They logged on hoping to see brown bears gorging on salmon, fattening themselves up for their winter hibernation. Instead, what the wildlife enthusiasts viewing one of Alaska’s most remote national park webcams saw was a disheveled and weather-beaten hiker shuffling into view, mouthing the words “help me” into the lens.
The episode captured by a camera at the Katmai national park sparked a chain of events that ended with the safe recovery of the unknown hiker by search and rescue teams, according to rangers.
“Dedicated bear cam fans alerted us to a man in distress on Dumpling Mountain. The heroic rangers @KatmaiNPS sprung into action and mounted a search, saving the man,” Explore.org, the company that operates webcams for the US National Park Service (NPS), posted to X, formerly known as Twitter.
“Bear cam saves a hiker’s life!”
A NPS spokesperson, Cynthia Hernandez, told the Washington Post that comments left in a chatroom by webcam viewers alerting Explore.org to the distressed hiker were forwarded to authorities in Alaska, who scrambled into action.
“The park sent a search and rescue team to find the hiker, who was caught in windy and rainy conditions with poor visibility,” Hernandez told the newspaper.
“Park rangers found the hiker a few hours later, unharmed, and brought the hiker back to safety.”
The same viewers who first spotted the hiker and posted the alerts were also able to watch the rescue personnel disappearing into the mist on their way to find him, the Post said. The area has little shelter, and no cellphone signal.
The camera at Katmai, a 4.1m-acre (6,400 sq miles) scenery-rich coastal park in south-west Alaska featuring volcanoes and tundra, is popular during Fat Bear Week, an educational knockout-style online competition held every October to see which of the park’s bears has put on most weight ahead of winter hibernation.
The competition gained extra notoriety, and publicity, last year when a ballot-stuffing “scandal” saw 9,000 allegedly fraudulent votes cast, then discounted, for a giant former champion known as Holly.
On Tuesday, however, when the hiker was spotted on the Dumpling Mountain camera, only a handful of viewers were online, making the sighting even more remarkable. On Saturday, when the Guardian checked the camera, only 19 people were watching the live feed.
No information about who the rescued hiker is, or how he found himself lost, were immediately available, although Explore.org promised in its tweet that more details were to come. The hiker was found close to the camera, although it is unknown if he was able to hear a message sent by authorities to the camera’s loudspeaker advising him to stay in place.
“That was a first for the bear cams for sure,” Mike Fitz, an Explore naturalist and founder of Fat Bear Week, told the Post.
“The weather up there was really poor that day, about 50ft visibility. And the weather on top of the mountain is often much, much worse than what you find across the river.”
