Timothy Treadwell was the sort of guy most Alaskans loved to hate. For starters, Treadwell was an outsider, a Californian from the weird-wacky end of the scale, a guy sporting a shock of blond hair and a backward baseball cap, with the outdoors skills you’d expect of a former Malibu cocktail waiter. Then there was the way Treadwell acted around bears. Lots of Alaskans would like to get a bear in their rifle sights; Treadwell sang and read to the grizzlies on the rugged Katmai Coast, and gave them names like Thumper, Mr. Chocolate, and Squiggle. He would walk up to a half-ton wild animal with four-inch claws and two-inch fangs, and say, “Czar, I’m so worried! I can’t find little Booble.” In Alaska, that kind of behavior makes a man stand out—and not in a good way.
Treadwell had been a fixture along the Katmai Coast for 13 years, camping out each spring and summer, alone, in the heart of bear country, deliberately seeking out the animals. He told the story of how this came about in his book,
Among Grizzlies. By Treadwell’s account, he was born into a middle-class family on Long Island, New York. He wasn’t really a bad kid, but a handful. All along, he sensed a kinship with animals; he “donned imaginary wings, claws, and fangs.” As an adolescent, he did more than his share of drinking, wrecked the family car, and managed to get arrested. After high school, he left home for California, where he became “an overactive street punk without any skills, prospects, or hopes.” He slid into hard-core drug use and was plucked back from the edge by a Vietnam vet with a heart of gold, who slapped him into shape and pointed him toward Alaska and bears.
There he discovered his true purpose in life: watching over those noble and imperiled creatures. The way he told it, he had stumbled onto a peaceable kingdom where the bears seemed neither ferocious nor afraid of man—a childhood dream made real. Photos and videos document the breathtaking proximity to the animals that he was able to achieve. Not only did they not attack, but they seemed to give a collective ursine shrug and accept him as a somewhat odd-smelling and harmless hanger-on.
Crawling on all fours, singing and talking in that sort of odd, high voice normally reserved for babies and small dogs—”Hey, little bear, love you, aren’t you beautiful, that’s right, love you”—Treadwell sidled up to wild bears, his camera and video recorder whirring, and he filled notebooks with observations, scrawled in wavering schoolboy print. Some of the animals, he maintained, seemed to actually enjoy his company. A wounded bear he named Mickey slept near his tent for weeks and recovered; mother bears would leave their cubs nearby when they went off to forage as if asking him to babysit. By his own admission, he even went so far as to plant a kiss on one bear’s nose after it licked his fingers.
Treadwell had found love, so powerful it bordered on obsession. He called the objects of his affection grizzlies, but they were and are considered by Alaska biologists to be brown bears, the coastal version of the species
Ursus arctos. The inland variation is commonly known in North America as grizzly (
Ursus arctos horribilis). The distinction between grizzlies and brown bears is, most Alaskans would argue, the difference between pit bulls and Labrador retrievers. But Treadwell chose to call his bears grizzlies for reasons any publicist could explain, and justified it in print by rightly claiming they were the same species.
In the history of the Katmai National Park and Monument, stretching back over 85 years, not one person had been seriously mauled, let alone killed, by a bear. Still, these huge animals are far from harmless. At least twice, Treadwell was reduced to a quaking ball of nerves. In one case, witnessed from a distance by a bear-viewing guide in the mid-’90s, an older male bear who was courting a female lost his temper at Treadwell and stopped just short of knocking his head off. Another time, threatened by a bear trashing his tent, Treadwell made a radio call in a total panic to a local air service, asking for an immediate fly-out from the area.
Treadwell never carried a gun and maintained that even if firearms had been legal in the park, he still wouldn’t have carried one. Early on he swore off nonlethal means of protection, like the newly developed (and highly effective) portable electric fences, and even pepper spray. The spray he did use once, when he felt he had no other choice, hosing a bear he’d named Cupcake; he was so distressed by the bear’s apparent agony that he vowed he’d never use repellent again. Fear, he decided, wasn’t the message he wanted to send. Good intentions were the only shield he needed.
‘You’re going to get yourself killed’At the end of each of those first few summers, Treadwell returned to Malibu. He and Jewel Palovak, his friend and co-author, put serious time into discussing how they might turn his burgeoning passion for bears into something more. Treadwell sold photos at crafts fairs, and he began doing free presentations for elementary school students.
He loved the children as much as they loved him. With his own kidlike enthusiasm, jumping up and down and having the kids repeat bear facts after him, he was a natural. What’s more, the youngsters were learning about bears, and coming to care about them too. Thus the idea of Grizzly People was born: a grass-roots, nonprofit organization with a professionally designed website, dedicated to protecting the bears, studying them and educating people. Palovak claims that Treadwell reached about 10,000 school-children a year. The letters from excited kids and grateful, impressed teachers poured in.
Not everyone approved of what he was doing. Regulations for Katmai stipulate viewing distances of no less than 50 yards for brown bears. Both Treadwell’s personal videos and professional productions featuring him document distances far closer than that, which angered and alarmed conservationists. Several local people resented this surfer boy with wraparound shades telling them what to do with their bears. As to his claims that the bears were endangered, not even the most greenie locals would go along with such an idea.
The bear science establishment disdained his methods; one researcher described Treadwell’s interaction with bears in the field as “his own private Jackass show,” a reference to the sophomoric MTV program that features a series of mindless, often death-defying stunts. Longtime state bear biologist Sterling Miller recalls admonishing Treadwell to be more cautious.
Treadwell wrote back saying that he would personally “be honored” to end up as grizzly scat—though that was not exactly the word he used. Says Miller, “Given his attitude, I believed it wouldn’t be long before he was so honored.”
Tom Walters, the plain-spoken head of bear-viewing guides at Katmai Wilderness Lodge, of which he is also a part owner, says, “I told him straight out, years ago, he was going to get himself killed.”
Strange seasonAmie Huguenard saw Timothy Treadwell in Boulder, Colorado, at a slide show and lecture he gave in 1996 at the University of Colorado campus. She was smitten by his passion and commitment and later wrote to him. One thing led to another, and they became romantically involved. At the time of their first meeting, she was in her early 30s, a surgical physician’s assistant, attractive in a wholesome, fit way.
She had spent a couple of weeks with Treadwell in Alaska in the two summers before 2003. This year’s visit was different; there was an evident strain. For one thing, this late in the season—the end of September—it was a challenge to keep warm and dry while camping in the autumn rains with the first snows around the corner. Then there were the bears. Treadwell’s camp, a short distance from the shore of Upper Kaflia Lake, was on a grass-crowned knoll amid a labyrinth of tunneled trails that bears had worn through the dense brush over centuries. Treadwell called this place the Grizzly Maze. Huguenard’s anxiety at being there showed on a video that Treadwell shot; in one sequence, she sits in the brush with a female bear and cubs ten feet away. Then one bear shifts even closer. Huguenard’s face is taut and unsmiling. She wanted to pull back, not push to get so close.
She was frightened. They argued. Treadwell tried to reassure her. You can practically hear him saying, “Everything’s fine. It’s only Tabitha.” But in fact, everything wasn’t fine. Five miles away as the crow flies, bear biologist Matthias Breiter was camped out with a small party of photographers. The bear dynamics he observed were both chaotic and unusual. In a normal year, the half-mile of creek before him might have had 15 bears working for fish; this year, more than 60 showed up. The crowding led to conflict. “You’d usually see four fights a week,” says Breiter. “It was ten a day. Real, all-out fights. The level of aggression was far above normal.”
