Pod Insights Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks The Grizzly Deaths of Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard, Part 2: Tragedy in the Grizzly Maze About this episode In the second and final chapter of our series on Timothy Treadwell, Wes takes us through the circumstances that ultimately led to the horrific and violent demise of both Timothy and his partner Amie Huguenard. On Oct. 5, 2003, an Alaskan brown bear decided to kill and then feed on the famous bear whisperer and his companion. We break down the evidence from the attack to recreate what most likely happened that afternoon, and then we go over some of the different theories concerning the responsible bears. We also examine the genesis and growth of the love that Timothy and Amie had for each other, as well as the somewhat rocky relationship that Timothy had with the National Park Service that extended to the scientific community at large. It's an absolutely crazy closing chapter to our most requested story ever, and we hope you like it!
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Transcript 19,355 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Wes Larson? Hey everyone, it's Wes. I know you guys are excited to get to Treadwell Part 2, but I have a fast announcement before we get started. We just recorded a subscription episode with my mentor, Tom Smith, and it was really fun. We talked about Timothy Treadwell, about his life, about his mission, about some of the experiences that Tom had with him. And he told me some stories that I'd never heard before about Timothy, which I've talked to Tom for days, if not weeks, about Timothy Treadwell. So I was surprised that there was still more in the tank. Anyway, that is going to be a subscription-only episode. It's coming out in a few days, but I highly recommend it. So if you've thought about subscribing, you can subscribe and listen to it. If you're not into it, you can always cancel or just back out the next day. So that will be coming out this week. Really hope you guys enjoy it.
0:44 Wes Larson? And with no further ado, here's Timothy Treadwell, Part 2.
1:01 Speaker 01 Well, let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, there is no, no, no other place in the world that is more dangerous, more exciting than the Grizzly Maze. Come here and camp here. Come here and try to do what I do. You will die. You will die here. You will frickin' die here. They will get you. I've found a way. I've found a way to survive with them. Am I a great person? I don't know. I don't know. We're all great people. Everyone has something in them that's wonderful. I'm just different, and I love these bears enough to do it right. And I'm edgy enough, and I'm tough enough, but mostly I love these bears enough to survive and do it right.
1:43 Wes Larson? All right, welcome back to Tooth and Claw Podcast. Are you guys edgy and tough enough for this episode?
1:49 Mike Smith? I thought I was. Maybe I'm not.
1:52 Jeff Larson? I couldn't handle those flies like he does. I think he's got me beat.
1:56 Wes Larson? Well, welcome back, everyone. Tooth and Claw Podcast. I'm Wes Larson. I'm a bear biologist. I've been working with bears for about 12 to 13 years now, and I'm joined here by my two co-hosts.
2:06 Jeff Larson? You love doing business with them.
2:08 Wes Larson? I love business with bears. That's kind of my main thing, just making deals.
2:13 Jeff Larson? Wes is the CEO of Bears.
2:15 Wes Larson? CEOs don't...
2:17 Wes Larson? I don't want to be a CEO right now. Jeff, you want to introduce yourself?
2:21 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I'm Jeff Larson. I'm Wes's little brother. I worked with black bears with Wes. I know a lot about bears, but not, not nearly as much as Wes.
2:32 Wes Larson? Mike, you want to let us know who you are?
2:35 Mike Smith? Yeah.
2:35 Jeff Larson? And how much you know about bears?
2:37 Mike Smith? I know little to nothing about bears. I just, I'm the producer at this here podcast.
2:44 Mike Smith? What I'm trying to do there.
2:45 Jeff Larson? You know, who knows a lot about bears is who you, we just interviewed.
2:49 Wes Larson? Yeah. Perfect segue into that. We talked to Tom Smith yesterday, who was my mentor. He is the professor I worked under while I did my masters. And he actually was working in cat mine when Timothy Treadwell was there. So he was really fun to talk to. He had a lot of insights and a lot of stories. Some stuff that I had never even heard before, which is crazy because I've probably spent five days talking to Tom about Timothy Treadwell. So it was wild to me that there was still more in the vault and it was a really, really fun conversation.
3:22 Jeff Larson? He's kind of who Treadwell like wanted to be, you know?
3:27 Wes Larson? Yeah.
3:27 Jeff Larson? He's like, or like should have been type of thing.
3:30 Wes Larson? Totally. Um, anyway, that was really fun. That's going to be available on our subscription channels. And yeah, again, like some really interesting insights into the Treadwell story. Far past what I could ever give.
3:42 Jeff Larson? If you've ever seen like the viral video of the polar bear playing with like sled dogs or Alaskan dogs. Like you'll want to listen to this because he had some really interesting behind the scenes.
3:55 Wes Larson? Yeah.
3:55 Jeff Larson? Shows that polar bears don't want to just exclusively play with dogs.
3:59 Wes Larson? Yeah. Yeah. Canadian dogs. Those are in Churchill.
4:03 Jeff Larson? Mike didn't say a single word to him. Mike didn't even talk.
4:06 Mike Smith? I was uninvited, which is the, it's the right move. I would have dominated that conversation. I would have been like, Tom, I know you think you know about bears, but what do you know about anime?
4:18 Wes Larson? Exactly. Well, this is part two of our Timothy Treadwell story. We're so thrilled with how much everyone liked part one. These are episodes that we've put a ton of time into. I've read a lot of books. I've watched Grizzly Man now so many times, I could probably quote it. It has dominated my mind for the last few weeks, and it feels really good to be getting these episodes out because I'm, it feels like I'm able to kind of finally move past them. So I'm excited to do this one. I feel like last week was kind of the buildup, and this one is when all the kind of the dominos come crashing down. The house of cards falls finally. All right. Are you guys ready?
4:59 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
4:59 Wes Larson? Let's go.
5:00 Jeff Larson? Let's do it. I want to know what happens to him.
5:02 Wes Larson? Well, on the afternoon of October 5th, 2003, there were two sounds disrupting the normal quiet surrounding the shores of Upper Cathleo Lake. One was the sound of snapping human bones and tearing flesh as a large brown bear easily separated meat and limbs from the now motionless body of Timothy Treadwell, just a few dozen meters from his tent. The other sound was much louder. It was a primal, almost non-human scream, and that scream was coming from Amy Huguenard, who was standing just outside their tent and was staring and screaming in the direction where Timothy had just been drug off. And totally alone now and hundreds of miles from help, she couldn't process what she had just seen, and her scream seemed to be coming from somewhere deep inside, from a place it's like reserved for characters
5:47 Wes Larson? in horror movies. This bear, satisfied that its current opponent wasn't getting back up, picked up its bloody muzzle, sniffed the air, and turned its ears toward the source of the high pitched scream. The first kill had come pretty easy, probably a lot easier than I hoped for, and it lumbered away from the body and back toward the sound. And that scream that was drifting across the lake quickly rose in its pitch, and then was abruptly cut off, and the grizzly maze was quiet again.
6:15 Wes Larson? So at the end of episode one, we left Timothy Treadwell where he was a thick of his expeditions to Alaska. He's spending the early part of the summer in the Grizzly Sanctuary, which again is Hallow Bay, and the second part of the summer and the early fall in the Grizzly Maze, which is Cathlia Bay and Cathlia Lake. And as we mentioned in part one, he's breaking a lot of rules. During the early years of his expeditions, there really weren't that many people in these areas as him, and the bear viewing industry is kind of just getting started. But as he spends more and more time there, he's seeing more and more people show up in these areas. And there starts to be a lot more run ins with Timmy the Bear, as Tom would call him. So there just are a lot of anecdotes about this. There's a lot
7:00 Wes Larson? of stuff about him running away like a bear, stuff about him filming people from the shadows of the alders, him kind of creeping around these people as they're just looking at these bears. And then there's some really bizarre stories, too. There's two different guides that report seeing him in a full tuxedo, and he's out among these bears, like, kind of like dancing around them. And then there's also a report where he has these two big photographic reflectors in his hand, and he's like spinning, and this guy said he was like a whirling dervish, spinning around, which I love whenever anyone ever drops the term whirling dervish.
7:40 Mike Smith? The whirling dervish, yeah.
7:41 Wes Larson? Yeah, that sounds like like an animal name that you would make up, Mike. It's like your spinkled toothed boar cat.
7:46 Mike Smith? The boar cat. The thing I would be more surprised, like, the whirling dervish sounds like the more strange behavior, but I think I'd be more surprised to see a man in a tuxedo than even that.
7:57 Wes Larson? Yeah, that one, that one was really funny to me. Again, I want to bring up my sources. So the two that I use the most are Death in the Grizzly Maze: The Timothy Treadwell Story by Mike Lipinski, and then I also use the book The Grizzly Maze: Timothy Treadwell's Fatal Obsession with Alaskan Bears by Nick Janz. And those are the two books that I consulted the most. I also read a lot of articles, and then, of course, the movie Grizzly Man by Werner Herzog.
8:25 Mike Smith? Did you read that one? What's that book called? Maze Runner? The Maze Runner series?
8:30 Wes Larson? I did not.
8:30 Mike Smith? That probably would have been helpful.
8:31 Wes Larson? Well, I actually think I read the first book of that a long time ago.
8:35 Mike Smith? Oh, that's probably where you got the idea to do this episode.
