By his account, Timothy Treadwell barely survived his first summer camping in Alaska's wilderness.
He had no idea how to pitch a tent, stay dry or cook for himself. He brought a sleeping bag several sizes too small.
In those early years, Treadwell looked like what he was: a shaggy blond beach bum from Malibu, Calif. But he had a thing for grizzly bears.
Treadwell, 46, persevered and spent the past 13 summers living among the immense creatures. Friends compared him to Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey.
The object of Treadwell's affections turned on him this month, when he and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, 37, were mauled to death by an old male bear outside their tent in Katmai National Park in Alaska.
Treadwell's story was a variation on a classic American tale. Battered by an aimless life in Southern California and his body ravaged by drugs, he saw the Alaska wilderness as his tonic.
There, Treadwell discovered a sense of purpose: He would live with and protect grizzlies from poachers. His fearlessness earned him fame. He wrote a book and appeared on national television.
He also had critics, who say he broke park rules, harassed wildlife and believed wrongly that he had a spiritual kinship with the bears. They long had predicted his demise if he didn't change his ways.
Treadwell was undeterred. When a Los Angeles Times reporter asked him in 1994 if he was afraid of the bears, his answer was: "They wouldn't hurt me."
"He was out there for 13 years, and it was probably a combination of skill and luck, and the luck ran out," said Louisa Willcox, a friend of Treadwell's and director of the Wild Bears Project for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
"But he also had a magic with the bears. There isn't anything else to explain it with. ... He was a bear whisperer."
Whether Timothy Treadwell had a special connection with the bears is doubted by experts, who say the animals merely tolerated his presence, and he contributed little to the body of knowledge about them. His friends say he taught more people around the world about the bears than any serious researcher ever could.
Treadwell wasn't the only person watching grizzlies in Alaska. In Katmai National Park and Preserve — one of his favorite stomping grounds — 69 commercial operators offer bear-viewing excursions, according to park records.
State wildlife officials estimate that 30,000 to 40,000 grizzlies, also known as brown bears, live in Alaska, compared to a population of 1,000 to 1,400 mostly in the northern Rockies in the contiguous United States.
What set Treadwell apart was his insistence on camping near bears and wanting to interact with them.
Katmai officials say they have nothing against people hiking or camping in bear country, but they worried that Treadwell had crossed the line.
Treadwell was born in New York in 1957 as Timothy Dexter, the third of five children. As an adult, he changed his name to Treadwell, from his mother's side of the family. He liked the alliteration of it, he told friends. After high school, Treadwell left for Southern California and landed in Long Beach, eventually working in restaurants. He indulged in booze and drugs.
An overdose — on heroin and cocaine — came in the late 1980s, according to his book "Among Grizzlies." After he left the hospital, a friend urged him to go to Alaska and watch bears. He never had spent time around bears but later wrote that they always had fascinated him.
His early attempts at camping were, at times, almost comical. He wrote that he often was cold, hungry and tormented by insects. The first time he saw a grizzly, it ran away. Treadwell later said he was sad that any bear would find him a threat.
Mark Emery, a wildlife filmmaker and outdoor guide, first saw Treadwell from the air in the early 1990s. Emery, who splits his time between Ocala, Fla., and Alaska, was on a charter flight over Hallo Bay in Katmai National Park with a film crew from National Geographic. They looked down and saw Treadwell desperately waving his arms.
"He said he wanted to get out of there right away because the bears had been in his camp," Emery said. "I took a picture of him holding a water jug that was crushed by a bear. He said he was learning to be around bears."
Joel Bennett, a Juneau-based filmmaker, had known Treadwell since 1989 and often filmed him interacting with bears. Bennett said he saw things he never thought he would see, including the time a mother bear left two cubs near Treadwell as if she expected him to baby-sit her babies.
Treadwell kept moving closer to the bears. He liked to tell of the time he calmly defused a potentially dangerous encounter with a bear by talking to it. When the confrontation had subsided, he laid down and took a nap next to the snoozing bear.
