After a Bear Attack That Nearly Killed Her, Petra Davis is Reclaiming Her life as a Teenage Athlete

Petra Davis had finished the hardest part of her middle-of-the-night lap in last year’s 24-hour mountain bike race on the Anchorage Hillside. After grinding through the twisting, root-covered Llama trail, she descended Spencer Loop and got ready to turn on the speed. Eager to cover the last couple of miles before tagging off to one of her relay partners, she made a sharp right turn, carved down a winding, forested path and entered a grass-covered clearing next to Campbell Creek. In the semi-darkness of that June night—about 1 a.m.—she stole a glance at the water before pedaling hard into the brush and trees at the entrance to Rover’s Run trail. No one knows exactly what happened next. And that’s probably for the best. “It’s like I don’t really want to remember, and it’s kind of a blessing that I don’t, but I really want to know, like, was I knocked unconscious and for how long?” Petra would say months later. “And then what happened?” As she regained consciousness and dragged herself from the weeds, gushing blood and gasping for air, Petra knew this wasn’t just a bike crash. Less than a month before her 16th birthday, she had suffered something few people ever face: She had been mauled by a brown bear. Within minutes, Pete Basinger, a solo racer and veteran of multiple mountain-bike endurance events, pedaled into Rover’s. As he crested a small rise at the edge of the forest, he saw a young woman sitting on the trail about 10 feet away, her back turned toward him. He stopped to ask if she was OK.
She looked over her shoulder at him and, barely able to breathe through a shattered larynx, forced out a loud whisper—“Bear!”

Pete’s actions in the next few minutes would prompt many people to call him a hero, but he didn’t feel like one.
“It was terrifying, and she’s just, like, covered in blood,” Basinger said. He tossed his bike off the trail and went to the girl. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh, shit! What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do?’ (Do I) go get help, or do I stay with her? Then I’m thinking, ‘Oh, dude, there’s a bear here.’”
In the dim light of the forest, and with blood covering her face and body, Pete didn’t recognize Petra, even though he had known her for years, having served first as her ski coach and later as her mountain bike coach. All Pete knew was that she was clinging to him, making sure he wouldn’t leave.
Petra pressed her cellular phone against him. She had called 9-1-1, but hadn’t been able to speak to the dispatcher. Pete, then 27, had never owned a cell phone and he wasn’t sure how to unlock the blood-covered keypad. They had to work together.
Petra unlocked the keypad, but Pete’s first 9-1-1 call couldn’t connect, and she had to unlock it for him again. Another call failed. Pete began to think about the bear, and the angle of the girl’s head when he found her—had it been a gesture?
“For whatever reason, I got it in my head that she was indicating ‘the bear’s that way,’ or ‘don’t go that way.’”
Though he knew it was inadvisable to move an injured person, Pete felt an overwhelming need to be somewhere else. He lifted her from the ground, carried her a short distance down the trail and laid her down. That’s when the severity of her wounds began to hit him.
“I remember being surprised at how wet I was from picking her up,” Pete said. “Like, ‘Oh shit, there’s a lot of blood.’ … All I have is my bike shorts, my jersey and a long underwear shirt, so I don’t really have anything to stop bleeding or anything, and I can’t really see anything because it’s dark. … I just know she’s soaking with blood.”
Pete managed to call race director Greg Matyas and report that a young woman had been badly mauled, then he returned his attention to the bloody girl he was beginning to recognize as Petra.
With his only light still attached to the bike he had tossed into the brush, Basinger couldn’t see well enough to distinguish one wound from another. He had no first-aid gear, no clean cloths—even applying direct pressure to stop bleeding seemed impossible, because Petra appeared to be bleeding everywhere. His only tool was her phone, and it was ringing.
The 9-1-1 dispatcher was calling back, but the Anchorage Fire Department was unfamiliar with the names of trails and access points in Far North Bicentennial Park, a 4,000-acre spread of forest, creeks and trails adjacent to Chugach State Park and surrounded on three sides by Anchorage neighborhoods. For the next 23 minutes Pete managed to describe the situation, direct trucks to the scene, and comfort Petra.
The dispatcher started going through her usual emergency call routine, asking for information about Petra’s injuries and suggesting basic first-aid steps. Pete found himself trying to reassure Petra while describing the severity of her wounds.
“It looks like she’s got this huge gouge in her face, and she’s bleeding everywhere,” Pete said. “And I’m like, ‘Petra you’re doing great. Doing great.’ And then I’m telling the lady on the phone how bad she is.”

