| 1 | Freak weather partly to blame for death |
Everyone knows that Treadwell’s 13 year bear odyssey ended with him being eaten, and later, biologists revealed that the weather conditions were freakishly cool in 2003, causing the berry crop to fail along the Katmai coast. Yet at the same time, the salmon run was average, and possibly above normal.
This combination had dangerous consequences. Matthias Breiter was camped by a river approximately 5 miles away from Treadwell, where he noticed that instead of the usual 15 bears fishing for salmon at once, one day saw 60 show up. This led to vicious conflicts between the bears and sent them into an aggression spiral.
In mid-September, the salmon run petered out by Breiter’s camp, and the hungry, berry-less bear brigade migrated to Kaflia Bay, where Treadwell was camped 300 metres away from the main feeding spot. When salmon schools are plentiful, bears will often take a bite or two and toss the rest away, but this year, the grizzlies devoured every scrap and carcass.
One of the last pieces of footage taken by Treadwell showed a thin, brutish looking grizzly heading back into the river for a dead piece of salmon. Werner Herzog speculated that this was Treadwell’s eventual killer.
The late date in October was also a factor, as by then, most grizzlies have normally journeyed inland to their deep mountainous lairs. The few stragglers by the coast were inevitably starving and desperate.
| 2 | Grizzly man’s love life |
Some youtube commenters speculate that Timothy Treadwell was gay, but no concrete evidence has ever emerged. Instead, Jewel Palovak became his girlfriend in 1989, after they met at a medieval-themed restaurant called Gulliver’s in Marina del Rey.
Rather than the ranting narcissist portrayed in Grizzly Man, Jewel said that they were a typical Californian couple, surfing, eating at restaurants, and going on day trips to the countryside. The couple broke up, but stayed close friends, and during the Grizzly Man years, Treadwell embarked on a string of looser relationships. “It’s my bear work they’re attracted to” said Treadwell, saying that he never got laid before 1989.
It was a similar pattern to a mountaineer obsessed with Everest: he could return to civilisation, spend time with his frustrated girlfriends, before they realised during tear-filled arguments that his heart was with the bears. He was never able to commit, nor did he want to.
When he hooked up with Amie Huguenard, he was under no illusions, warning her that “I’m really not the settling-down type. It’s just the way I am, and I won’t change“. He insisted that he didn’t want any mini-Treadwells running around.
Despite craving commitment, Huguenard admitted that “he is who is is“, and she made plans to leave him in October 2003, shortly before the pair died. According to Treadwell’s diary, she believed that the Grizzly Man was hellbent on destruction.
| 3 | David Letterman |
Treadwell spent 12 years battling it out in the Alaskan wilderness before finally entering public consciousness. The greatest leap forward was undoubtedly his appearance on the David Letterman show on February 20th 2001. Beforehand, he sat in the greenroom alongside Samuel L Jackson and when his name was called, he strutted onto the set in a black coat and with his gold locks swaying like a movie star 20 years into his career.
As he sat down, Letterman showed him a photo of the gnarliest looking male bear from Treadwell’s collection, who he’d dubbed “The Big Red Machine”. Letterman asked him if he was destined to become bear food. The audience laughed. Treadwell replied “this is dangerous work” and that respecting the bear hierarchy was vital, but also said that grizzlies were harmless “party animals”. His goal on the show was to promote his 1997 book Among Grizzlies, and on January 8th 2002 his appearance was so popular that he returned to Letterman for round 2.
The clip of Letterman appeared in the first 10 minutes of Grizzly Man, but weirdly, it was omitted from the DVD release, as warned by a disclaimer stating that the film had been changed from its theatrical version. Removing Letterman was the sole change, and in its place was an NBC interview where Timothy Treadwell vowed to never shoot a bear with a gun.
Later on, the Letterman appearance seemed to make him paranoid. “Ah Timothy, I’m getting a bad feeling about you, I saw you on David Letterman” he says in a bitter mocking voice, in his infamous Hallo Bay rant video.
| 4 | His mysterious youth |
Part of the appeal of Timothy Treadwell is the enduring mystery that surrounds his youth. The story he concocted in his 1997 book Among Grizzlies seems almost too perfect to be true. He claimed that his lifelong love of nature was kicked off when he and his friend Ricky saved a jar of frogs from the clutches of a cruel school bully, who proceeded to beat him to a pulp, which is inside the realm of possibility, but feels too Disneyfied. In his words: “an ecowarrior was born“.
