Two US Army soldiers have been injured after encountering a brown bear in a mountainous training area in Anchorage, the military said.<\/p>\n
The incident happened Friday as the soldiers were participating in a “land navigation training event” in Arctic Valley, part of the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson’s training area.<\/p>\n
The soldiers were receiving medical care as of Saturday, a military official told the Anchorage Daily News. Messages sent to base spokespersons were not immediately returned to The Associated Press.<\/p>\n
The soldiers’ conditions were not released pending notification of relatives.<\/p>\n
Both soldiers used pepper spray on the bear, the official said. Few other details were available about the incident because it was still under investigation.<\/p>\n
“The safety and well-being of our personnel is our highest priority,” Lieutenant Colonel Jo Nederhoed, a spokesperson for the US Army 11th Airborne Division, said in an email to the Anchorage Daily News.<\/p>\n
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game is investigating what it says appears to have been “a defensive attack” by a bear that had recently emerged from a den. The area near where the incident occurred has been closed to recreational activity by base officials, the department said.<\/p>\n
Samples were collected by investigators with the aim of positively identifying the species and gender of bear involved, the department said.<\/p>\n
The base encompasses 259sqkm within the Municipality of Anchorage, where up to 350 black bears and 75 brown bears roam freely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two US Army soldiers have been injured after encountering a brown bear in a mountainous training area in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":385332,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[50,42,43,64,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-385331","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-animals","9":"tag-headlines","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-north-america","12":"tag-top-news","13":"tag-top-stories","14":"tag-topnews","15":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385331\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/385332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}