8:40 Wes Larson? So a lot of this was really harmless behavior, but it does have people kind of worried about his mental stability out there. And a lot of these reports start trickling their way into the upper leadership of Catmai National Park. And I think it's really important that we dive into this a little bit today about his relationship with Catmai, because it's kind of crazy that they let him operate in the park for so long. And I think a big part of that is because he was so charming. And Tom even talked about this a little bit yesterday. It does seem like most of the Rangers and park personnel and people that met him kind of liked him. Like, they thought that he was a friendly guy and interesting. And there's lots of Rangers that talk about how
9:22 Wes Larson? he was really fun to sit around the fire and just chat with. And then also, these books do mention that he, when he was around female Rangers, especially, he would like really amp up his charm and just lay it on thick. And so a lot of these Rangers did end up forming friendships with him. And it is a lot harder to write a citation for your friend than it is some guy who's being really antagonistic toward you. He also would kind of fold when people told him he was doing something wrong. So a lot of the times, he would just promise that he would change, that he would be better. And, you know, over the years, his behavior didn't get any better. It did seem to actually be ramping up. And they even created that rule that we talked about in part one, which they dubbed the Treadwell Rule, which was that after camping in a certain spot for seven
10:06 Wes Larson? days, you had to move your camp a mile from where you were. And that really made things tricky for him. And he broke that rule a lot. And then he also like got a boat so he could move around a little bit easier. But complaints about Timothy from other visitors, from Rangers, from bear biologists start adding up, and they find themselves on the desk of the Catmai Superintendent. And finally, in 1998, Deb Liggett, who was the Superintendent of Catmai National Park, arranges a meeting with Timothy. And she had recently been named the superintendent and something that happens in the park service that I've learned is that often in these smaller parks where there's not a ton of visitation, it's kind of like a training ground for up and coming superintendents.
10:48 Wes Larson? So their like goal is maybe to go to Glacier or Yellowstone or something like that. But they first spend some time in places like Katmai or these smaller, less visited national parks to kind of, you know, learn how to be a superintendent. So there tends to be kind of a revolving door of superintendents. Every time I say superintendent, I think of Super Nintendo. Chalmers.
11:08 Jeff Larson? Chalmers.
11:10 Jeff Larson? Emphasis on it.
11:11 Wes Larson? Yeah, uh, there tends to be kind of a revolving door. And because of that, this, the buck kind of got passed with Timothy Treadwell. Like often there were superintendents that knew about him that wanted to do something about him, but they would kind of just pass it off to whoever was coming in next. And that's part of the reason that he wasn't banned for so long was just that it kept getting passed to the next person. But Deb Liggett didn't feel that way. And not long before or not long after being named superintendent, she called Timothy and she told him that she wanted to meet him before his next season. So in May of 1998, she picked him up from his hotel, drove him to a restaurant where they shared a meal and she had a really frank discussion with him.
11:54 Wes Larson? And she told him that he needed to stop with this bear whisperer stuff, that he needed to stop approaching bears and harassing them. And she said that if he didn't stop, she would go to the park solicitor and have him kicked out for three years. And that's his worst nightmare. So he immediately agrees to clean up his act and she thinks that he believes her. And she hits him with one last warning. She says that she would never forgive him if his actions caused one of her people to have to go out and harm a bear. And that actually makes him cry. Uh, so as she's dropping him off, she says that and he starts crying and she feels like, okay, I got, I got through to this guy. And I kind of feel like what he should have done is just tell her that he was the boss
12:37 Wes Larson? of all foxes and all bears and she would have left him alone. Only Timmy is the boss of all foxes. And all bears. You're the ruler. That's all he needed to say and she would have listened to him, but he didn't do it.
12:50 Mike Smith? In that voice.
12:52 Wes Larson? So not long after that meeting, Deb Liggett was informed that Timothy was appearing on the Tom Snyder Show, which is a popular late, late night show at that point. And boy, does he do some talking on that show. In the show, he pretty much states that he was the bear's sole protector from machine gun wielding poachers. And that the park service didn't give a shit about the bears. So much so that they were going to allow bear hunting for grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park. And he makes all these claims on a nationally syndicated television program. I like to picture Deb Liggett, like watching this and doing a spit take. And it makes her really mad. Uh, especially because it includes videos of him approaching bears really closely, you know, pretty much touching them.
13:36 Wes Larson? So she gets pissed. She immediately puts together evidence and she sends it to the park solicitor in Anchorage, which is the process she needs to go through to get Timothy officially cited and banned from the park. When the solicitor writes back though, they declined to recommend prosecution, which from what I understand, it's pretty much just means that her hands are tied when it comes to kicking him out of the park. At that point in time, for whatever reason, they needed to go through this official channel of a park solicitor to get someone banned from the park. And I don't think it's that way anymore, but I could be wrong. All right. So for whatever the reason, they don't prosecute Timothy and she doesn't really have a way to kick him out. But their relationship has soured.
14:21 Wes Larson? He starts sending lots of letters to Deb Liggett and to the park, trying to convince them that he's there in the bear's best interest. And he even starts kind of narking on other guides that are getting too close to the bears. And at one point he even, yeah. At one point he even says they should make a new position called a bear guardian and give him this position that he would do it for free and that he would waive all of his liability in case something happened. Which you know is is an interesting pitch, but they obviously don't take him up on this. Through all of this, he tells Deb Leggett over and over and over again that if anything ever happens to him, he does not want them to harm the responsible bears. So they're really curt and professional now in their responses to Timothy.
15:06 Wes Larson? They tell him in like, you know, no uncertain terms that he needs to stop getting close to the bears, that he has to act more appropriately, or that there's going to be serious repercussions.
15:15 Mike Smith? Do you think she was like that Al Pacino scene in Devil's Advocate? Where she's like, look, but don't touch. Touch, but don't taste. Oh, how does it end?
15:27 Wes Larson? I don't know.
15:28 Jeff Larson? We'll put the clip, we'll put the clip in.
15:30 Speaker 04 Look, but don't touch. Touch, but don't taste. Taste, don't swallow.
15:40 Wes Larson? I think that's exactly what she did. But he has a secret weapon. He reaches out to all these different classes that he's spoken to in California. And he gets tons of schoolchildren and supporters to write letters to the superintendent in his defense. And she's flooded with letters. Yeah. They come from everyone from six year old kids to leaders of the Sierra Club and the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. But one particularly passionate letter comes on March 4th, 2001, from a young woman. And she argues in favor of Timothy Treadwell staying there with the bears. She says that it's his life's mission, that he's the only one protecting these bears. And she's really passionate about it. And the name of that woman was Amy Huguenard. So I'm in a five star hotel right now in Thailand.
16:25 Wes Larson? I'm sitting on the bed. It's a great bed. It's amazing. I'm still dreaming of my bed back home. And that's because it's a Brooklyn Bedding bed. I have the Sedona Elite from Brooklyn Bedding. I absolutely love it. Every night I look forward to just climbing into bed and going to sleep because it's such a good mattress. And that's because Brooklyn Bedding has been assembling top tier mattresses for over 30 years in their Arizona factory. There's no middlemen, there's no gimmicks, just top tier quality, honest pricing and real American craftsmanship. A better night's sleep. Brooklyn Bedding knows that sleep isn't one size fits all. And that's why they offer 15 plus different mattress models for every body, every sleep style, even in the hard to find sizes.
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19:52 Wes Larson? All right. So I think it's really important that we spend some time on Amy. It makes sense to me why a lot of the coverage is always focused on Timothy. Because he was the one that had kind of dedicated his life to these bears that was out there for 13 years. And she was kind of an unfortunate bystander in a lot of ways. But I think that her story for me feels much more relatable to the common person and much more tragic. So I do really want to talk about her. Amy Lynn Huguenard was born in 1965 in Buffalo, New York, and she grew up in Indiana. She was shy, but well liked and always had a passion for the outdoors and wilderness. And that passion really blossomed when she attended college at University of Colorado in Boulder.
20:33 Wes Larson? And a lot of her classmates were busy going to parties, binge drinking, kind of doing all the stuff that you do in college. But she spent essentially all of her free time outdoors where she got really into hiking. She climbed a lot of the 14ers in Colorado and in the process she got really tough. She was barely five feet tall. She weighed less than a hundred pounds, but she could out hike anyone. And had that kind of inner toughness that betrayed her shyness and general appearance. She graduated with the degree in molecular cellular developmental biology and then went to University of Alabama Birmingham School of Medicine to get a master's degree. And after getting her masters, she really missed the Rocky Mountains. So she decided to go back
21:15 Wes Larson? to Colorado. She knew that to become a doctor, she'd need to get her doctorate, but more and more her life was centered around hiking, biking and running. So she worked as a physician's assistant in Colorado and spent every spare minute in the mountains of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. A trip to the Tetons actually changed her perception about wilderness because she was finally hiking in grizzly country and she really liked the way that it made her feel. It felt intoxicating to her to be around grizzlies and she knew that she had to pay more attention to her surroundings and just be more careful in general. So one day while she was in a Colorado bookstore in the late 90s, a book caught her eye. And that book was among grizzlies and it was written by Timothy Treadwell. She read the book in pretty much
22:00 Wes Larson? a single sitting and was just completely captivated by this personal relationship that he had with an animal that she had come to have so much respect for. So when Timothy gave a talk at the University of Colorado in Boulder in 1999, she was there. And she was watching Timothy while he spoke and slowly she started to kind of think, this guy's pretty attractive. I'm actually like kind of into him. And he made a really big impression on her. And in January of 2000, she wrote him and let him know. She told him that she'd been in his presentation, that she had loved it. And on that note, she left her number, just in case he ever wanted to talk to her about bears.