Matyas, the race director, showed up roughly 15 minutes later with an off-duty emergency medical technician who had been at the race staging area. After driving at speeds as high as 90 mph, they had pulled up to a trailhead off Campbell Airstrip Road in the heart of the park, and then ridden their bikes to find Pete and Petra.
With only a basic first-aid kit, there was little they could do. Matyas’ headlamp illuminated Petra’s wounds, and what they saw stunned the three men.
“As I’m looking at her I’m realizing, ‘Wow, she’s just like, torn to shit.’” Pete said. “She’s shredded. It looked to me like her face was just torn off.”
After fire department medics—led by police officers with shotguns—reached the scene a few minutes later, Petra was carried by stretcher half a mile to an ambulance. En route to the hospital, she lost consciousness and stopped breathing. When she reached Providence Alaska Medical Center, doctors worked their way through the damage:
The layers of Petra’s carotid artery—the major artery carrying blood to the brain—had separated, and blood was pulsing into the lining of the artery, further tearing the layers and causing an aneurysm that threatened to cause a stroke. If the artery ruptured, she would bleed out and die.
Her larynx was fractured into as many as 27 pieces, an injury believed to have been caused by a chinstrap as the bear ripped her helmet off her head.
“It was horrible,” said Dr. B.J. Coopes, who would coordinate much of Petra’s care in the weeks after the mauling. “It just fragmented her voice box. … She could barely breathe just because her larynx was crushed. And I mean just little pieces of bone left.”
A claw wound in her chest had punctured her lung cavity—a classic sucking chest wound.
“That’s another reason she couldn’t talk,” Coopes said. “Because every time she took a breath in, it couldn’t go through her trachea and into her lung, instead it sucked through the hole in her chest wall and went around the lung, collapsing it like a deflated balloon.
“She could have died from any one of these three injuries.”
Though not life-threatening, her other wounds were significant: a concussion, eight broken ribs, a raking claw wound up one leg, and severe bite wounds that had torn muscle from her buttocks and right shoulder.
“You have to understand, there’s no book. There’s no education on how to take care of bear maulings or animal attacks,” said Coopes, who helped assemble and coordinate a team of at least a dozen physicians to repair all the damage. “There’s nothing written, there’s no standard of care, because they’re all so unique and different you don’t know what the hell is gonna happen.”

On a cold afternoon in January, Petra sits at her family’s dinner table in their home on a quiet street in South Anchorage. The orange glow of sunset streams through the window behind her, highlighting her blond hair as she and her parents tell her story. A subtle scar near the left side of her mouth is the only visible reminder of the violent trauma she survived seven months earlier.
Now 16 years old, Petra is back to being an athlete and excited about being a captain on her junior varsity Nordic ski team at South Anchorage High School. Discussing her experience appears to be easy for her. Whether it’s amnesia from her concussion, or a natural defense mechanism that allows the mind to block traumatic events, she has no memory of the bear.
“I shot into Rover’s, and I think the bear came at me from that way (her right) because most of my serious injuries are on this side. … And I knew I couldn’t stand because I tried, and I couldn’t,” Petra said. “It was just like my body was tired or something. And so I crawled back to the trail and I called 9-1-1 and I remember it being really frustrating that I could not communicate to the dispatcher what was wrong, or where I was, what had happened.”
When Pete found her, “I was glad it was Peter, but I was more relieved that, OK, it’s someone, and he’s experienced and he knows where he is, not just some random rider that doesn’t know anything.
“The only pain I remember from that night—that hurt so bad—was when he picked me up, and I didn’t know why he was doing it. And I guess I didn’t realize that he, like, wants to get me out of immediate danger or move me back to the race course, but it hurt really bad. I think it was my ribs that hurt.”

