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Outside Magazine January 2004

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Blood Brothers (cont.)

TIMOTHY TREADWELL came to visit me in the early 1990s, after his first summers among Alaskan bears. He'd read my book, Grizzly Years, about the 14 seasons I spent camping in Montana and Wyoming's grizzly country after my return from the Vietnam War, and we talked about his decision—after nearly killing himself with an overdose of opiates in California—to go live with bears in 1990. Treadwell possessed a fragile sincerity that shouldn't be confused with naiveté. He was fearless, yet, as he wrote in Among Grizzlies, "keenly aware it takes only a single misinterpretation [of bear behavior] to get myself killed." I issued the usual admonitions, among them that he should be careful about conditioning bears to humans: Legal bear hunting is big business outside the 4.7-million-acre park, and though no poaching episodes have been recorded in Katmai, Treadwell would later claim to have repeatedly driven poachers away.

But if people had taken exception to Treadwell's methods during his lifetime, after his death the gloves came off. Former Katmai National Park superintendent Deb Liggett told the Anchorage Daily News how park officials had repeatedly warned Treadwell not to camp among bears—and even threatened to expel him from Katmai. She'd told Treadwell her staff would never forgive him if they had to kill a bear because of him.

Chuck Bartlebaugh, director of the national safety campaign Be Bear Aware, in Missoula, Montana, told the Anchorage paper that he worried about Treadwell's example: "We have a trail of dead people and dead bears because of this trend that says, 'Let's show it's not dangerous.'"

Treadwell's supporters disputed that implication, stressing that he had always cautioned people to avoid bears. But even his friends were at a loss to put the deaths into perspective. Dave Mattson, a wildlife biologist based in Arizona, told me that he was "struggling, really conflicted. Tim was a friend whose courage and dedication I admire above all. I fear ego was a factor, as it sometimes is for all of us. I know that adrenaline rush of wanting to get close to grizzlies. Respect means, for me, giving them their space."

Home in Montana, I went to see my friend Lance Craighead, one of the preeminent grizzly biologists working today. We lamented the loss—of Treadwell, of Huguenard, of the bears. We couldn't help but like this guy who punched out as he'd wanted to, who'd told people he would be honored to "end up in bear scat," though we agreed that he'd camped in terrible places and gotten way too close to bears. Still, Treadwell may have contributed a significant chapter to the study of grizzly behavior. "His legacy," Craighead said, "may well prove that he did a lot more good for bears than any short-term harm."

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