22:40 Jeff Larson? That's why on like first dates, I always talk about bears.
22:43 Wes Larson? It's a good move.
22:44 Jeff Larson? No matter what. You gotta get the conversation to bears. And I mean, it just works 100% of the time.
22:52 Wes Larson? I gotta start preparing for first dates. Have like a little presentation on my phone with like a slideshow.
23:01 Wes Larson? Here are all the things I've learned about bears. And then slowly, as you talk, they're just gonna think, oh, this guy's kinda hot.
23:08 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
23:08 Wes Larson? Kind of into this.
23:11 Wes Larson? One thing that we haven't really gotten into too much is that Timothy really loved women. From my research, it seemed like he was more comfortable around women in general, and he found it easier to connect with them, and that a lot of those initial connections turned romantic, and then turned friendly. Herzog includes a lot of him talking about how hard of a time he has maintaining romantic relationships. But I think part of that was because his notoriety as the bear whisperer had led to this much bigger dating pool than he was used to. I think he had a lot of options.
23:44 Jeff Larson? Yeah, he, okay. He says that he like would prefer just to be gay. Because it's so easy, like, they have such an easy life, gays, you know? No one ever gives them a hard time about anything.
23:56 Wes Larson? You know, this, this film was made at a different time. Timothy lived in a different time, but there is that portion where he talks about, yeah, what Jeff was saying, where he thinks it'd be easier to be gay because connections are so much easier to make. Yeah, I'm with Jeff on that. I don't think that's an easier lifestyle to pick for a straight white dude.
24:14 Jeff Larson? Especially back then.
24:16 Wes Larson? Yeah, and it's no secret that he would actually occasionally invite women to come visit him while he was observing the bears in Hallow Bay. He even bragged on that Tom Snyder show about having sex with a woman while the bears were mating nearby. So he was pretty openly kind of the slithario.
24:34 Jeff Larson? He says in the documentary, he's good at sex. And I was kinda like, I haven't believed you on a lot of things, but I kinda believe you on this one.
24:43 Wes Larson? Yeah.
24:44 Jeff Larson? I feel like, I feel like the next guy, the girl or whoever goes on dates with, she's not gonna be like as wowed in the bedroom as having sex with like grizzly bears having sex next to them.
24:58 Wes Larson? That's true. Yeah, it probably ups, ups the intensity a little bit when you can hear two grizzly bears mating nearby.
25:04 Jeff Larson? That became like your kink and you only wanted that afterwards.
25:09 Wes Larson? Maybe that's his justification. Yeah. Uh, I do want to make it clear that I don't think this is why Timothy was living with bears. I don't think it was just like the most dangerous ploy ever just to get laid. I do think it was a side effect of his mission that he didn't mind taking advantage of from time to time. So he actually, he ends up calling Amy, a friendship begins. And then when he visits Colorado again during the end of 2000, they meet and from what I understand, that's when they started a romantic relationship. He's unlike anyone that she's ever met. She quickly falls in love with him. Uh, he's following his heart. He's following his passion. And for her, that was the most noble thing that a human being could do. And that's
25:53 Wes Larson? the thing that she's really attracted to. And while Timothy also feels strongly for Amy, he refuses to put any kind of terms or goalposts around their relationship. He tells her frankly, that his, his life revolves around the bears and that he doesn't want to settle down with anyone. And even though she had decided that she's like fully invested in him, he just like, didn't want a girlfriend. And she seems to understand and be okay with that.
26:18 Jeff Larson? And that's an interesting one too, where like, if he did decide to settle down with her, it's like, the whole reason she loves him is because he lives with bears.
26:29 Wes Larson? Yeah, you gotta keep that going.
26:30 Jeff Larson? If he just got like a insurance salesman job and like, tried to make a home with her, it would just be such a different dynamic than what they started with.
26:41 Wes Larson? Weirdly, I can kind of like relate to this a little bit where when I was single, I feel like I went on a number of dates where I could tell that if I wasn't actively working with bears, those girls like, wouldn't be interested in me at all. And so, yeah, anyway.
26:58 Mike Smith? I got that a lot when I was in cybersecurity.
27:02 Wes Larson? Girls were like, ah.
27:05 Jeff Larson? You had like a lot of girls interested and when you quit, it was just like nothing.
27:11 Wes Larson? Right. Dry as a riverbed. So feeling feelings do continue to grow on both sides of this relationship. And during one of the early seasons that they meet, Timothy is actually at the grizzly maze and he gets Giardia. And he's hallucinating and while he's in the tent hallucinating, he sees Amy walk in front of the tent. So he calls Jewel, Jewel gets in touch with Amy and she actually arranges for medicine to be dropped at his tent site. So it was like, he knew who to talk to, even though it seems like there was an extra person, an extra step in there. Like Jewel's like, I could just do that.
27:47 Jeff Larson? And it wasn't like too complicated of a solution.
27:51 Wes Larson? No, right.
27:54 Wes Larson? Uh, he does have a satellite phone with him, which is something I think we've talked about, but it is important to note that he does have a satellite phone. In 2001, he actually invites Amy to join him while he's watching the bears. She spends a week with him in Hollow Bay, which is really idyllic and beautiful. And then a week in the grizzly maze, which is much more intense and scary. Uh, he's much more careful around the bears when Amy's around, but she still gets to see them up close. She tells friends that they haven't lived until they've taken a bath with grizzly bears. Like.
28:24 Jeff Larson? They're like, okay.
28:26 Wes Larson? Yeah, sure. Thanks, Amy.
28:29 Jeff Larson? I guess.
28:30 Wes Larson? Their kids are like screaming in the background. They, in, in his journal and Timothy's journal, he would write that the summer would deepen their relationship, but also complicate it. And no doubt he's feeling more pressure to commit to Amy, but he really only wants to be free and just focus on these bears.
28:50 Jeff Larson? It'd be really interesting to like be doing that during nine 11.
28:55 Wes Larson? Yeah.
28:55 Jeff Larson? Cause that's the year nine 11.
28:57 Wes Larson? Yeah.
28:58 Mike Smith? That would be weird.
28:59 Jeff Larson? Be out with the bears.
29:01 Wes Larson? It's funny because there's a clip in Grizzly Man where it's the one where he goes on a rant against the park service and stuff. And you hear him say, oh, it's a patriotic time right now. And I thought, oh, that's because September 11th just happened.
29:15 Mike Smith? Yeah.
29:16 Wes Larson? Which is really, I thought it was interesting.
29:18 Mike Smith? That is interesting.
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29:50 Wes Larson? Tooth and Claws brought to you by MasterClass. And I was really excited when I saw that MasterClass came on as a sponsor because actually a year ago, I was trying to think of a good presents for, for Jesse's mom. And I thought, you know, she's someone who's really trying to work on her writing. She really wants to learn from people that are good at writing. And I looked into MasterClass and I thought, man, this is a perfect gift. And I got her an annual membership to MasterClass, which ended up being, I think, probably the best gift she got last year. Don't quote me on that, but I know she was really excited about it. And it is a really interesting gift. With MasterClass, you can give your loved ones this gift where they get to learn from the best to become the best.
30:32 Wes Larson? It's the only streaming platform where you can learn and grow with over 200 of the world's best. And that's why Wirecutter calls it an invaluable gift. You gift unlimited learning. You can learn from any MasterClass instructor, anywhere, on a smartphone, on a computer, on a smart TV, or even just in audio mode. So it's really interesting. There's all sorts of different, really cool people you can learn from. There's actors, there's writers, there's journalists, FBI hostage negotiators. Jeff, I know you've always really wanted to learn how to negotiate hostages.
31:04 Jeff Larson? They always die when I try.
31:09 Wes Larson? And the classes, the classes really make a difference. Eighty-eight percent of members feel like MasterClass made a positive impact on their lives. So I really loved giving it. I also got it for myself. I've learned a lot as I've gone through some of the different classes that I took. And you can give your loved ones a year of learning with MasterClass. So MasterClass always has great offers during the holidays, sometimes up to as much as 50% off. So head over to masterclass.com/tooth for their current offer. That's up to 50% off at masterclass.com/tooth. Masterclass.com/tooth. So in 2002, Timothy again invites Amy out for a couple of weeks and things pretty much go the same.
31:54 Wes Larson? They share a deep passion for the wilderness. Amy's every bit as tough as Timothy, if not tougher. And she realizes more and more that Timothy is always going to keep her at arm's distance. And she seems to accept this and is grateful that she's just really become an important presence in his life. That's enough for her at this point. During the winter of 2002, something seems to change. She seems to be making some headway with Timothy and she convinces him to let her move in with him in Malibu. She finds a job as a PA in Cedar Sinai in Los Angeles. And on the Grizzly People website, Amy is now named as expedition coordinator and consultant. And she seems to be increasingly changing her orbit to revolve around Timothy Treadwell and the bears.
32:37 Wes Larson? And I do, I feel like even as I'm hearing myself say this, it feels kind of like I'm making this sound really one-sided, but from everything I read, they really cared about each other, but it did seem like she was the one that was doing most of kind of the pursuing in this relationship.
32:53 Mike Smith? Okay.
