Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #261940 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

From the Back Cover
On the afternoon of Sunday, October 5, 2003, in Alaska's Katmai National Park, one or more brown bears killed and ate Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard. The next day, park rangers investigating the site shot and killed two bears that threatened them; it was later determined that one of the bears had human flesh and clothing in its stomach.
This chilling story immediately captured worldwide media attention, not only because of the horrific manner of Timothy and Amie's deaths, but also because Timothy was a well-known wildlife celebrity. His films of close-up encounters with grizzly bears – he spent more than a dozen summers living with and videotaping giant bears in the Alaskan bush – were the subject of television talk shows, movies, and books.
But his work was not without controversy, and some bear experts felt that Treadwell's fatal encounter was a tragedy waiting to happen – the result of the unorthodox tactics he used in his life among the bears.
Death in the Grizzly Maze is the compelling account of Treadwell's intense life and dramatic death. Author Mike Lapinski chronicles Treadwell's rise from self-described alcoholic loser to popular grizzly-bear advocate. Lapinski explores how a waiter from Malibu, California, with no background in biology or wildlife science, came to be considered a bear expert. And he reveals the high cost of the current craze for wildlife celebrities – and what it means for the future of wildlife conservation.

About the Author
Mike Lapinski is the author of eleven outdoor and nature books and hundreds of magazine articles. His photographs have appeared as inside and cover art in a variety of magazines and books. Mike is considered an expert on the use of bear pepper spray and often speaks on this subject, bears, and self-defense for nature lovers. He lives with his wife Aggie most of the year in Superior, Montana, close to grizzlies and grizzly country. While the bears are hibernating, Mike and Aggie live in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, where Mike writes about jaguars, ocelots, and other wilderness animals of the Southwest.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Breaking the Rules in Bear Country

It was finally dark...Suddenly, I felt the ground shake and the crush of grass being trampled outside my tent. A bear was bedding down for the evening. Without alarm, I left the tent, shining my flashlight into the pitch-black evening and saw Mr. Chocolate, my beautiful half-ton friend, who had stopped by to spend the evening with me..."Good night, big fellow, and sleep tight," I crooned. "We're gonna have a great day tomorrow."--Timothy Treadwell, Among Grizzlies

Night descended upon the Run Amuck Campground northeast of Ketchikan, Alaska, as George Tullos, a forty-one-year-old resident of Ketchikan crawled into his tent, feeling snug and safe after a long day of watching bears.

And why not? He was in a well-used camping area in a place where the big brown (coastal grizzly) bears were thought to be benign because thousands of spawned-out salmon clogged the nearby river and provided an abundance of food. The spot was so safe that the Forest Service maintained a bear-viewing platform three miles away along the river, where people could watch bears passing by as close as twenty yards away as the bloated bruins blissfully gorged on dead salmon.

Tullos was stirred awake during the night by the shaking of the ground and the crush of grass outside his tent. He probably poked his head outside his tent with flashlight in hand. The next morning, a passerby found the Tullos campsite torn apart, and investigating rangers discovered the partially eaten body of George Tullos. A short time later, they encountered a brown bear and killed it. A necropsy found human flesh in its belly, along with berries and grass.

Back at Katmai, Timothy Treadwell emerged from his tent, stretching and yawning, and set out to find his good friend Mr. Chocolate among the dozens of brown bears roaming within a mile of his campsite. He wrote, "I sat only 30 feet away, watching and photographing Mr. Chocolate, a half-ton brown male grizzly bear, who paused between bites and gazed up toward me, not concerned at all by my presence as he ate...throughout the years, Mr. Chocolate had not only tolerated my presence, but seemed to enjoy it."

Ironically, George Tullos, who always kept a clean camp and made it a practice to observe bears at a distance, fell victim to claw and fang, while Timothy Treadwell lived, despite the fact that he'd repeatedly violated most of the rules for proper behavior in bear country.

Timothy ignored these simple rules, at first out of ignorance; later out of a growing conviction that the bears accepted and trusted him. Beginning with his very first foray into bear country, Timothy exhibited a disturbing lack of judgment, largely attributable to his admitted naiveté as an outdoorsman.