Petra’s parents, mountain bikers themselves, had spent the day riding on the Kenai Peninsula, delivering food to Petra’s race team about 11:30 p.m. and then going home to bed. Mark Davis had set an alarm so he could get up and ride with his daughter during the lap they believed would be darkest, in the wee hours of morning. He and his wife, Darcy, awoke to the ringing of a phone when one of Petra’s teammates called to say something had happened on the course and that Petra was overdue from her lap. Word of an incident involving a bear was circulating, and another girl’s father was driving to find Petra and give her a ride back to the team campsite if she had left the course. It wasn’t until Mark Davis reached the race staging area that he was told his daughter had been attacked. He called his wife, and they met at Providence minutes before the ambulance pulled in.
“That was pretty intense,” Mark said. “She wasn’t covered up. We could see all the wounds. … She looked bad.”
“You know,” Darcy Davis said, “my overwhelming impression was how dirty Petra was. … She was just covered in mud, and then I saw these big, gaping holes on her back that were just bright red purple. … I knew that I was looking at puncture wounds, but it was just, like, ‘Oh my god, my daughter’s just been …” Darcy paused as she recalled the scene at the hospital. “That was just too much for me.”
Friends stayed with them through the night as they waited for Petra to come out of surgery. She would remain sedated for days. They were told she would be hospitalized for six to eight weeks and would likely be unable to speak during that time.
When she regained consciousness, “that was probably the worst couple weeks of my life,” Petra said. “Especially when I started getting a lot better, it was very frustrating that I couldn’t communicate very well. No one knew, really, that I had nerve damage in my leg until I could tell them.”
Her life became a routine of reconstructive surgeries and being sedated for a couple of hours each day during wound cleanings and bandage changes. A healthy attitude and sense of humor became weapons in her recovery. When Pete arrived for a visit shortly after Petra regained consciousness, it was the first time she’d seen him since the paramedics had carried her away, and though she couldn’t speak, she was ready.
“Pete walks in the room and I’m super emotional,” Darcy said. “Petra didn’t seem emotional at all when she saw Peter, you know. I could barely talk, I had this thing in my throat. And she grabs the dry-erase board—and I’m thinking, this is the man that saved my daughter’s life, you know? She’s gonna write, ‘Peter, you’re the best,’ or ‘Thank you.’”
Petra turned her note toward him: “Did you win?”
Pete gently explained that the race had been canceled after the attack.
For a teenager who has been athletic since childhood, being bed-ridden was frustrating. When physical therapy began for her shoulder and leg, she looked forward to each session.
“I actually really enjoyed physical therapy,” she said. “It was hard, but was kind of like my workout, and so I liked that. I had been lacking endorphins for so long I wasn’t feeling good.”
Coopes said attitude and athleticism played a large role in Petra’s recovery. Instead of going home from the hospital in six or eight weeks, she went home after 21 days.
“I just don’t see kids that bounce back this quickly, and I really give credit to her physical fitness and her prowess,” Coopes said. “She’s an incredible human being. And brave. I mean, just incredibly, incredibly brave.”
As her wounds healed, Petra worked to rebuild balance, strength and flexibility during months of physical therapy. The rotator cuff in her right shoulder
remained damaged and the nerves in her leg had not healed well enough to allow pain-free running, but she was skiing and riding her bike on an indoor training stand.
The muscle tissue she lost cannot be restored, but a special bandage that
applied negative pressure during the healing process encouraged scar tissue to fill the void, restoring a normal shape to her shoulder and arm. The discolored wound on her face has faded, leaving only the subtle scar that she can have
removed later, if she chooses. Most of what remains are questions. What really happened that night? And how will she return to the woods, knowing what she endured?

Petra and her family have tried to reconstruct what happened, and why. One scenario is that she simply collided with the bear and it responded defensively.
“That’s the only logical thing I can come up with,” Petra said. “Or (maybe) it was a bear with cubs.”
A brown bear sow with two cubs behaved aggressively during several encounters with runners and other trail users in the same area last summer— and was later destroyed as a result—but its DNA did not match samples taken from Petra’s helmet in June. Other bears in the park were captured and tagged throughout the summer as part of regular research by biologists, and no DNA match was ever found.
Petra Davis’ mauling is a case with no motive or suspect. And no crime.
The Davis family believes that, whatever occurred, the bear felt threatened and reacted naturally. They hold no animosity toward it, but they favor reducing the city’s bear population as a matter of safety. They are among many Anchorage residents who think bear numbers have increased in recent years because a plentiful population of brown bears in nearby Chugach State Park is spilling into the city. Petra was hurt at night, but scary bear encounters in Far North Bicentennial Park have occurred at a variety of times, day and night.
Petra’s mauling led city and state officials to begin discussing a wide range of new bear-management strategies. By midwinter, they were still debating a seasonal closure of Rover’s Run and increased hunting in nearby Chugach State Park. They also planned a public-awareness campaign to make trail users more aware of bear dangers.
Rick Sinnott, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist who handles most calls about troublesome wildlife in Anchorage, doubts bear numbers are higher than they used to be. No one can be sure, he said, because no comprehensive study of Anchorage’s bear population has ever been done.
“We just know there’s lots of brown bears,” he said.
“What I think is happening is there’s a lot more people living near where bears live. There’s a lot more people using the park—mountain biking, jogging, etc.”
Many Anchorage bears have become tolerant of people, Sinnott added, and that leads to more close-range encounters.
Sinnott called Petra’s scenario classic. It was fairly dark and quite windy that night, making it harder for Petra and the bear to see or hear each other. And Petra was riding fast in an area where she couldn’t see far ahead.
If she didn’t run into the bear, Sinnott believes, she must have come close to doing so. “It obviously felt some threat from her.”