32:53 Wes Larson? All right. So in 2003, when she's 37 years old, she makes plan to visit Tim twice during the season, once in July at the Grizzly Sanctuary and once in September in the Grizzly Maze. So while it would seem that everything on paper points toward this evolving, committed relationship between the two. When Timothy arrives in Alaska in 2003, he kind of tells everyone that he meets that he's completely unencumbered and single and free. And Kathleen Parker, who's this Kodiak resident, she's featured in Grizzly Man. She keeps his gear over the winter. She lets him stay at her house. She says that even though Timothy would tell her about his girlfriends,
33:34 Wes Larson? he never once mentions Amy when he's preparing to go to Katmai that season and only brings her up later. Yeah. When he says that she's gonna join him.
33:43 Jeff Larson? Well, in the Grizzly Man too, like, he definitely prefers the narrative of he's out there by himself the entire time. Like, you know, he just makes an emphasis even when he's not alone to say he's alone.
33:56 Wes Larson? There's that scene where you see a woman there with him and then he immediately is like, I'm out here alone again.
34:02 Jeff Larson? I've never been more alone.
34:04 Wes Larson? Yeah.
34:05 Jeff Larson? Like, how?
34:06 Wes Larson? Yeah.
34:07 Jeff Larson? If you're alone, you're alone.
34:09 Wes Larson? I think there's three possibilities to consider here. The first that is what Jeff is saying, that he doesn't want to ruin his image as this solo bear whisperer that's completely wild and free in Alaska. And having a girlfriend or even a significant other might detract from that image. I think the second is that he's been actually warned by a lot of his main donors in really simple language, that he cannot have any romantic visitors with them when he's doing his work with the bears. And his biggest donor, Roland Dixon, told him point blank that he'll pull funding if Amy shows up in Katmai. So he might be hiding this just to kind of protect his support. And then I think the third option
34:52 Wes Larson? is a combination of the two, which I think is probably the most likely. All right. So when the field season in 2003 starts, there's a lot in motion. He'd just been on David Letterman for a second time. It's made him more famous than ever. And there's a Disney project.
35:09 Jeff Larson? Did you watch him on Letterman?
35:10 Wes Larson? I have watched him on Letterman.
35:12 Jeff Larson? How was he as a guest?
35:13 Wes Larson? He's good. It's, you know, Letterman like, kind of just makes fun of everyone and Timothy. I think he handles it about as well as he could have. But um, I, I had a hard time finding full videos of any of these appearances, but I did find snippets. And he's, he is good. Like, I can see why Letterman invited him back because they have a good kind of repertoire on the, on the show. One project that he was working on that summer is Disney had actually contacted him about doing a short film before the film Brother Bear. And they wanted to film it in Kodiak with Timothy. And so, like, this is probably going to be his biggest media victory ever.
35:52 Wes Larson? In a lot of ways, the park has kind of thrown up their hands and they're realizing he's gonna get, he's like, hard to get rid of at this point. So the park is involving now this guy Chuck Bartelbaugh from the Center of Wildlife Information. And what they're trying to do now is more help Timothy clean up his messaging, clean up his message to the public. So that they can work with him instead of against him. So really a lot of things-
36:16 Jeff Larson? Bigger break than the bartender and cheers.
36:21 Wes Larson? Oh, yeah, much bigger than being.
36:24 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
36:25 Wes Larson? Yeah, so things are really going his direction at this point and he's in really good spirits. And I do think he's actually starting to realize that his craziest videos are doing some harm to his message. Even though they're the ones that everyone wants to see. And there's maybe just a little bit of hope that he can be directed toward being a good spokesperson for the park and for the bears. I will say like his videos from 2003 still show him approaching bears and getting really close to bears. So in my opinion, I don't think he ever was gonna fully change. But it does seem like there's a little bit of momentum in the right direction.
37:01 Jeff Larson? He at least understood that it wasn't like the best.
37:06 Wes Larson? Right. I think he knew that he couldn't do it forever. And part of that too is because of feedback from bear biologists. He'd gone to a bear biologist's meeting in Bozeman. And one of the most prominent bear biologists ever, Chuck Johnkell, had stood up after Timothy gave a presentation and said, I have some real problems with what you're doing. And it really like was hard for him to hear that. I think he really looked up to a lot of- These bear biologists and kind of wanted to be like them. And when he heard this kind of feedback from them, it made him want to change.
37:37 Mike Smith? Yeah, I can kind of sense in him a sensitive soul, someone who doesn't respond all the way. Well, I don't know if healthy response to criticism, but just like really takes that kind of thing hard.
37:49 Wes Larson? I think it's because he kind of knew that he was a bit of a fraud, you know, and I have like, I need to call him that. And I know that's a harsh word, but he was pretending to be a bear biologist or pretending to be this protector. And he knew that he wasn't either of those things deep down. And so when he heard it directly from someone that was one of those things, I think it was hard for him to process that.
38:10 Mike Smith? Sure.
38:11 Wes Larson? But he's really cheerful. He's really upbeat when he arrives in Alaska in 2003. He spends the first month of his season at the Grizzly Sanctuary in Hallow Bay, goes off without a hitch. He goes back to Kodiak to film this project with Disney. He has to do that under their permit because Kodiak won't write him a permit anymore to do commercial work with these bears. And while he's filming that, his filmmaker friend talks to Timothy and says, hey, we, we got this. There's really not much left to film here. Like we kind of are good on bears. Maybe it's time to move on to something else. And Timothy kind of just shrugs him off, even though he's kind of starting to focus a little bit more on harp seals in the winters. Timothy has like some, some kind of stuff that he's doing with harp seals too.
38:55 Mike Smith? What?
38:55 Wes Larson? Knows, yeah, that he's never.
38:57 Mike Smith? Research.
38:58 Wes Larson? Yeah.
38:59 Mike Smith? Harp, harp man.
39:00 Wes Larson? He was working with Sea Shepherd with them, like the Paul Watson. What was that? What was that show called again? Whale Wars. You guys ever watch Whale Wars?
39:11 Mike Smith? No, no.
39:12 Wes Larson? I watched Whale Wars a bit.
39:14 Jeff Larson? That sounds good.
39:15 Mike Smith? I like whales being at peace.
39:17 Jeff Larson? Oh, really?
39:18 Mike Smith? Yeah.
39:19 Jeff Larson? I would love to see a whale war. I just feel like it won't deliver on the title.
39:24 Wes Larson? It was on Animal Planet and it was where the, it's like these, I, I don't want to call them eco terrorists, but these people would like attack Japanese whaling boats as they were trying to get whales.
39:34 Mike Smith? Oh.
39:35 Wes Larson? It was a good, it was a good show.
39:36 Mike Smith? That sounds a lot more interesting to me now. Yeah.
39:39 Wes Larson? Yeah.
39:40 Jeff Larson? To me, it'd be so much better if there's like no people, it's just whale wars.
39:45 Wes Larson? You know what's that's gonna play if anything happens, it's gonna be a whale like bumping a different whale and like that's the extent of it.
39:52 Jeff Larson? Doing it like in the.
39:54 Wes Larson? They're not gonna have like swords.
39:56 Jeff Larson? Like the Revolutionary War where they just line up at each other and then like ram it.
40:02 Wes Larson? I mean, if that's what it was, I would watch, you know?
40:06 Jeff Larson? That's what I'm thinking. That's.
40:08 Wes Larson? It's not gonna be that though.
40:11 Jeff Larson? All right, whales are like up against like four humpback whales, one blue whale type of thing.
40:17 Wes Larson? All right, so things go smoothly in both hallow and then in Kodiak, but when he arrives at the grizzly maze in Kathlia Bay in late July, things are far from calm. He almost immediately notices more bears than normal, including a lot of bears that he hasn't seen in previous years. And there seems to be this kind of undercurrent of anxiety among the bears, and that manifests in a lot of fights and a lot of squabbles between the bears. He notices that a lot of the females and subadults that are usually feeding in the salmon streams at Kathlia have been pushed out by these big dominant males. And these males get the more ominous names that we talked about in part one. You start hearing names like demon, big red machine, Satan, all these different kind of much, much scarier
41:01 Wes Larson? than Sergeant Brown or Fluffles or whatever bears were called. Yeah. So on August 21st, 2003, he writes in his journal, and he says, "Much danger for me. I feel a great deal of paranoia and rightfully so. Some 500 yards away, the creek is loaded with bears and trouble. The chemistry between the bears is explosive. Three killer bears. I feel the tension growing." And then there's this clip from Grizzly Man where he shows an aggressive bear behind him that actually could very well be the bear that killed him.
41:31 Speaker 01 But I will tell you something. It is the old bear, one who is struggling for survival and an aggressive one at that, who's the one that you must be very careful of, for these are the bears that on occasion do, for survival, kill and eat humans. Could Ollie the big old bear possibly kill and eat Timothy Treadwell? What do you think, Ollie? I think if you were weak around him.
42:00 Speaker 01 You're going down his, down his gullet, going down the pipe.
42:03 Wes Larson? So some of this tension might be due to the fact that the berry crop in Katmai had pretty much completely failed in 2003. In the fall, all these bears are in hyperphasia. Jeff, can you just quickly explain what hyperphasia is?
42:17 Jeff Larson? Yeah, so it's when a bear's like trying to get as much in them before hibernation just because during hibernation they don't eat at all. So they gotta really store up.
42:28 Mike Smith? I'm always in hyperphasia.
42:31 Mike Smith? Oh, man.
42:32 Jeff Larson? But he never hibernates. And then that's a problem.
42:35 Wes Larson? He's kinda doing walking hibernation.