After traveling to Alaska in 1989 and learning where to find bears, Timothy set shortly after lunch on a drizzly August afternoon in Katmai National Park. Hiking along a major bear trail, he began finding huge piles of bear droppings, black and squishy from fish oil. He waited for hours at a place where the trail followed a river, but no bears appeared. Timothy penned his thoughts: "I waited in the rain, getting soaked as my cheap raincoat failed. And when it wasn't raining, the mosquitoes and white socks bit and gnawed at my flesh. Tears of frustration welled up in my eyes. All I wanted was the company of bears."

As the long Alaska day ended at about 11 P.M., Timothy started back to camp along the gloomy forest trail he'd traveled hours earlier, the path now dark and slick in the pouring rain. Suddenly, branches snapped and cracked just ahead. Timothy Treadwell was about to get his wish.

"In the dim light," he reminisced, "a massive form took shape, definitely not human. As the bear slowly ambled my way, fear enveloped me. My body told me to run, but my brain knew better. Without turning my back on the bear, I slowly retreated and started singing softly. What I sang, I haven't a clue, but it calmed my frazzled nerves. Maybe it communicated some goodwill to the approaching bear because the animal veered to my left and disappeared into the night. I shook with adrenalin spiked with fear. Triumphantly, I resumed the hike back to camp."

After another bear encounter that ended the same way, Timothy was feeling pretty shaken and wanted only to get back to camp because it was almost dark. Then the vague outline of another bear loomed ahead in the trail.

"This brown bear was massive, possibly weighing 1,000 pounds. On all fours, the bear's head was as high as mine. Again I attempted to back up and sing sweet songs, but the bear came too fast and quickly closed the distance between us. I stumbled on the mud and fell face-first. As I curled into a fetal position, the grizzly's steps vibrated right next to my sniveling face. Pearl-dagger claws stopped inches from my cheek.

"Spreading my fingers over my eyes in a bizarre form of peekaboo, I gaped up at the grizzly's face. What little light was left exposed an immense, furry face horribly engraved with long, deep scars from battles past. The bear exhaled a puff of fish-breath, then quickly inhaled my odor. No brilliant defensive strategy occurred to me. The grizzly hovered above for a few minutes, but for me, it was a lifetime. Then, ever so gently, he stepped over my quivering body, his bloated tummy scraping across my right shoulder, and vanished into the night.

"After he was gone, I picked up my shaking body and stumbled along the path, all the while chanting, 'Thank you, bears...thank you, bears.' This brush with the wild grizzly was more than I had hoped for."

On his very first outing, Timothy Treadwell had violated two cardinal rules: Never hike in the dark, and never go looking for bears. Bear experts often don't even bother to warn hikers about traveling through bear country in the dark because the danger is so obvious.
In retrospect, it might even have been a life-saving, though painful, experience at that embryonic stage of his bear vision quest, if that half-ton grizzly had swatted Timothy Treadwell with a sledge hammer-like blow and busted a half dozen of his ribs, or shaken him like a rat while crushing the bones in his shoulder.

But Timothy got lucky. The bear passed without incident, no doubt bolstering his budding notion that if you love bears, they'll love you back. What ultimately brought Timothy fame among bear lovers, and incurred the wrath of bear experts, was his continual practice of getting close to grizzlies. Timothy moved toward bears over and over again without being attacked, though he had many close calls. In one day, a single bear charged him three different times. On his first trip to a place in Katmai National Park he called the "Grizzly Sanctuary," Timothy recorded his first close encounter during which he willfully moved toward a bear. Katmai, it turned out, was an ideal location for getting the closeness that he craved.

