Blood Brothers: Timothy Treadwell's risky grizzly research

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Outside Magazine January 2004

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Blood Brothers
A bear expert's risky research ends in disaster. Should anybody get so close to grizzlies?

By Doug Peacock


	A "Maze" grizzly gnaws a salmon. (Timothy Treadwell/Franklin Berger photo)

ON OCTOBER 6, Willy Fulton eased his Beaver floatplane down into Alaska's Katmai National Park and remote Kaflia Bay, a broad mosaic of ocean beach, braided waterways, dense thickets of alder, and sedge fields yellowing in the autumn chill. His plan was to pick up his friends Timothy Treadwell, 46, and Amie Huguenard, 37, both of Malibu, California, who spent each summer living among the many brown bears—as coastal Alaska's large grizzlies are known—that congregate in this salmon-heavy wilderness at the base of the Alaska Peninsula.

But something was very wrong. Descending into camp, the bush pilot spotted a flattened tent, and a large grizzly on top of what looked like a human body. Fulton buzzed the bear with his plane, but it refused to budge. He landed on an adjacent lake and immediately called state troopers on Kodiak Island, across the bay, and Katmai National Park headquarters, in King Salmon, 100 miles to the north.

"Some bet on my death."

To read Timothy Treadwell's stunning final letter, CLICK HERE

Famed naturalist Charlie Russell argues that Timothy Treadwell's work was both crucial and sane.

Katmai rangers touched down first. They hiked to a small knob above the camp, but before they could get closer, a large male grizzly approached out of the bushes. Ranger Joel Ellis, flanked by two others standing by with shotguns, fired his pistol 11 times at the lanky brown bear, which fell dead 12 feet away. At the camp, the team found Treadwell's and Huguenard's shoes lined up neatly outside the tent; Treadwell's glasses were still in their case. Then they discovered the couple's partially buried remains nearby, the bodies mostly consumed. As the rangers loaded their plane with the victims' cameras, gear, and remains, a smaller bear approached—too persistently, they thought—and they killed it, too. The Cessna 206 lifted off, leaving Kaflia Bay looking as pristine as it had for thousands of years.

After two days of bad weather, authorities returned. The smaller grizzly, a three-year-old, had been eaten by other bears; only its head remained. There was no way to determine if it had fed on the couple's bodies. A necropsy described the larger bear as a thousand-pound, 28-year-old male, reasonably healthy despite the fact that, like many older grizzlies, it had broken teeth. Its stomach contained human flesh and clothing.

The chilling facts disseminated to the international media were at once vague and disturbingly graphic. The state medical examiner could establish only that the cause of death was "multiple blunt-force injuries due to bear mauling." But Treadwell's video camera (its lens cap still on) yielded a six-minute audio recording, illuminating all too vividly the last moments of two people trying to save each other's life. It starts with Treadwell investigating a bear that has come into camp. Something goes wrong, and the bear attacks him. "I'm getting killed!" he screams. Huguenard, still in the tent, tells him to play dead, and for a minute the bear backs off, suggesting that the initial attack was not predatory. But the grizzly returns, and Huguenard comes to Treadwell's aid. In his last words, he yells to her to save herself.

Still unknown is which bear attacked, and why. It could have been a third grizzly, or a bear wandering down from the interior. Was it a predator hunting for a human meal—a rare but not unknown possibility—or a chance mauling followed by opportunistic feeding by other bears at the lean end of the salmon season? Anything dead is food for a grizzly.

Treadwell and Huguenard knew that well. They were not ordinary bear watchers; in fact, they were widely known bear activists. Huguenard was a physician's assistant with a degree in molecular biology; she'd written to Treadwell after meeting him at a presentation in Boulder, Colorado, in 1996, and had spent parts of the past three summers with him in Katmai. Treadwell, meanwhile, had photographed the Katmai grizzlies for the past 13 years, and his 1997 book Among Grizzlies had brought him to the edge of fame: He'd appeared on David Letterman's Late Show, the Discovery Channel's Discovery Sunday, and other television programs. Eight months of the year, he traveled America giving slide shows about Alaskan wildlife to schoolchildren.

Treadwell's methods of chumming up to grizzlies, however, were considered unsound by much of the bear-research community. He gave the bears names like Mr. Chocolate and Booble. He filmed himself chanting, "I love you, I love you," as he inched up to a grizzly. Scientists belittled him for his anthropomorphizing. Mainstream researchers either cautioned Treadwell that his behavior would put bears and humans at risk or dismissed him as a loon. Even his friends worried—they thought he should carry bear spray. But after blasting one charging bear, Cupcake, with pepper spray in 1995, Treadwell refused.

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Longtime Outside contributor Doug Peacock lives in Montana.

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