42:39 Wes Larson? So, yeah, it's exactly that. In the early fall, something just kinda kicks in for them where they start just putting on as much weight as they possibly can, taking in calories as quickly as possible. And there's even things within their body that suppress the feeling of being full so that they can just continue eating and eating and eating so that they have as much fat as possible when they go into hibernation.
43:01 Mike Smith? It's like the opposite of Ozempic.
43:04 Wes Larson? Uh, yeah, exactly.
43:05 Mike Smith? Someone needs to invent that. That sounds pretty good.
43:08 Wes Larson? For people that just wanna get morbidly obese.
43:11 Jeff Larson? Yeah. Well, and most all bear populations have like spots of food sources that they really rely on for right before hibernation, right? So if that...
43:22 Wes Larson? Totally.
43:22 Jeff Larson? If there's a year where that is not hitting, it's gonna be...
43:26 Wes Larson? Totally.
43:27 Jeff Larson? Bears, it's gonna be 9/11 for bears.
43:31 Wes Larson? Exactly. I think that's the exact term I read in all these books. No, for these bears, the cool thing about a place like Katmai is that they have multiple resources like that. So when the berry crop fails, what do these bears do? A lot of the bears that would typically be going to berries just go for salmon. And Catholia Bay, where Timothy Treadwell is in the fall of 2003, is one of the latest salmon runs in the area. So a ton of bears that would typically be eating berries descend on Catholia Bay.
44:02 Mike Smith? Do you think when bears, if a bear is ever so hungry, it'll look down at its paw and think like, maybe I should eat, eat that bear claw? That's what I would think if I were a bear. Dude, bear claws are so good.
44:15 Wes Larson? They are.
44:15 Mike Smith? Jeff, you can't deny that.
44:17 Wes Larson? I don't.
44:17 Jeff Larson? I always think, catch me if you can on the plane.
44:20 Mike Smith? Oh, yeah.
44:21 Wes Larson? Is there a bear claw on that?
44:23 Jeff Larson? Yeah, he's like, tell me how you pass the bar and I'll give you the bear claw.
44:27 Wes Larson? Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. All right. So in early September, one of Timothy's favorite bears, a female named Downey that he has known since she was just a little cub, seven years ago, completely disappears. He searches and searches for her and he finally finds her on September 13th, hiding in some alders. On a typical year, she's able to find some space on this creek, avoid the big males during the salmon run. But this year, she's totally just hiding and settling for scraps that the males might leave behind. Meanwhile, Amy arrives in Kodiak, but the weather takes a turn and it's nonstop rain and wind and fog. And she has to spend a few days in Kodiak, just in a hotel room, hanging out. So she sits in the restaurant.
45:10 Wes Larson? She reads books, she's pretty quiet and she's just anxiously looking out the window and hoping the weather's going to clear. And there's this restaurant waiter and manager that talks to her and she quietly tells him that this is going to be her last trip to the grizzly maze. Which is kind of prophetic in a way, even though I don't think she meant it the way that it ended up being.
45:29 Mike Smith? You don't?
45:31 Wes Larson? No.
45:32 Mike Smith? Me neither.
45:35 Wes Larson? All right. On September 14th, the weather does clear.
45:41 Wes Larson? The weather does clear and Timothy watches his pilot Willie Fulton, who me and Jeff know, shows up in the float plane and drops off Amy Huguenard and some supplies at the grizzly maze. She pretty much immediately consents that something is different this year. And she writes in her journal that she's terrified of the bears. Timothy says the same thing about her in his journal. He says that she's really uncomfortable. And there's a few video clips of her from that couple of weeks that you can see she's like visibly nervous around the bears. She's not feeling very comfortable. Something that doesn't help with this at all is that their camp is at Upper Cathalia Lake and sits right on some really well-used bear trails. It's pretty much the only clearing
46:24 Wes Larson? in the area, which makes it attractive to them for a campsite, but it's also really attractive to bears. It's also sandwiched in between some cliffs that lead into the lake and then these alders on the other side. So bears that want to avoid the campsite would literally have to either swim in the lake or walk through really dense alders.
46:42 Jeff Larson? Such a stupid camp spot.
46:45 Wes Larson? Yeah. Which means that a lot of the bears that would normally give this campsite a wide berth are forced to walk right through the middle. It's so bad that one of the bear biologists that ends up on the inspection after the deaths says that like a human literally could not have designed a worse campsite as far as bear safety is concerned. It's, it's that bad.
47:08 Jeff Larson? Wow. Well, that's kind of impressive then. It goes from being dumb to impressive.
47:15 Jeff Larson? The number one worst imaginable.
47:20 Wes Larson? All right. So things get pretty tense the whole time that Amy's there, but they do make it through the two weeks and they're both kind of relieved to see Willie Fulton arrive in his beaver float plane on September 26th. And I have to imagine that Amy's breathing a big sigh of relief as they load into this plane and she watches the grizzly maze fade away and they're flying back to Cody.
47:40 Jeff Larson? Oh, I thought they died.
47:41 Wes Larson? Into civilization.
47:43 Jeff Larson? Is the bear in the plane?
47:44 Wes Larson? The bears. She turns around and in the backseat. Uh, no. And Timothy actually isn't very relieved.
47:54 Mike Smith? Bear Force One. Sorry. I don't know if that was worth it.
47:58 Wes Larson? No, that was worth it. All right. That was worth it. Uh, Timothy is not satisfied. And that's because Downey, his favorite bear that he had thought had disappeared and then he found had disappeared again. And with all of these huge males fighting.
48:11 Jeff Larson? He's got to save them.
48:12 Wes Larson? He's worried. Yeah. He's gotta go save her. Uh, he's worried that maybe she'd been killed or maybe that ever elusive poacher had actually gotten wind of this bear bonanza at Cathalia and had killed his old friend Downey. So when they get to Katmai, they pack up all their gear and they stored at Kathleen Parker's house, which is like quite the effort to put all this stuff away. And then they go to the airport. And at some point at the airport, they decide that they're not going to leave. And then they're going to go back to the grizzly maze to find down and to close out the season. And there's this story out there. I don't know if it's a myth or if it's true, that Timothy got in a fight with an airport agent about his ticket price. And then he got so angry that he just decided to stay.
48:56 Wes Larson? It's hard to say if that's true or not, but he phones.
48:59 Jeff Larson? There's something about that in Grizzly Man, but it's different.
49:02 Wes Larson? Yeah. Everything I read said that that happened, but then in one of the books I read, the, the guy that wrote it, Mike Lipinski, said that he couldn't find any proof of that anywhere. And he actually interviewed all the airport people and no one knew about it. So it's hard to say if it's true, but for whatever reason, he phones Jewel and she arranges for a flight with Willie back to the grizzly maze. They go and collect their gear again from Kathleen's house. And everyone thinks this is really weird because Timothy has never changed his plans on a whim like this before, but everyone's also kind of come just to trust him over the years. So they wait for a bit of a weather window and then they fly back to Kathleen on September 29th.
49:44 Wes Larson? Willie Fulton drops them off and he would be the last human to ever see these two alive.
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51:09 Jeff Larson? And it turns back on like immediately when you turn the light on.
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51:26 Jeff Larson? Thought of Mike loading his up with anime girls?
51:29 Wes Larson? I don't think they thought of that.
51:31 Mike Smith? I'll start thinking about it now. It's a good move.
51:34 Wes Larson? Mike hates when he turns off the light and it disappears. He's like, no!
51:38 Mike Smith? I sleep with the lights on.
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52:24 Wes Larson? It's just a little bit spookier.
52:26 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
52:27 Wes Larson? They spend about a week looking for Downey, and during that time Timothy records a few videos where he's talking more and more about how dangerous things are. But he knows that his relationship with the bears is going to protect him.
52:40 Wes Larson? So Timothy and Amy do find Downey and on October 4th, the weather clears, it becomes bright and sunny. So they're in great spirits. Timothy calls the float plane operator in Kodiak and he ranges for a pickup on the 6th. He told Willie that they'll be there and that him and Amy are ready to go. So around noon on October 5th, he uses the satellite phone to call Jewel Palovak and he's super excited. They'd survived the craziest trip yet to the maze. They'd found Downey and they were charged by the sub adult male. So they had all this excitement and he's just ready to go home and start preparing for the next season to work with Disney, to do all these different things. Amy's ready to start her new job in LA. It starts in about a week. They're
53:23 Wes Larson? both looking forward to settling into their new apartment together. And he says goodbye to Jewel, not knowing that in two hours, he and Amy would be dead.
53:32 Jeff Larson? Jeez.
53:33 Wes Larson? They get to work preparing their camp, securing it as it starts to rain. A storm's approaching and they have the dual task of getting ready for their flight and making sure their camp holds up to the rain and the wind. It's October in Alaska, so by 1pm, the lights are already starting to fade a little bit. And with the rain and the clouds, it's starting to get kind of dark. Timothy and Amy head into their tent and they start eating some candies, some junk food. She opens up a pack of sausages. They're chatting about plans for the next day, when suddenly, the snapping twigs and sound of heavy footfalls echo through their tent. Timothy's no stranger to bears in his campsite. He tells Amy to stay put and he walks out into the storm, closing the
54:14 Wes Larson? zipper behind him. Amy reaches over and probably just out of habit, turns the camcorder on, but the lens cap is still in place. And the timestamp of this video is 1:53pm Alaskan Standard Time. So I'm going to piece together what happens next using the audio transcript from that video, as well as what I've pieced together from my research and my background with this case.
