first aid kit with him, he was on his own until a first responder could get to the scene, and so Chloe talked him through using whatever he had on him as a tourniquet to stop the bleeding.
Shayne, who has been in the Army Reserve for 17 years, also brought significant, important experience to the table.
“I knew that I was pretty confident that nothing was fatal in the moment," he says. "However, I didn't know exactly how long I had, and I knew that they were having trouble finding me, not because of their issues. All the issues were kind of on my end. My phone didn't have really good service, so the GPS was really bad, and it wasn't given good coordinates for some reason. So it took a little while to figure it out."
Eventually, a helicopter was able to come to get him in the woods and rescue him.
"The rescuers were on point, they were absolute experts at what they do," he continues. "So I didn't really express or really feel the pain until they showed up. And then they kept telling me I was doing a good job, and I wasn't being a baby about it, but I did just get attacked by a grizzly bear."
While being rescued, Shayne made a surprising request.
“I humbly asked if they would spare the bear's life, and they said that they have to do an investigation, and thankfully they did come to the conclusion that neither me nor the bear were in the wrong. So that's a relief,” he says. “That was a big concern of mine. I love animals and I think all of us have a purpose on this planet and deserve to live in some capacity. And she didn't do anything wrong.”
Shayne’s injuries were severe. So far, he has had nine surgeries in as many areas.
“When he got to the hospital, he spent about an hour in surgery being sutured and stapled back together," Chloe says. "We don't have an accurate count of the staples, but I tried to count them during his last dressing change and we counted 58."
Shayne says he is lucky to have survived his encounter with the bear.
“I think luck was probably the biggest part of my survival is pure chance that that bear can stayed in my finger, stayed wrapped around it, and I'm sure that's by design that has the ring handle," he says. "So that definitely worked out for me. I think if I dropped that canister and she bit me in the neck like that without it there and she got another grip on it, I don't know. I don't think I'd be around any longer."
