Mary Byrne
Danny Rizzo was two miles from finishing his run last week when an unexpected visitor joined him on the trail.
“I was … running down from this lake … and looking at the trail in front of me, and I heard bear noises off to my right,” he recalled. “I turn my head, and there’s a bear running directly at me, probably 20 feet away. [It was] a full-grown black bear.”
Rizzo, a Belmont High School graduate who now lives in Utah, was running on the Mill D North Fork Trail in the area of Big Cottonwood Canyon when he stopped in his tracks. He knew he couldn’t outrun the bear.
“I tried to stand tall, wave my hands, make myself big, and yell to scare it off,” he said. “I’m not a bear expert, but I know the rhyme: black, fight back; brown, lay down; and white, goodnight.”
Still, the bear started “bluff charging” at him, according to Rizzo. Then the bear did start to approach him and instinctively, Rizzo began backing up.
“I tripped over something and fell on my back, so the bear came up over me, and it got my arm in its mouth,” he said. “I pulled it out and kicked it in the head with the bottom of my shoe. It shook its head and ran off.”
Rizzo ran down the trail to alert other trail users that he’d been bitten by a bear and then drove himself to the hospital for rabies shots.
“All things considered, I was not very injured,” he said. “I have one puncture wound from a tooth and a bunch of bruising. Overall … I got pretty lucky.”
The 27-year-old said he doesn’t really recall what he was thinking at the moment he turned around and saw the black bear staring back at him.
“I don’t know if there was a coherent thought,” he said. “It was disbelief at first.”
According to a statement from the Utah Department of Natural Resources: Division of Wildlife Resources, DWR conservation officers and biologists responded to the trail and worked with tracking hounds to locate the bear. The bear was located around 9:45 p.m. that same day. Because the bear had shown aggressive behavior and injured a person, it was euthanized, per policy.
Rizzo, who is training for the Chicago Marathon, said while he’s already back to his training, he’s sticking to roads and bike paths for now. On Sunday, he was running when a labradoodle jumped out, startling him.
“I’ve been a little bit jumpy,” he said.
According to the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, residents who come into contact with a black bear should “make noise by banging pots and pans, shouting, or using an air horn to try to scare the bear off.”
He wouldn’t call himself an expert, but Rizzo said he felt good about how he chose to respond in the moment.
“The Division of Wildlife Resources, they said I did a pretty good job,” he said. “I’ve seen varying assessments online on how my response was, but if those guys say I did a decent job, then I’m OK with that.”