54:40 Wes Larson? When Timothy leaves the tent, the bear's there, likely just a few yards away. Timothy, who's really used to being dominant with these bears, asserts his dominance. He stands up tall, makes himself look as big as possible, but this bear's different, and it's feeling defensive. Maybe there's a bigger bear behind it, maybe it's just amped up from all the fighting it's had to do recently, or maybe Timothy coming out of this tent so quickly was a big surprise for it and just too much for it. So rather than run, the bear charges in and crashes into this surprise threat.
55:13 Wes Larson? Timothy Treadwell, who's placed all of his trust in these bears, has dedicated his life to them, is shaken through the air by the bear as its teeth shred through his skin, his muscle, and his tendons. It's more powerful than he ever could have dreamed of, and immediately knows that he's about to meet his end in the way that countless people have warned him that would happen. It's not going to be a romantic death, it's going to be brutal, and it's going to be painful. Inside the tent, Amy hears Timothy screaming that the bear's killing him, and he pleads with her to come out and help. She unzips the tent, and then leaving the camcorder behind, which is still capturing audio, she yells to Timothy to play dead over the sound of the rain and the wind, and the bear ripping Timothy's arm apart from his torso.
55:57 Wes Larson? She screams, and then screams for him to play dead again, and he finally lies still, and the bear, content that this fight is over, backs off.
56:06 Wes Larson? She runs over to Timothy to assess his wounds, and they talk for a minute, but suddenly the bear rushes back in, and she's forced to back up near the tent again. Timothy tries to get up, he crawls towards Amy, but the bear rushes in and smashes him to the ground and begins to bite and rip at his face and scalp, its huge teeth cracking into his skull, scraping away bone, skin, and hair.
56:31 Wes Larson? He feebly tries to fight back, but his hands in his face are so covered with blood that he can hardly see or grab anything. And Amy's screaming nearby, but she sounds like she's a world away. He screams again to Amy and tells her that playing dead isn't working. He pleads with her to hit the bear. And in the campsite, she searches frantically for something big enough that can hurt the bear. And she grabs a large cast iron frying pan. This is a 100-pound, five-foot woman who runs at a 1,000-pound bear that's killing both her hero and the love of her life. And she starts hitting it with a frying pan. She's screaming at the bear to leave Timothy alone when she pleads with him to fight back,
57:11 Wes Larson? but he's losing consciousness and a lot of blood, and he only moans a response. And this bear, which probably originally started this attack defensively, has now switched into predator mode. It's an opportunistic kind of predator thing. And it's had enough of Amy. So it switches from biting Timothy's head in his upper arm and bites down into the soft flesh of his upper thigh and starts dragging him away. It pulls him feet-first away from the campsite and from Amy, and he looks up at her with glazed-over eyes and tells her to run and to get away from the bear. She starts screaming as the bear pulls Timothy a few dozen yards from the tent, and she's forced to listen to the sound of tearing meat and crunching bones as the bear kills
57:56 Wes Larson? and eats Timothy Treadwell. She's standing in the cold, dark Alaskan rain, hundreds of miles from help, completely alone, and she's screaming. Her brain's unable to process the horror of what just happened. Her scream is an almost unearthly high pitch, becomes even higher when the bear once again emerges from the alders, lunges forward, and the audio cuts out.
58:21 Wes Larson? Pretty crazy. And that's pretty much taken directly from the transcript of the audio on the camcorder. The screaming, all of that dialogue back and forth, there's a little bit there that I kind of had to assume is what happened, but most of that is what happens on that audio.
58:42 Wes Larson? On the morning of September 6th, Willie Fulton's already a bit worried that something's wrong. Timothy usually calls him on these pickup days to let him know like what the weather is, and he hasn't heard a single word from Timothy. So as he approaches the lake and lands near their camping spot, he's even more worried because Timothy almost always has his gear packed up and is waiting at the shore of the lake, and this time there's nothing there. So while he's approaching the shore in the plane, he thinks he can see Timothy shaking out a tarp on the hill, and he decides to get up and walk up that hill. He's about three-fourths of the way up when he suddenly senses that something doesn't feel right. He yells for Timothy and Amy, and then he decides, when he doesn't hear any answer, he's like, okay, something's wrong, and he starts walking back toward
59:26 Wes Larson? the plane. He's only a few yards from the shore when he turns around and he sees a huge bear with its head down on the trail quietly stalking him. He knows this bear, he's seen it before, and he knows that it's a bear that you just don't mess around with. And he told me and Jeff this too, when we were in Katmai, he's like, that bear was just a nasty old bear. So he is close enough to the plane that he knows he can beat the bear, so he hustles to the plane, kind of sprints out in the water and climbs onto the float, and he turns around to see the bear skidding to a stop at the side of the water and then disappearing back into the alders. Whoa. Yeah. He gets airborne and he starts doing passes over this hill, and he's looking for Timothy or Amy or any sign of life, but what he can see is that both tents are flattened.
1:00:11 Wes Larson? You can see this big bear that had just stalked him, it's now lying back in this opening in this clearing, and it's chewing on something. And when he flies over again, he focuses on what it's chewing on, and he realizes it's a human rib cage. He also starts kind of trying to buzz this bear to get it to run away, and it doesn't leave, it just starts eating faster and faster.
1:00:34 Wes Larson? So he calls park ranger Joel Ellis and tells him that he thinks a bear has attacked Timothy and Amy and he tells Ellis, you know, to get up there. Ellis tells him to find a safe location and to wait for them. He gets two other rangers. They take a plane up to Upper Cathalia Lake. They join up with Willie. They call some Alaska State troopers and they start heading up toward this campsite. These troopers are a little ways away, so they just decide to go without them. And they are armed with a forty caliber handgun and two twelve gauge shotguns that are loaded with slugs. And Willie doesn't have any kind of defense and he's ahead of them and they have to keep telling him to like, slow down because he just keeps pushing ahead and it's very dangerous. They finally decide, okay, we should probably wait for these
1:01:18 Wes Larson? troopers. This is too dangerous. They stop and wait when suddenly one of the rangers yells, "Bear." Ranger Ellis turns and he sees a large bear, which is about twenty feet away and it's moving toward the group. All four of these men start yelling. They do everything they can to get this bear to leave, but it keeps moving toward them and Willie Fulton ducks down right as the three men open fire. The bear is immediately hit with multiple rounds. It falls, tries to get up, keeps coming a little bit, struck again and falls and dies. By the time it hits the ground, it's only a few feet in front of them and a literal cloud of smoke is surrounding them and they'd shot at the bear a total of nineteen times.
1:01:58 Mike Smith? Raw, fifty cent.
1:01:59 Jeff Larson? The bear was just trying to tell him, "Hey, these humans are in trouble."
1:02:03 Wes Larson? People got hurt up here. Oh, yeah. I don't think that's what it was doing, but it's, you know.
1:02:09 Jeff Larson? I mean, how would it do it?
1:02:11 Wes Larson? True.
1:02:12 Jeff Larson? I don't know.
1:02:12 Wes Larson? Yeah. Willie does walk up to this bear, looks it in the eyes and says, "This is the bear. This is the one that was coming at me and it's the one that killed Timothy." They hike the remaining thirty or so meters to the campsite. They find that both tents are flattened, but not torn up. Some of the barrels that had food and stuff had been strewn about, but not torn apart. They're calling out for Timothy and Amy when they notice a freshly dug mound of dirt in front of one of the tents. And when they look close at that dirt, they see human fingers, part of an arm protruding from the ground. They get closer and they can also see a kidney lying in the dirt. And some of these rangers start excavating what they is a bear cache. So just for people
1:02:56 Wes Larson? that maybe don't understand what this means, often when a bear kills something that it isn't that it can't finish in one sitting, it'll dig a cache and cover it with dirt. And the point there is to kind of preserve that and also to cut down the smell. So other animals don't come in and steal it from them.
1:03:12 Mike Smith? Hmm.
1:03:13 Wes Larson? As they're doing this, as they're excavating this bear cache, some of the other rangers decide to do a circle around the campsite. And one of the rangers heads back toward where they killed this bear. He's walking in the altars and he finds what's left of Timothy Treadwell. All he finds is Timothy's head, which has been scalped. It's connected to a bit of shoulder, some spinal column, some connective tissue that leads to one of his two forearms, and his face is more or less intact and locked in a grimace.
1:03:41 Mike Smith? Ah.
1:03:41 Wes Larson? Mike, I know you don't want to see it, but I am going to show you guys.
1:03:45 Mike Smith? Come on, dude.
1:03:46 Wes Larson? Timothy's autopsy photos. So.
1:03:48 Mike Smith? Oh, gosh.
1:03:49 Wes Larson? Oh. So you can see, really, the main thing that's left is his head and his forearms. Pretty much everything else has been consumed, aside from some skin.
1:04:00 Mike Smith? Just doesn't even look real.
1:04:02 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:04:02 Mike Smith? Oh, man.
1:04:03 Wes Larson? Just for the sake of not getting too into this, I'm not going to show you guys Amy right now. But this is what was left of Timothy. There's a reason I wanted to bring this up because we're going to talk about the bears responsible in a little bit. But um, yeah, just to describe this again for people, because I'm not going to send these to anyone, I'm sorry. His face is pretty much intact with a big gash through the middle. He's been mostly scalped. His forearms are mostly intact. Almost everything else has been consumed, aside from like, kind of a pile of skin in the middle. It's pretty gross.
1:04:36 Mike Smith? That's, yeah.
1:04:38 Wes Larson? It doesn't look real.
