Shelley Hughes campaign: Lieutenant Governor Candidate Blake Gettys' Testimony and Story

My name is Blake Gettys. I've been in Alaska since '94. I separated from the active duty Air Force after 10 and a half years, and I knew if I ever got to Alaska, this is a place I would probably stay. And here I am 25 years later.

Well, we start over here in the trail and I'll walk you towards the cabin and it kind of opens up.

This is the original cabin. I put a new floor in it, jacked it up, new stove, new plumbing, and this is what we used, uh, probably the first thing I did was tore down the old outhouse and built a new outhouse, and it took about 14 years to build it the way it is now. I like to build, you can tell, but I also like to disconnect. This is off the grid. There's no television sets, there's no computers.

2012, A friend of mine came down just to get stuff ready for the trapping season, opens up November, and we took the boat upriver and to an area that we had planned on trapping in, and that's when I had my accident.

So I had set up my snares in this area, and I was just walking back, and I got to right about here, and I hear the, uh, a brown bear wolfed at me. And I turned, and the bear was on the other side of this stuff. I could see the toe profile, and it looked like a great big male. So I got squared up with it, got my arms up, and I just yelled, yelled at it so it knew I was human. And it paused And then it faced me, and then it came up off the ground on its hind legs, put its head back and gave a big roar.

And then it hit the ground and started coming. The bear turned that corner, came off the ground. I jumped and came off my left foot and stepped inside. A big brown blur shot past me. As it went by, the bear rotated and reached behind with its far arm and hooked my left thigh.

But what doesn't make any sense was the claw, it started from the front and ripped back. It came out and jumped over top of my artery and vein, reinserted, and finished cutting around the back. Had it gone right through, I would have been dead probably in 15 seconds. And then I was on the ground. So I sat up right into the mouth of the bear and my entire head in its mouth.

The top canines were on the back of my head and the bottom teeth had me hooked underneath the jaw and I couldn't get my head out of the mouth. Finally, it relaxed the bite enough that I was able to pull my head out. Just as I did that, uh, the, uh, canines came down and cut through my forehead and took my nose off and ripped this open. And I thought I lost that eye because when that flap came down, it filled that eye with blood. I could still see out of the left.

I couldn't see out of my right eye.

And it kept working on me, and I'm getting lower and lower until I'm all the way on my back. The bear bites my left— or my right knee, so much pressure that it shattered my fibula. And then it just explodes off the ground and gives me a double chest bump on my sternum. Didn't break anything, and that winded me, and I had nothing left in the tank. The bear got really close, just inches from my face, and just stared at me.

I didn't move, and it turned and walked in that direction. The whole ordeal lasted not more than probably 2 minutes.

The result of that being my left quadricep was severed down to the femur, my right fibula was fractured, significant wounds in my face, my nose was almost removed and hanging by the right nostril, and then other scars just throughout my body. I had to walk out of that with the help of my friend and was— made it to an ambulance and then was life-flighted from Central Peninsula Hospital up to Anchorage.

I'm just thinking about Kathleen. I dated her from my sophomore year in high school all through my college years at the Air Force Academy, got married soon after. She was president of the Alaska Nurses Association. She had some work injuries that caused her health to deteriorate pretty rapidly, to the point that she didn't get out of the house much. Her blood pressure would drop all the time, and I had to go shopping, go grocery shopping and do some other stuff.

And— When I got home, so I came in the door, I said something to her and there was no response. And I carried groceries upstairs and I saw her, she was not conscious. She had passed out before and had other issues and I had revived her a few times in the previous couple years. And I worked on her for a while and and called 911. And the responding paramedic turns out to be a friend of mine.

Eric helped me work on her for a little bit, and he— he finally said, "Believe she's gone." One week later, then I had— my mom was in town and my friends were kind of surrounding me to keep an eye on me after Kathleen had passed and came down to the cabin to just get some quiet time. While we were down here, the Funny River Fire was getting closer and closer to the point that it took action. In southern Alaska today, a wind-whipped fire has burned nearly 250 square miles in the Kenai Peninsula. CNN reports officials have now ordered evacuations of 1,000 structures in the area after authorities worried about the safety of people traveling for the Memorial Day weekend. So I had friends bringing pumps down, and I was saturating the ground pretty well.

And I talked to— and we'd fly, we'd go up and fly and look at it and see where it's coming.

So we were flooding the back, the fire was coming from the south, flooding the back area, and we were working on it for a few days, and the fire's getting closer. I was backcutting, and you could hear this roaring, like an airplane roaring, that jet engine sound. And you could look up and you could see just a wall of black.

So a friend of mine, I said, "Can you go down the trail and see how close this is?" And he was gone for about 5 minutes and he came running back and he said, "We have to go." I didn't think there was any chance at all this was going to survive. It was just all-consuming. And where we stood on the far bank, you could watch it. It was as if the flames were determined to hit this particular piece of property.

And at this point I'm thinking, it's gone and it's tough, but it was just one more loss.

We came and there were fires, small fires burning around inside the perimeter. Everything outside was gone. At the end, there was not one structure that was even singed. Nothing. This is about where the flames stopped.

And you can see this side of the tree is untouched. There's no char or anything, and the fire came from that direction. And if you look to the other side, it's just incinerated, like if somebody had a blowtorch on it. And then for 26 miles, everything is gone. It's incredible.

It might seem counterintuitive, but the fire actually kind of renewed my faith. That's essentially a rebirth in that I want to be a better man than I was in the past. I'm remarried and have a wonderful relationship. And not to dwell on things in the past that I can't change, but the wake-up of, look at everything that you still do have in front of you and do appreciate that. That was the catalyst for renewing my faith.