Located 30 miles west of Kodiak Island via the Shelikof Straight, Katmai National Park was created to preserve the famed Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, a spectacular forty square mile pyroclastic ash flow deposited by the Novarupta Volcano. Currently, there are fourteen volcanos in Katmai that are considered active, though none are currently erupting. It's no surprise that Timothy Treadwell would choose Katmai National Park for the staging ground of his star-crossed odyssey. It had everything he needed: fantastic scenery, wilderness, isolation, lots of big brown bears--and a perplexingly cordial staff.
In the beginning, Katmai received some attention from geologists and volcano lovers, but attendance didn't come close to matching the envious attendance record of its sister park to the northeast--Denali, where tens of thousands of animal lovers vied for the privilege of viewing its wildlife. It wasn't that Katmai didn't have bears. More than 2,000 of the giant brown bears roamed its shores and inland forests, sustained by a series of salmon spawning runs that saw millions of the dying fish struggling up its numerous fresh water streams that flow into the ocean. The big problem at Katmai was access. It was truly a wilderness park, with no roads slicing through the heart of it like at Denali. At Katmai, you either flew or boated to get anywhere in the park, and then you were stuck there until you flew or boated out.
Katmai was officially "discovered" when the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound. This catastrophic oil spill in 1986 threatened to destroy hundreds of miles of pristine Alaskan shoreline. Desperate federal officials sent urgent pleas for all charter craft to aid in corralling the spreading black oil slick. Lured by the promise of big bucks, fishing and sight-seeing boats steamed down the Shelikof Straight to help with the oil cleanup.

It was during these trips back and forth along the Katmai Coast that charter boat captains noticed the large numbers of brown bears roaming in plain view along the shore. After the oil spill was contained, many of these charter boats began offering bear-viewing excursions in the comfort of their fully equipped boats, and added land excursions led by experienced bear guides. Tourism exploded from a meager 3,000 visitors annually, to more than 30,000 today, with 70 commercial operators of bear viewing excursions working within park boundaries.
Initially, rules and regulation were few at Katmai, since almost all of the bear viewing occurred from boat or plane, with overnight stays a rarity. By contrast, Denali requires anyone planning a camping trip to apply for a back country camping permit and attend a half hour training session. Katmai, on the other hand, didn't even require a camping permit (and still doesn't, except in certain areas). In Denali, visitors are not allowed to move closer than a
fs20quarter mile (1400 feet) from any grizzly bear. In Katmai, it's 100 yards from sows with cubs, and only 50 yards from all other bears. These lax rules and regulations, in turn, fostered lax enforcement by park rangers. In other words, Katmai Nati...

Customer Reviews

What a disappointment
This book gets one star for its few photos depicting the bears and Treadwell; otherwise it is, without exception, a terrible read. The author is clearly biased in his painfully inept attempt to document the life, and death of Treadwell as he lived among the bears. The insideous message conveyed throughout the book (though the word insideous perhaps suggests that the author artfully IMPLIES his thesis rather PANIFULLY OVERSTATE)is that Treadwell acted foolishly among the bears and so died as a result of his actions....unfortunately it takes the author 165 pages to do so over and over and over again. Especially disconcerting is the author's gratuitous reconstruction of what actually happened during the attack (creative writing 101 perhaps). Interesting how the author is set upon a mission to ferret out the truth of the Treadwell story, yet fabricates Treadwell's demise all the way down to the huffing of the bears and a dramatic imaginative fight scene that he almost appears to enjoy writing. I would have prefered a more even-handed telling of Treadwell's story, not the knee-jerk anti-Treadwell reaction this book appears to be. Absolutely horrible read.

Excellent
This book was a well written and very honest take on Timothy Treadwell's tragic story. While the author has compassion for Treadwell and values him as a human being, he does not sugar coat his behavior and actions that ultimately contributed to his death. A great read for bear enthusiasts and those interested in Timothy Treadwell. He seemed like a sweet, likable, but misinformed and troubled individual. May he rest in peace, along with his girlfriend Amie.

A very tragic story, perhaps others can learn from it.

Accurate, Informative and Fair Assessment
I was very grateful that Mike Lapinski took the time to investigate and write this book. It's well worth reading. His research and conversations with so many key people help clear up alot of rumor, bias and speculation. There is alot of valuable details that help clarify a broader, balanced viewpoint on Treadwell's life and final days in Alaska.
I also appreciated the info concerning Amie, Tim's girlfriend. In the end, I think this book gives a more complete picture, filling in alot of blank spots and helping bring closure to a tragic event.