LaVern Beier

LaVern Beier with beaver pelts in 1979.

In 1970 I was 17, and I thought I was on my way to Vietnam. I wanted to see Southeast Alaska before Southeast Asia. So I saved up $262 and bought a standby ticket to Petersburg, to visit my sister and brother-in-law. After that visit, I planned to join the Navy before I turned 18 and got drafted. I had a lot of friends who went to Vietnam and came back not in one piece, or not at all.
About a week after I got to Petersburg, we flew to the Unuk River in a Super Cub to go moose hunting, and Bruce Johnstone was there, on crutches. We got a moose, and everyone had to go back to work except Bruce and I. I had read about Bruce before I met him and I thought he was older than dirt because he was such a legend.
Bruce was born in 1909. He was the only man alive who had survived an attack from three brown bears at one time. In 1935, a bear known as Old Groaner stalked him and his brother. And Brucejack Mine on Sulfide Creek is named for him and his brother.
Bruce had continuous stories about growing up in Misty Fjords. He guided rich and famous people in the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s all over Southeast Alaska. He guided with Allen Hasselborg. It was like being with someone from the past.
He wanted to go trapping again. In hindsight, he really wanted to prove to his friends and family that he could still do the all-day Alaska stuff that he used to do. But he was on crutches, so he needed someone to look out for him and do the muscle work. And he discovered I was trainable and I was a pretty decent cook.
Walter Cronkite used to have a Vietnam body count every night. We tuned in religiously. It gave you some kind of a meter for how the war was going. The body count was going down, so a combination of that and spending about 10 days with Bruce, he kind of brainwashed me to think — maybe I won’t join the Navy. Maybe when I go back to town I’ll gamble on my draft card number. So we tentatively agreed we were going to go trapping together next spring.
When my birthday came around — November 8 — my draft number was 260. So Bruce and I decided to go trapping in March 1971.
The winter of 1970, I got a job at Bell Island as a caretaker. It’s defunct now, but it used to be one of the nicest fishing resorts around Ketchikan. David White caught the world record steelhead on its way out the Unuk when he was fishing out at Bell Island. It weighed 42 pounds. It was so gigantic that at the time, they thought it was a king salmon.
At the end of March, around breakup, Bruce flew into Bell Island and we flew out to the Unuk. We did beaver trapping, primarily. I grew up on a game farm in Wisconsin. I was almost an orphan — my mother died when I was four, so I took care of myself from five. Growing up, we did a lot of hunting and trapping with hounds. That whole world on the Unuk was not much different.
But Bruce was Mr. Alaska, on crutches. He was one of those people that never complained. Even as an older man, he was probably 6’2. Very charismatic and distinguished looking. During that time period we would go weeks, if not months, without seeing another person. He wore knee pads. And I remember seeing Bruce kneeling on his knee pads, falling a great big 30" diameter tree for firewood. He was just a mountain man kind of guy.
There are lots of comical stories about Bruce. I used to go down to the water every morning to wash up. He’d cringe. He'd claim water made you sick. I never saw him brush his teeth. He had beaver teeth. But he had such deep history there in the Unuk. On the Hooligan River there, where we were based out of, he had his first guiding trip in 1921, guiding a goat hunter. It’s just amazing to talk to someone that can talk in that kind of time period.
When Bruce and I were trapping together in 1973, about halfway in between Cripple Creek and the mouth of the river was where I had to shoot my first brown bear in self defense. I’ve had to shoot five. As it turned out, the bear and I were the same age. About 20. Now I’ve captured over a thousand bears.
I was up on Cripple Creek in 2006, footsnaring and collaring brown bears, the day that Bruce died. He was 97.

—LaVern Beier, Unuk River land & cabin owner, trapper, hunter & retired ADF&G bear researcher


Photo credit: On "The people" page, LaVern Beier with two sleeping brown bears, tagged for Alaska Department of Fish & Game research, in the Unuk watershed.