1:04:39 Mike Smith? It doesn't. It really does. It it looks, it's usually you imagine worse than reality a lot of times. That was worse than I could even have imagined, I think.
1:04:49 Wes Larson? Yeah. So the troopers dig through the cache. They find pieces of Amy, including her head, part of her torso, some miscellaneous scraps. They make multiple trips up and down. The hill to bag evidence in these human remains. And on one of the last trips, the Rangers headed up the hill. When he hears one of the troopers yell bear. This is a much smaller bear. It's about 300 pounds. Charges at the men, it runs in and out of the alders. Again, they do everything they can to scare it off. They even fire a warning shot. But when it comes in one final time, they open fire. And they drop this bear with a few slugs from the 12 gauges. It's starting to get dark at this point, so the last thing they want to do is have to deal with more bears that are protecting these carcasses in the dark.
1:05:33 Wes Larson? So rather than examine these bears right then, they pack up everything and they fly away. And the next day, some biologists with Alaska Fish and Game fly in and inspect these bears. The large one's about a thousand pound bear. It's in average condition. It's found to have about 25 pounds of human muscle, tissue and skin in its stomach. They also find human hair and clothing in its stomach and its esophagus. And it has a tattoo, the number one forty one on its inner lip. Yeah.
1:06:03 Wes Larson? So a lot of biologists back in this day, especially instead of putting in an ear tag, or sometimes they do both. They put in an ear tag and they also do a lip tattoo. So that they can identify these bears if they're ever involved in situations like this.
1:06:16 Jeff Larson? Wow.
1:06:17 Wes Larson? Yeah. So this bear had been caught like 14 years prior, prior to this by a Sterling Miller, who was kind of the Alaska bear biologist at the time.
1:06:25 Jeff Larson? You think God would be mad about that bear having a tattoo? Cause it wasn't really its choice.
1:06:31 Wes Larson? God hates all tattoos, Jeff.
1:06:33 Mike Smith? Their body is a temple.
1:06:34 Wes Larson? That's something you need to learn.
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1:08:46 Mike Smith? So some media said that this bear was probably Ollie, which is the bear that was behind him in that clip that we watched a second ago. Others say that it was the Big Red Machine. It's hard to say which of his bears this was, but it was Bear 141.
1:09:00 Wes Larson? The smaller bear that they had killed had been almost completely consumed by other bears at this point. Just a day later, other bears had eaten it almost completely. Um, and they usually don't eat the really big bears that are dead because they're still kind of afraid of them. But this little bear they went in and ate.
1:09:18 Jeff Larson? Well, that's one of the most interesting things, like shameless plug to our Patreon, but Tom, your mentor was saying he doesn't think the big bear killed either of them. Because he was saying like with polar bears, once there's a seal.
1:09:35 Wes Larson? No, it was grizzly bears. He was talking about grizzly bears and cat my.
1:09:38 Jeff Larson? With the seal?
1:09:39 Wes Larson? Uh huh.
1:09:40 Jeff Larson? Okay, I got confused on that, I guess. But like immediately went and killed the seal.
1:09:45 Wes Larson? Mm hmm.
1:09:45 Jeff Larson? And then as soon as it killed it, another bear smelt that and came in. And as soon as that happened, the biggest bear in the area smelt it and came in. So basically what he was telling us is like, the biggest bear is going to end up on a big kill eventually. So it's kind of any of those bears could have killed Timothy and Amy, but that biggest bear was probably going to like eat part of them at some point.
1:10:13 Wes Larson? Exactly. And that's a perfect segue for what I wanted to talk about here and why I showed you guys the autopsy photos even. Is that the prevailing theory, and I think this is kind of, it makes the most sense. What's that law of like, whatever's the most likely is most.
1:10:29 Mike Smith? Occam's razor.
1:10:30 Wes Larson? Yeah, Occam's razor. That the bear that they found on top of the carcasses with human remains in his stomach is probably the one that killed him. And that's what most people assumed.
1:10:39 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:10:39 Wes Larson? But there is some evidence that points to a different bear. And I think the main evidence there is that this video that they took with the audio, there's six minutes of Timothy Treadwell being killed by this bear. If they were a thousand pound bear, it's very unlikely that it would take six minutes. They often kill people in like a single swipe. And then another big piece of evidence to the contrary is the fact that they only found 25 pounds of remains in that big bear, but Timothy and Amy were almost completely consumed. So that speaks to different bear consuming them before this big bear got on the carcass. I was kind of convinced it was the big bear, but the more I think
1:11:24 Wes Larson? about it, I think it was a smaller bear. And also, these subadult bears are the ones that do tend to initiate these kind of aggressive attacks because they just kind of feel like they have something to prove still. And big bears do tend to avoid these kind of counters. Now, if you talk to like Willie Fulton or some of the guides in the area, they are completely convinced that it was this big mean bear that they all knew that they all knew was aggressive. So it really could be either, but I do kind of tend to lean toward the two bear hypothesis. So one of the troopers discovers this tape. He plays it back in Alaska or back in Anchorage. And there's a few videos of Timothy getting close to bears. And then this video that has no image, but the audio of the mauling, he listens to it.
1:12:09 Wes Larson? He realizes it's six minutes of audio from the attack. Later, this tape would be given to Jewel Palovak, which Werner Herzog gives it to her in the film. And she apparently places it in a safety deposit box. Everyone that I know of that's heard the true audio, these investigators, Werner Herzog, say that you don't want to hear this. You know, this is something that you might think you want to hear, but you actually don't. In the official report, they list three contributing factors. And we're going to play that, right? Yeah, we're about to play it right now. In the official report, they list three contributing factors for the attacks, and I'm going to sum them up here. The big one is the location of his campsite in pretty much the worst
1:12:54 Wes Larson? possible place you could put a campsite. The second one is the time of year and the fierce competition in the area between bears. The third one is potentially there were attractants in the tent. They were eating some food. And it's very likely that Timothy had also approached these bears that perpetrated the attack. So they were habituated. Those are the main reasons they put in the official report. And honestly, this is kind of where we're gonna leave the story. There is a lot more information in these books. There's a lot more online. If you guys want to learn more about the repercussions of all this, if you want to learn about the effect it had on their families, on grizzly people, on all of that, I really recommend Grizzly Man, the documentary. I recommend the books that I
1:13:38 Wes Larson? referenced earlier. But we could talk about this for days if we wanted to. And I think this is kind of where I want to separate from it. And I want to just kind of more talk about our feelings about how we view this whole thing. Honestly, at this point, I feel like I could write a book on this. But what I really want to talk about is Timothy's legacy.
1:13:59 Jeff Larson? You should write a kid's book on it.
1:14:04 Wes Larson? Everybody poops, but it's pooping.
1:14:07 Mike Smith? And then the bear munched his noggin.
1:14:12 Wes Larson? Alright, so I'm gonna be a little harsh here. And I'm just gonna say, in my opinion, I think at this point, his main legacy is that there's two dead bears, a lot of habituated bears, and a reinforcement of negative attitudes toward bears. Because ultimately, everyone that he told these bears were his friend, and that he loved them and they loved him, learned about his death at the paws of these bears. So for them, they see these bears then as monsters. So it reinforces those negative attitudes.
1:14:43 Mike Smith? I also think, I know you're not done, but I also think negative repercussions towards conservation in general and biologists, because he was such a prominent figure. And he wasn't those things. I am going to be equally as harsh. And he was saying that he was, and people got the wrong idea. I think, overall, very negative impact towards everything you wanted to have a positive impact towards. Go ahead, Wes, sorry.
1:15:08 Wes Larson? Yeah, I'll finish up, and then I have some time for you guys to say, like, everything you feel about that, too. Unless you want to say it now, Jeff, feel free.
1:15:16 Jeff Larson? I was just gonna say, also, like, in a negative, if we're just harping it on him right now, a bad boyfriend, like, wouldn't commit. And then also, she just obviously started to feel really uncomfortable around the bears. And he just pushed to go back, he put him in. I mean, this is where my argument of him being maybe dumb to like that campsite. It's one thing to risk your own life camping there, but he had to have known like that's a bad spot. And like, he just wanted to be in the path of the bears at night, I think.
1:15:57 Jeff Larson? And that's just a very inconsiderate thing to do to your significant other that has
1:16:04 Wes Larson? Is afraid of bears.
1:16:05 Jeff Larson? Is getting afraid of the bears and you're just like.
1:16:09 Wes Larson? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you're right. And my next thing I was gonna say that's part of his legacy is that he led to Amy's death. I don't want to take her agency away from her because she knew what she was doing. She, I think she easily could have stayed in Kodiak on that return flight. She could have said, I'm not going back. You can go, but she really trusted Timothy. So I do think he, he knew that, but he was drinking his own Kool-Aid so much at that, at that point that he thought he was invincible and she was as a proxy. But I agree, like he had a satellite phone. He could have said, listen, Amy's not comfortable. Let's get Willie here to take her out. I'm gonna stay. And he didn't do that. So I, I do think he kind of took advantage of her trust in him.
1:16:52 Wes Larson? And I don't think he did that knowingly. He obviously didn't think she was gonna get hurt. But unfortunately, that is part of his legacy.
1:17:00 Jeff Larson? And to his credit, he did like at least tell her to run at one point while he was getting eaten, which I think is a hard thing to do if you're being eaten.
