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In the wee hours following Monday night, the Dinghy food truck in Kodiak received an unexpected visitor looking for one of its enormous grilled cheese sandwiches. The patron stood at six feet tall at the shoulder, was covered in brown fur, and managed to collapse the food truck’s stairs.
Kristyn Kenney manages the Dinghy food truck on Mill Bay Road. She said her phone rang on Tuesday.
“I got a phone call really early yesterday morning and said that there was some presumed bear activity. A trash can not too far had gotten broken too. And whenever we went to check on stuff, our power cord had been ripped out from the side of the Dinghy and had messed up our door frame, and there were big claw marks and nose marks and mud all over the side,” Kenney said.
The Dinghy needed two days’ worth of repair before reopening on Thursday. The bear didn’t manage to get its sandwich but it did keep the food cart out of commission all day Wednesday while it was being fixed.
“It kind of looks like he may have got a little bit of a shock whenever he grabbed ahold of it and pulled the cord out of the side of the power box. And so it looks like after that he left, so he did not manage to get in- just a little bit of damage to the doorframe, too, so nothing too terrible,” Kenney said.
The Dinghy doesn’t have any security camera footage of the event, but Kenney is convinced it was a bear from the claw marks, nose prints, and overturned trash nearby.
“There’s been a lot of comments on our Facebook posts since we were closed today and saying we ought to name a burger after him. So we may have to do that,” Kenney said.
Kodiak Police Department didn’t have any further information about the bear, but did confirm that they had received reports of a bear sighted on Mill Bay Road in the early hours of Tuesday morning.