Cut to the 1980s in Long Beach, California, and while working as a bartender and waiter, he claimed to be a poor English orphan who was cast out onto the street by his parents. He perfected a Cockney accent and went to the lengths of emblazoning a Union Jack on his surfboard. Fellow surfers and the English owner of a bar Treadwell once worked in confessed to have been fooled.
At first, people took pity on him, and the brothers of his friend Karyn Kline took him in. But slowly it dawned on them that the story was lies, and Treadwell was turfed out onto the streets again.
The Australian story was so pervasive that when Booklist reviewed Treadwell’s memoir in 1997, they called him an “Australian-born bear lover”. Treadwell’s family was forced to rebuff the fascination of Australian reporters who wanted to claim a down under hero for their own.
| 5 | Treadwell’s drug fest |
The 1980s was one of Treadwell’s murkiest periods, but by his own account in Among Grizzlies, he spent the decade as a strung out heroin addict. According to his father, the seeds were planted after Timothy left for college and his acting career went nowhere. Instead, the depressed young man sat around drinking alcohol in vast quantities.
One time, he landed face first in the mud after he leapt from a third story balcony during an LSD trip gone wrong. When he stood up, he had left a perfect imprint of his face, complete with glasses marks. Treadwell described himself as “an overactive street punk without any skills, prospects, or hopes“. He racked up two criminal convictions: one for assault in Long Beach, another for illegally disarming a firearm in Beverly Hills.
His old friend Karyn Kline from Long Beach described how “Tim was always in fights. He finally left when he heard several people were out to get him”. Treadwell claimed to have slept with an M16 under his pillow.
In 1989, the frenzied Treadwell almost died after taking a speedball, a heart-pounding combination of cocaine and heroin. Treadwell went to rehab, and in his darkest hour, he realised that only caring for Alaska’s bears could keep him on the straight and narrow. When his lifelong confidant Jewel Palovak met him in 1989 in Malibu, California, she saw no evidence of drug addiction, and he stayed clean until his death in 2003.
| 6 | Treadwell gets slammed through a wall |
According to Treadwell’s autobiography, he was once invited to a private party with some low-level drug dealers, including the devious Turk, who jeeringly instructed Treadwell to sell his body for the lines of glittering coke on their table. In a sudden rage, Treadwell jumped and kicked his tennis shoes into Turk’s ugly face. His friends grabbed Treadwell and rammed him headfirst through a sheetrock wall.
Treadwell was momentarily dazed, admiring the well sculpted kitchen in front of his eyes, but snapped back to focus when blows rained down on his trapped lower body, still in the previous room. He pulled his torso free, grabbed a chair, and flung it in a circular motion so that each part of the chair caught one of the drug dealers in a separate spot. It also caught the chandelier, and in the confusion of jewels and glass shards flying everywhere, the table was upended, spilling hundreds of grams worth of cocaine onto the carpet.
At this point, the enraged Randy grabbed a .357 magnum. Treadwell gulped and dashed through the front door, and across the manicured lawn. He wasn’t fast enough, and with his hands up in the street, he screamed “enjoy your life in prison” while the pursuing Randy pointed a gun at his face. Before he could shoot, lights flicked on in the neighbouring windows. The seething Randy returned his magnum to his waistband.
Some have called this a tall tale, but who knows Treadwell’s life better than himself?
| 7 | Tales from Katmai National Park |
With 13 years of bear experience, we’ll never know everything that happened to Treadwell on his Alaskan adventures, but there’s plenty of wacky adventures spread around.
Mickey was one of Treadwell’s favourite bears, who he once captured duelling with Sgt Brown for the mating rights to Saturn, the “Michelle Pfeiffer of bears”, with Hollywood league cinematography skills. When Mickey was injured, he spent several weeks recovering right next to Treadwell’s tent, who claimed that he seemed to enjoy his company.
Given that a wolf and bear made headlines in 2013 for their close friendship, this is perfectly possible. Treadwell once kissed a bear on the nose after it licked his fingers, and like Charlie Russel in Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, mother bears would leave their cubs with him while they left to hunt for fish, like a babysitter.
Another episode was when Treadwell contracted giardiasis, AKA beaver fever, caused by drinking water contaminated with beaver waste. Treadwell lay in his tent for days with a 104F fever and plagued by hallucinations. Jewel Palovak was shocked to receive a call from the babbling Treadwell demanding to know why she had left when “I saw you just walking today“. Palovak hadn’t been to Alaska all year.