In the early years in Alaska, Treadwell stayed away from people, said John Rogers, 54, who owns Katmai Coastal Bear Tours in Homer. "He wished to maintain a very secretive existence out there (so that) ... he could blend in with the bear's habitat and within the bear's social structure," Rogers said.
Treadwell worked as a bartender at a number of Los Angeles-area restaurants during the winter. He stayed sober. With an old friend, Jewel Palovak, he wrote his 1997 book "Among Grizzlies."
And together they began Grizzly People, a nonprofit devoted to educating people — especially schoolchildren — about bears. But Treadwell's altruistic notions often overrode what little business sense he had, Palovak said.
Treadwell drew a small salary from the group and his lecturing. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio became a donor, giving Grizzly People nearly $25,000 in the past three years, DiCaprio's publicist said.
Did Treadwell have a special connection with the bears? Not all bear researchers thought so.
"I've been working on bears for a long time, and more and more I'm convinced that most of the credit for bears and people getting along goes to the bears," said John Hechtel, an Alaska Department of Fish and Game wildlife biologist who specializes in bear-human interactions.
Bears along the Alaska coast are well-fed because of salmon runs. The fish attract an extremely dense population of bears. So, the challenge for the coastal grizzlies isn't dealing with people — it's competing with other grizzlies for food.
Treadwell spent his summers camping in several parks in Alaska, but Katmai National Park, on the Alaska Peninsula, became a favorite. Almost from the start, though, National Park Service officials worried about his behavior.
In 1998, according to the park service, Treadwell was issued a citation for storing an ice chest in his sleeping tent — a dumb move in bear country. Rangers also found boxes of co*ke and canned fruit outside his tent. On another occasion, he was ordered by rangers to remove from his campsite a portable generator, a device prohibited in wilderness areas.
Deb Liggett, outgoing superintendent of Katmai National Park, became sufficiently concerned about Treadwell that she took him for a cup of coffee in Anchorage several years ago. "I told him that if we had any more violations from him, we would petition the U.S. magistrate to ban him from the park," she said.
Liggett applauded the fact that Treadwell was winning fans for the bears and was being more careful to implore people not to attempt what he did. But she and other park officials fretted that one swipe of a paw would undo all that.
Amie Huguenard apparently didn't share the same concern. A physician's assistant in Aurora, Colo., she first fell in love with Treadwell's book and eventually its author, said Kim Sullivan, a friend who worked with Huguenard.
Huguenard quit her job Jan. 31 and moved to Malibu.
The couple had spent parts of the two previous summers together in Alaska. Huguenard told Sullivan once about the time that she and Treadwell were trying to cross a river when a bear charged them. Sullivan recalls Huguenard telling it: "It was a two-hour standoff, and she could feel the bear's breath on her."
Huguenard boarded a plane to Alaska to meet Treadwell in September. The couple wanted one more chance to be with the bears before winter fell.
Treadwell wrote Bill Sims a letter a few weeks ago. Sims owns Newhalen Lodge near Katmai, and Treadwell said in the letter that a few bears at his campsite near Kaflia Bay were more aggressive than usual.
Investigators still are trying to sort out exactly what happened to Treadwell and Huguenard. They say it's doubtful they ever will know the full story.
The pilot of a bush plane found the partially buried remains of Treadwell and Huguenard at their campsite Oct. 6 when he arrived to pick them up.
When park rangers and state troopers arrived, they killed two bears that they say charged them. A necropsy of one of the bears, a 28-year-old male adult, determined that it had fed on the bodies, said John Quinley, a National Park Service spokesman.
A video camera was found. The attack was recorded on the last three minutes of the tape, but there is only audio. Investigators think that Huguenard was inside the tent when Treadwell ran into the bear, and that he may have been wearing a voice-activated microphone.
According to Alaska State Troopers, the tape begins with Treadwell screaming that he is being attacked. "Come out here; I'm being killed out here," Treadwell said.
"Play dead!" Huguenard yelled in reply. She then urged him to "fight back."
He asks her to get a pan and to come hit the bear. And then the tape ends.
Officials believe Treadwell had become the first person killed by a grizzly in the 85-year history of Katmai National Park.
