The images with a skier chased by a bear on a ski slope in Predeal mountain resort in Romania last weekend have gone viral on social media, but were also featured in the foreign media.
During the chase, the others on the ski slope tried to distract the bear by whistling and screaming but the skier was saved by his own ingenious maneuver.
“He did a pretty cool move, which is a really safe one when you want to get away from the bear. He dropped his bag off, and, well, the bear was dragged towards the bag,” Angel Somicu, an eyewitness who had spotted the bear an hour earlier along with another skier, Daniel Jenei, told ABC News.
“Go on, go faster, faster! Come on, the bear is chasing you! Fore Heaven’s sake don’t look back!“, people in the ski lift who saw the bear used to shout to the skier.
“Ski patrol stopped us told us there was a bear at the bottom of the slope,” Jenei said. “All the people that were down there threw their skis down and ran from the slope,” the eyewitness recounted.
The spokesperson of the County Gendarmerie Inspectorate, Ion Zaharia told Digi24 that the tourist did the right thing to throw away his bag, as the bear became concerned to examine the bag ad stopped chasing him.
According to the mountain rescuers, three calls were made to 112 on Saturday, January 23 to warn over the presence of a bear in the area. Two calls pointed to Clabucet ski slope, and another one indicated precisely the ski slope where the tourist had been chased by the wild animal. It seemed though that ski slope was closed down.
It is not the first time that bears are seen on the Clabucet ski slope. A bear cub was filmed two weeks ago while crossing an area full of tourists near the ski lift.
Usually, bears should be hibernating this time of the year, but they are seen more and more often in the Romanians mountain resorts. Specialists explain that bears have no reasons anymore to hibernate during the winter, as long as they find food all near human settlements.