She implored him to leave, but instead, his friend Bill Simms airlifted drugs in by float plane. When Treadwell returned, he was gaunt, his body missing 30 pounds.
| 8 | Helped to make Brother Bear (2003) |
On Timothy Treadwell’s IMDB page, the most prominent of his 7 credits is understandably Grizzly Man, being the main star despite never interacting with its production members. Yet one film is missing – Brother Bear, the 2D animated film from Disney.
Released in 2003, it featured songs by Phil Collins and told the story of Kenai the Inuit warrior, who kills a bear and is transformed into one himself as punishment, and makes friends with a small cub. It seemed very true to the Disneyfied Tim Treadwell vision, and that’s not surprising considering that he appears in the credits under “support staff”.
According to Jewel Palovak, Treadwell’s confidant and will executor, Treadwell flew down to Orlando in order to help the animators produce realistic bear movements on screen, using real life footage as an example. True diehard fans of the grizzly man can wait for the credits to roll and spot his name after a few minutes – people have reported shock at seeing Timothy Treadwell pop up. People joked about how Grizzly Man was the polar opposite of the sweet and sugary Brother Bear, and that while Brother Bear was about a man tapped inside a bear’s body, Treadwell really did end up inside a bear’s body.
This wasn’t his only Hollywood connection, as Leonardo DiCaprio reportedly donated $25,000 to Treadwell’s charity Grizzly People. “I am a strong advocate of Timothy Treadwell because he risks his life to protect animals and he is reaching the next generation by teaching children how to preserve the planet” he said in 2003. Pierce Brosnan was another rumoured patron, but Jewel Palovak denied this.
For fans: wait until the end of the credits, under the large section “Very special thanks to the following support staff“.
| 9 | Shot footage hours before his death |
Treadwell once light-heartedly said that he hoped whoever found his half-eaten corpse would throw the body into the woods, to prevent the culprit from being shot dead. Ultimately, the Treadwell story ended on October 5th 2003, and the last of his 1000 hour archive of Alaska footage was taken that very same day (excluding the accidental death audio).
It shows a misty, drizzly Alaska, with what Treadwell describes as “50mph winds, soon over 70”. Unlike the sunny wide open vistas of Hallo Bay where Treadwell filmed some of his signature rants, there’s an eerie claustrophobic quality to this last video, with camera lens smudged with raindrops.
As Treadwell stands in the bushes in his camouflage gear, he seems hesitant, as though using his intuitive bear sense built over 13 years, he can sense that something is coming. He was leaving Alaska with “the bears safely heading for their dens, the work successful“, he says. He was only 95% correct, but that wasn’t enough.
Treadwell repeats a similar theme again and again: “It’s the only thing I know, it’s the only thing I want to know“. He looks around, fiddles with a swaying branch briefly, and those were the last words Timothy Treadwell ever deliberately recorded. Werner Herzog used this clip in the last 3 minutes of Grizzly Man.
| 10 | Treadwell’s food supply |
One question which is mentioned surprisingly little about Treadwell (unsurprisingly given his grizzly-cuddling activities) is how he acquired food. Did he fish for salmon like his grizzly comrades, or pick berries from bushes? According to Jewel Palovak, Treadwell packed all his own food, with monthly resupplies by a floatplane.
Treadwell’s philosophy was to never hurt the bears by removing food from their environment. He tried to avoid cooking so that the scents wouldn’t attract predator bears, but was a sucker for Mac n Cheese.
Palovak joked that Treadwell’s diet wasn’t particularly balanced. Peanut butter and jelly was high on the menu, as were veggie meals ready-to-eat (MRE), but also lots of candy and crisps. His beverage of choice was Coke, and during the early years, disaster almost struck when a hungry grizzly poked its nose into his tent and stole 50 power bars from a theoretically bear-proof container.
Bill Sims was a hunting guide in Katmai national park, and met Treadwell early on, who he thought was a loopy yet endearing character. Somehow, he got roped into packing Treadwell’s lunches for him, and one day, when visiting Sims, he offered to cook fresh halibut for Treadwell in his tent. “If you don’t mind, I’ll eat it here,” replied Treadwell before wolfing down the fish silently in bear-like fashion.
However, Treadwell wasn’t a total slob. In April each year, he would kick off a high intensity training regimen involving long runs around his California neighbourhood.
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