Failure™ Magazine

Bear With Me

The author of “The Grizzly Maze” on Timothy Treadwell.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under Arts & Entertainment, Life

Treadwell spent a lot of time—the better part of 13 summers—in close proximity to grizzly bears. How did he manage to get so physically close to the bears on the Katmai coast without them taking offense?
First, the bears there are exceptionally tolerant. There is a high concentration of bears there and yet the good feeding areas are very, very limited. Because of the high concentrations they are tolerant of each other and that tolerance radiates outward to people. In addition, being in a National Park, those bears are protected and highly habituated to being viewed.

Another thing that’s unique about the Katmai coast is that the females will often allow people to get close, and sometimes even approach humans, because they know that people afford an island of safety against the large male bears who kill and eat cubs. Those are the big intolerant bears that won’t approach people. They are much more reticent because they are older and more intelligent. Practically all of Treadwell’s video was shot with a relatively small number of bears—five or six which were especially laid back.

What I’m saying is that you or I—if we had the desire and the time and the guts—could do what Treadwell did. A lot of the so-called magical stuff, he couldn’t have pulled that off anywhere else. If he tried that in the Brooks Range he wouldn’t have seen a bear, much less established kinship. It would have been a procession of vanishing furry butts going over the ridge or him being scared to death by sudden defensive-aggressive charges. There wouldn’t have been this tolerance. I just got back from the Katmai coast last fall and I had bears within six feet of me. I didn’t choose to. If you sit along a creek there you will have bears all around you and mostly they will ignore you completely.

But in October 2003 weren’t the Katmai bears very agitated?
Bears have their limits, no doubt about it. First of all, the berry crop failed on the Katmai coast. So a creek that might have had a dozen bears [in the past] now had like 50 bears. And Treadwell wasn’t very tuned in to the subtleties and nuances of larger natural cycles around him. He was so focused on his beloved bears that he didn’t see that this was different. It was also early October, the end of the season, which was later than he ever stayed. The bears were starting to go to their pre-denning areas and there was little food available. So they were becoming less tolerant. At the same time their desire to get on a few more calories was never stronger. They were not going to eat again until March or April. That doesn’t mean they would look at a person as food, but it does mean they were agitated and competing for food.

Did the people who knew Treadwell think it was only a matter of time before he was mauled by one of “his” bears?
I don’t know if they thought it was a matter of time but they certainly worried about him. Frankly, I think that Treadwell just ran out of luck. But I don’t think it was inevitable. It was a matter of time in the same sense as if you go hang gliding, it’s a one in ‘X’ chance that something will go wrong and you’ll be killed.

Was there anything unusual about Treadwell’s campsite—the place where Treadwell and Huguenard were killed?
One thing for sure is that they were camping at this choke point where bears passed to and from a high density feeding area. One of the main bear trails went right by his tent, a distance of less than ten feet. It was also a short distance to the creek, where he could go and sit among his bears.

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