A day after Tuesday's bear mauling in a popular Anchorage hiking area, officials said they do not yet have enough information about the incident to search for the animal.

"At this point it would absolutely be a needle in a haystack," said Cynthia Wardlow with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game's Division of Wildlife Conservation.

According to the Anchorage Police Department, the victim is a 67-year-old woman who is in stable condition after she was rescued with a helicopter Tuesday and brought to a hospital.

"She sustained injuries to her head, neck and arm," APD spokesman Christopher Barraza wrote in an email Wednesday.

Barraza said the victim, whom they declined to identify, was hiking alone on the Dome Trail near the Basher neighborhood when the attack happened and was dragged by the animal off the trail. She was able to call 911 for help but was too injured to get herself back out to a trailhead, according to Barraza.

Personnel from several local emergency response agencies were involved in Tuesday's rescue. According to Barraza, officials had trouble locating the hiker, and ultimately used a police drone to search for her before personnel from the Alaska State Troopers flew in by helicopter to hoist her out.

Wardlow said that investigators with Fish and Game had not yet interviewed the victim and had little information to use to locate the bear involved. They recovered material around the area where the attack happened, about 2 miles back into the mountains from the nearest trailhead, that they will send off for testing.

Though police on Tuesday identified the bear as a brown bear, Fish and Game said Wednesday that the agency wasn't sure yet of the bear's species.

"We were able to gather some samples, both hair and scat that will be analyzed through genetics," Wardlow said. "From that we will try to determine the species ... we need some more information before we can say if it was a brown bear or black bear involved in the attack."

The testing, which will take around two weeks, will also determine if that animal was male or female. Wardlow said Fish and Game personnel examining the area did not find any obvious bear attractants like a food cache, and the area sits around 1,500 feet above a salmon run in Campbell Creek.

The incident happened near Basher and Stuckagain Heights, where heavily wooded parts of the Anchorage Hillside give way to some of the most popular hiking trails in Chugach State Park. By 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, emergency responders cleared the staging area, according to the Anchorage Fire Department, about three hours after the hiker first reported the attack.

Bear attacks in the Chugach Mountains surrounding Anchorage are uncommon but occur from time to time, usually involving brown bears.

In 2018, a hiker was killed and a member of the search party looking for him was later mauled by a bear far back in the South Fork Eagle River Valley. The prior summer, a 16-year-old participating in a mountain run up Bird Ridge along Turnagain Arm was killed by a black bear.

Elsewhere in the Anchorage area, a U.S. Army staff sergeant participating in a 2022 training exercise in a remote part of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson was killed by a brown bear sow.

After a bear attack is reported and investigated by Fish and Game, the department decides whether the animal poses a threat to public safety. In some cases, the department will then try to dispatch the predator, though that determination is made "case by case," according to Wardlow.

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