Idaho family survives angry moose attack

SALT LAKE CITY — An Idaho family is counting their lucky stars after being attacked by a moose while snowmobiling in the Palisades, east of Idaho Falls, on Wednesday.

“We were headed to some hot springs and my brother got ahead of us and a moose stepped onto the trail,” said Jeremiah Bigelow.

With his brother about 100 yards ahead of him on one side of the moose, Bigelow worried about his son and the two others positioned behind him.

“The moose was trapped. We were trapped. We couldn’t get off the trail. The snow is four to five feet deep up there,” he said.

In the video shared on his Facebook page, the moose begins to lick its lips before stepping towards Jeremiah.

“She drops her head and just charges right at us. And I said, ‘Oh shoot.’ And I couldn’t do anything, and I had my boy right behind me, and it stopped about 20 feet from us and just did a false charge.”

The moose then turned its attention to Jeremiah’s brother, who was trying to get its attention because he had the best path forward.

“You can see on the video, he gets up on his sled and tries to make himself look big, hoping it will be a false charge, and the machine is running at this point, and so he sits down and hits the gas and the snow machine died,” he said.

As the moose begins to charge towards Jeremiah’s brother, he has only seconds to react.

“He looks back over his shoulder for just a second and realizes it’s right there and jumps off, and as he jumps off, it hits the snow machine right on,” Jeremiah said.

 

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Shocked but uninjured, Jeremiah’s brother scrambles back to his sled, only to be met eye to eye with the moose again.

“The moose lies on the ground for a minute, stunned. My brother goes back on the sled, and then it stands up, and you can see in the video for a second, they have this little old fashioned western standoff where they are staring at each other.”

As the moose turns and starts down the trail, he’s surprisingly uninjured and unfazed from landing on the snowmobile. The Bigelow brothers on the other hand were left shocked by the encounter.

“It could have killed him. The amount of weight that came down on those handlebars, it pushed the handle bars all the way forward, and so it would have been pretty catastrophic.”