The day after of Petra’s incident, bear-warning signs were posted at Hillside trailheads and information kiosks. Tape blocked the entrance to Rover’s Run, making it look like a crime scene. And a shockwave rippled across the city: For the first time, a person had been mauled in the heart of the state’s largest urban area.
The popular Hillside trail network became a virtual ghost town for most of the summer. The city closed Rover’s, and people who had hiked, biked, jogged and walked their dogs in the area for years stayed away. Some pointed fingers and tried to place blame. Why was a bike race held at night in bear country? Why were teenagers allowed to participate? Who let this happen?
The Davises, though, never looked for anyone to blame. Race director Matyas saw that while Petra was still in surgery.
“I’ve probably gotten the best support of all from that family,” he said. “I mean, I’m at the hospital that morning at whatever time—five in the morning—and Mark is asking am I OK? Unbelievable. No one could have handled (what happened) any better than they did, Petra included.”
The 24-hour race had been staged on the Hillside three times in the past without incident. The race had the proper permits, and city officials had approved the course, but Matyas found himself defending the event.
“There was quite a bit of Monday-morning quarterbacking going on, but at the same time, the entire outdoor community rallied and said ‘You know, this is what we do. We go up and use the parks and we understand that there are risks,’” Matyas said.
“With the daylight that we have, we use those trails at midnight in the summer. Many times we’ll be out in the park on a long ride. We all know that the bears are there. I’ve been using Rover’s Run for
about 30 years now, and I’ve still yet to see a bear there.”
Sinnott, the biologist, believes the risk, though small, is significant. Although he said he believes a mountain biker is in more danger while driving to a race than participating in one, he questioned the idea of racing at night in places with dangerous wildlife. Given the numbers of bear and moose, he said, “maybe it’s not a good idea to have a 24-hour race anywhere in Anchorage.”
Coopes, Petra’s doctor, believes such events should continue, and that young people should be involved.
“It’s stupid for people to say it’s inappropriate,” she said.
“I make a living out of kids that are drinking alcohol, getting in car accidents, getting in ATV accidents, snowmachine accidents, trying to commit suicide—I mean, I see many more things from kids who aren’t biking. The risk of a bear mauling is so miniscule compared to the risk of dying in a car accident on the way to the Dairy Queen.”
Over the winter, Matyas continued making plans to hold the race again this summer at another location. He doubted city officials would be willing to grant a permit for the same course, anyway.

In the aftermath of the bear attack, Pete Basinger, who grew up in Anchorage, received wide admiration from the community for his handling of the incident. He had already started spending most of his time in the Lower 48, and two weeks after the race he went south again for the rest of the summer. An accomplished veteran of multiple endurance races in remote wilderness, he went out on his mountain bike only two more times before leaving town, each time with company and carrying bear spray—both unusual for him.
“I didn’t sleep too well for two or three weeks after this happened. It took me a little while to kind of get over it. I feel stupid because of that, because I’m like, man, Petra’s the one who got mauled by the bear,” he said. “She’s the one who got injured.”
Petra Davis worked on getting back to normal life: physical therapy, regaining her strength, returning to high school for her junior year and enjoying the ski season.
“My strength isn’t where it will be,” she said. “But given some hard training, it should be back to where it was.”
As for dealing with the psychological trauma, she said, so far, so good.
“That was one of the things I was worried about when I was still hurt, that … I wouldn’t be able to ride and always be looking over my shoulder. I’ve been back to Rover’s and stuff, and that’s been fine, and skiing is fine. I see moose and it’s no different than when I saw moose before.”
During a Labor Day trip to Valdez with her parents and younger brother, Keifer, Petra hesitated when the family entered a forest for a hike. It felt unnatural, unsafe.
“It was weird,” she said. “It’s gotten better though, I think.”

When frost covered the ground last fall, Petra’s parents took her back to the scene of the attack. They knew her ski team would pass by there in the coming winter, and they wanted Petra to see it on her own first. Plus, they all wanted to try to reconstruct the event, so much of which remains a mystery. They ran into Matyas a bit farther down the trail, and he took them back and described what he saw, and where he saw it.
“It was pretty cool, because he told us, and we went back there and checked it out again,” Petra’s mom, Darcy, said. “I continue to puzzle over exactly what happened, and we’ll never know. Actually, I think about it a lot less than I used to.”
“Me, too,” Petra added.
What about 24-hour racing?
“Probably not next year,” Petra said in January. “I really enjoy 24-hour races and I hope I’m not limited by that, but … I’d love to volunteer next year if they have it! I’ll help out and …”
“Not as the one standing out there in the dark, though?” Darcy teased.
“No!” Petra emphasized with a smile.
Most people consider a bear mauling a life-changing event, but Petra’s still sorting that out and keeping it in perspective.
“It’s a huge something that happened,” she said. “But I hope to think of it as just that, just something that happened, not like, ‘I’m Petra Davis, the girl that got mauled by a bear.’”