In search of Timothy Treadwell

This year over the July 4 holiday weekend, rather than grilling burgers and watching fireworks, I traveled to Halo Bay, Alaska to camp out with grizzly bears and to explore the area documented by the late Timothy Treadwell. Halo Bay is a remote coastal area along the Alaskan Peninsula, only accessible by boat or small plane from either Kodiak, AK or Homer, AK. Earlier this year, the film "Grizzly Man" came up in a conversation among friends, which got me thinking that since I would be in Kodiak for work twice this summer, it would be the perfect opportunity to visit Halo Bay, watch bears, and get to experience some of the brilliance which had drawn Treadwell back to the area for thirteen years.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the story, Timothy Treadwell was an environmental activist who traveled to Halo Bay (and other bear-rich areas in Alaska) for thirteen years, camping amongst them, filming, photographing, and observing them in order to attract attention and appreciation for the grizzlies in the lower forty eight. Late in 2003, Treadwell and his girlfriend were mauled my a bear, causing their death. From the wealth of information about Treadwell, including his own book "Among Grizzlies: Living with Wild Bears in Alaska", and the (admittedly weird) Werner Herzog documentary "Grizzly Man", it could be argued that his death was actually a "bear-assisted suicide". However, I'll save my analysis (and lecture) on bear safety for the end of this article.

Day One:

I got up early and met a small group of three other co-workers who had agreed to take a chartered scenic flight-seeing trip with me... a trip in which they would drop me off in Halo Bay then head back to Kodiak. We drove from the Coast Guard base to downtown Kodiak to find the float plane pier for Andrews Airways. Our pilot Phil was an ice climbing buddy with some folks that I met at a trail head a few weeks prior (thanks for the info Steve and Sharon!). After a quick take off, a short scenic flight across Kodiak Island, and a 15 minute trip across the Shelikof Strait, the shore of the Alaskan Peninsula started to become visible. Phil asked us how many had hiked on a glacier before, and when a couple people said that we hadn't, he responded with, "OK, well we have to fix that". A couple minutes later we were circling over a giant glacier and dropping fast into an iceberg filled lake. Phil nosed the plane up onto a lateral moraine, hopped out and tied it up, and we all proceeded to stroll up the glacier for a few minutes.

After the glacier festivities, we hopped in the plane and cruised down the coast passing several bays and meadows and flying over a few bears that were grazing. Shortly, Halo Bay came into view (which I recognized from the flight scenes in Grizzly Man, and my satellite photos and topo map) and we were diving down to the shore. Unfortunately, it was low tide and Halo Bay has tidal flats that extend out for hundreds of meters. Since I didn't have hip waders or anything (way too heavy for me to carry), I took off my boots and socks, and rolled up my pants for a numbing wade through the tidal water to get to the beach. Fortunately, unlike some Alaskan tidal flats, Halo Bay has a nice sandy bottom... try that outside of Anchorage and you will sink in waist high!

As I sat down on a drift log to put my boots on a get my bearings, there was already at least one grizzly walking down the beach towards me, and a couple others out on the tidal flats digging clams. Clearly this was going to be an interesting weekend!

I wandered north up the beach, looking for a set of tents that supposedly belong to the park rangers of Katmai National Park. When I got there it turned out to be a film crew from Kaos Entertainment who were spending a couple months camped out there, filming the grizzlies. We exchanged greetings, they pointed me to the nearest spring, and mentioned that NPS had (since Treadwell's death, I later learned) restricted camping to the south and north ends of the meadows. I said that I would probably camp close to them, but that I was going to wander down the beach first and see if there might be any good sites at the far north end. The far north end would prove to provide my first (and closest) encounter with a bear.

I headed up the beach, around a little wooded knoll which cut off the main meadows from a large estuary basin and the far north end of the bay. I saw one bear at the far end of the bay coming off of the tidal flats, but it seemed to head back into the woods, so I didn't think anything of it. I dropped my pack, removed my bear-proof food container, and placed it a ways away (it's always recommended to keep your food and your cooking area away from any other gear you might have), and went for a quick stroll down the beach to check things out, and scope out potential camping areas.

As I got a kilometer or two down the beach I heard some rustling in the grass very close by. Ooooops. That bear that I had seen coming off the tidal flat hadn't gone very far into the grass and now it was just paces ahead of me. And I didn't have my gear with me. Start the bear behavior tutorial right about... now. I snapped a couple photos while it seemed to not be paying attention to me and then I tried slowly backing away while remaining facing the bear (never turn your back or run). That didn't work... she started paying further attention to me. Step two: I backed away and found a drift log at the top of the (steep) beach and sat down. She continued to approach displaying some yawns and teeth which I later learned is stressful behavior. I continued snapping photos, before she got too close. When she did get within a meter or two of me and gave me one big sniff, I jumped up, raised my arms above my head and yelled, "Whoa bear! Back off!" and she scampered back with an expression of surprise on her face. It was almost comical and fun to watch what was probably an 800 pound animal flee from you like a squirrel.

With that surprise she decided to continue south down the beach and to keep feeding on sedge grass, all the while giving nervous glaces over her shoulder, keeping an eye on me. Well, now she was between me and my gear, which I wasn't so happy about. So I decided to try and circle around her and grab my gear. Bad idea. I walked down the very steep beach and circled around my new bear friend, and as soon as the off-shore wind blew my human scent up to her, she immediately stopped eating to watch me again. Once I was precisely between the water and her, she got this mischievous look on her face and started approaching me again. She stopped briefly to take a monster dump, in an apparent display of dominance, and then started running down the beach at me. I did my normal raise-arms-and-yell routine (hey, it worked on the baboon in Africa!) and she backed off again and went back to eating and slooooooooowly making her way down the beach.

At this point I decided it best to let her do her thing and just cross my fingers and hope that she didn't screw with my gear. Which seemed like a long-shot since she was checking out every single piece of human-made debris on the beach (fishing floats, washed up plastic bottles, etc.). After probably about an hour of her slowly advancing down the beach, she veered away from the grass line where my gear was stashed, and went for the sandy highway of the beach. Pfew, I was in the clear.... or was I.... doh... she stopped to take nap in the sun, right in front of my cache! But thirty more minutes of my waiting nervously and she got up and proceeded quickly down the beach, back towards the central meadows. I was in the clear. I hiked back to where the film crew was camped and promptly pitched my tent within fifty meters of their camp.

That evening I ran into another man, Kent, who was camped nearby and had been coming to Halo Bay for fourteen summer straight. I also saw a beautiful fox, and took my first stroll through the main grizzly meadows and promptly learned that if you just talk to the bears, i.e. singing "Hey Bear!" when you pass them, they generally ignore you. Their hearing seemed to be much better than their eye-sight, or at least human voice invited less curiosity.

After dinner on the beach, I bedded down for the evening escaping the mosquitoes, read some John Muir, and fell asleep long before darkness which comes so late in the northern summers.