1:17:10 Wes Larson? Yeah. When he knew it was over, he just wanted her to get to safety. But at that point, there wasn't safety, you know, where does she go? Yeah. Like, where do you run to? So on the positive side, I do think he created a lot of inspiring footage. I think he was a passionate person. I think he put cat mai on the map and kind of led people to know that there's this amazing place with all these incredible brown bears that you can visit. So I do think there's a silver lining to what Timothy did, but ultimately his legacy is his death. And, and the repercussions from it. And I know he would hate that those bears had to be killed, but they did like. Those Rangers did everything they could to not kill those bears and they kept coming.
1:17:52 Wes Larson? And that's what bears that are defending a valuable carcass will do. They won't stop.
1:17:57 Jeff Larson? And you can't just leave a human body out there.
1:18:00 Wes Larson? No, especially when Amy's there too. Like had it just been Timothy, they might have just said, listen, this guy got what he deserved. We don't want to kill bears. We'll go in there in the spring. But Amy was in there too, and they couldn't do that. Yeah.
1:18:12 Jeff Larson? That's a good point, though. Maybe we would have never gone there had he not been there, you know? Because like that's one of my favorite places I've ever been. So maybe I owe that to him.
1:18:23 Wes Larson? Yeah. Uh, an interesting thing that Tom told us too, is that the bear numbers there have really are reduced because the habitat has changed so much. A lot of that's just because it's lifted over time. So volcanic there that the the Halibay is like come up, so the grasses don't grow the same way. Yeah. And then sea otters. Yeah.
1:18:42 Jeff Larson? Like fifty times more sea otters.
1:18:45 Wes Larson? Yeah. And they're eating all the clams, the razor clams that that the bears would typically eat. So it has changed quite a bit.
1:18:51 Jeff Larson? I prefer bears, but sea otters are very cool animals.
1:18:55 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:18:55 Jeff Larson? What I mean? I'd still go.
1:18:57 Wes Larson? It doesn't mean there's less bears in Katmai. It just means those bears have left those areas and they've, you know, sought out greener pastures, so to speak. Right? All right. So a little bit more that I want to talk about quickly, and we've hinted at this a lot, is like, why did Timothy?
1:19:12 Jeff Larson? Do you think they were just there because they're friends with Timothy?
1:19:16 Wes Larson? The otters?
1:19:17 Jeff Larson? No, the bears. Because once he died, they left.
1:19:20 Wes Larson? They're like, oh, our protector's gone.
1:19:24 Wes Larson? Uh, no. So we've talked about this a bit and we've kind of hinted at mental illness. I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist or any kind of professional in that. I don't want to diagnose him. There are a lot of references to bipolar disorder in these books. I do think that if you were to try and put something on him, that might be the closest fit. But it's impossible to say. But it does seem like he had these crazy kind of swings between euphoria and depression. He battled with addiction. He battled with a lot of the things that are often associated with that disorder. But I don't know, I I'm curious to hear from you guys, like, after hearing this whole story now, what do you guys think was going on with Timothy Treadwell?
1:20:09 Mike Smith? I think he was a man who was addicted and didn't know any other way to find and stay sober from whatever his demons were in his past life. I also, I mean, there's really nothing I would totally take off of the table. And I hesitate to to bring this up again. In one of our previous episodes, we talked about people that had severe forms of body dysmorphia, where they truly believed that they were a werewolf, or what was the the guy thought he was a buffalo, or an ox, or a bull, or something. And honestly, I can see a lot of that happening with Timothy, where he started behaving literally like a bear, you know?
1:20:46 Wes Larson? Like anthropy.
1:20:47 Mike Smith? And I honestly, I can understand and sympathize with everything that he went through and what happened to him. The only thing I I can't reconcile in his favor is Amy. It's like she just, she's the one thing where it's like, that's beyond reproach in my brain, that he got someone like her. And again, she was an adult, she had her own agency. She was 37 years old, you know, can't lay it entirely at his feet alone that she died, but I can lay a very good portion of it to him.
1:21:17 Jeff Larson? I'll give a little bit to the bear, too.
1:21:20 Wes Larson? That's true.
1:21:21 Mike Smith? Yeah, don't want to short him, short the bear on their due credit.
1:21:26 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I would, I would say it definitely seems like a possibility that he had bipolar or something like he, he self admits that he had depression and like addiction issues. But also, I do think like, when you're taking that much footage of yourself, like, and you're out alone in the wilderness in Alaska, like, we watch the show Alone, and people always have like, really weird moments that are Entertaining and like you get it because they're out there alone, but they'll do like little like skits. They'll do like little like self monologues and like little freakouts.
1:22:08 Jeff Larson? So I think that's part of just being out in the wilderness, living alone too. And when you have all this footage and then you just pick out like the craziest footage. Like it will portray him as more eccentric than maybe he was. How do you think he would have done on alone? Probably pretty good.
1:22:29 Wes Larson? Probably pretty well. Yeah. I, I think you would have just like put up a tarp and laid under it, you know?
1:22:35 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:22:35 Wes Larson? But, um.
1:22:36 Mike Smith? It's an interesting point to bring up the isolation because like what worse circumstances can there be to be in? When you have like mental struggles than to be like stuck alone with your own thoughts. And you start like concocting theories and all kinds of things and you buy into it, especially for 13 years, nothing went wrong. Like he felt like he was the master.
1:23:00 Wes Larson? It's not nothing went wrong. Like he had his fair share of problems with the bears, but like, yeah. I agree. I think anyone that tries to say, oh, this is 100% a result of mental illness. I think that's a stretch because I do think he wasn't at that level where he wasn't, he like could take criticism. He learned and he knew that people thought what he was doing was wrong. It wasn't like he was a completely out of, you know, in a different kind of realm of reality. So I don't want to, I think it's a stretch to say that's like a hundred percent the reason for this, but it could have been at play.
1:23:36 Jeff Larson? I actually think I disagree with what Mike just said too. Like just that the isolation was bad for his depression and is it?
1:23:46 Wes Larson? I think it was both.
1:23:48 Jeff Larson? Because I feel like he was in a really meditative area where he could really self reflect. And this was like kind of the one thing that could get him away from like. Like he overdosed once and almost died. So like,
1:24:03 Mike Smith? Right.
1:24:03 Jeff Larson? I do think that this was healthy for him. It just wasn't healthy for the bears and it wasn't like
1:24:10 Mike Smith? I, yeah, I think you're, I think you're right. And I, I'll concede that. I also think that it didn't need to be as extreme as it was, you know, like, there is something to be said to being unplugged from the matrix, as it were, to like reconnecting with nature. Like, we struggle with brain rot in our day and age with all the social media stuff, but like, when you're alone and you start really buying into your own persona and like this image of yourself that Yeah, exactly.
1:24:41 Wes Larson? I had
1:24:41 Jeff Larson? I don't know, maybe he should have been more extreme. Well, if he would have like, sat on a bear, maybe he would have like, all his problems would have gone away.
1:24:51 Mike Smith? As long as maybe we're done speculating, I know, but just to bring up maybe one last reason Tim did what he did was maybe there's some narcissism, like a narcissistic disorder. I know everyone wants to feel special and different when they're younger, but we remarked in the first episode how that was something that was really weighing on his mind that he wanted to be different, that he wanted to feel special and
1:25:14 Wes Larson? He says it himself in that clip we played at the beginning, that he's different and edgy and special, you know?
1:25:19 Mike Smith? Exactly. So, yeah, maybe some narcissism.
1:25:21 Wes Larson? Uh, all right. So I did write down just some closing thoughts about Timothy because I've been thinking about him for so long and this really feels like kind of getting this out finally. But in some ways I can see myself in him. Like I know that rush you get when you're close to an incredibly powerful predator and it tolerates you. It makes you feel really invincible. It makes you feel special. And I understand how intoxicating that can really be. But I'm also really aware that wild animals are unpredictable. Um, you could spend 20 years in cat mai and never get injured by a bear. Or you could be mauled by the first one that you encounter when you walk up that beach.
1:26:00 Wes Larson? You just can't know, like they can do whatever they want. They're animals. They're, they have their own agency. And you can be an expert at reading their body language and their behavior. But there's still going to be bears that act outside that norm. And that's why it's so important that you have a tool that lets you keep that upper hand, a deterrent. That's what we constantly preach on this podcast. That lets you be prepared for that one different bear. And Timothy was really misguided. These last few weeks, though, have made me feel a lot more empathy for him than I ever have in the past. I really wish I could say his legacy was that he spurred tons of conservation and action for bears, but ultimately, I do think his legacy surrounds his death.
1:26:45 Wes Larson? The death of Amy and the death of two bears. And I think that's really unfortunate because that's the last thing you would have wanted. So really quick thing to note before we go into our categories. The audio is not online. The audio of his death. I've spent hours looking for it. I've only found fakes. Everyone that I know that did the investigation and I'm sure has heard the real audio says that you hardly hear the bear making a single noise. And every fake that you hear on YouTube and stuff, you hear a lot of growling and vocalization from the bear. They don't do that when they kill stuff like they're generally pretty quiet. So that's a good way to know that you're listening to something fake. The true audio is six minutes long.
1:27:27 Wes Larson? It, from what I understand, you cannot access it anywhere online.
1:27:31 Mike Smith? Did Jewel, she didn't end up destroying it then? She kept it?
1:27:35 Wes Larson? I don't think so, but I don't think she's ever like let it out.
1:27:38 Mike Smith? Hmm, okay.
1:27:39 Wes Larson? There are not, as far as I know, autopsy photos online either. I'm guessing those will probably leak at some point because I know the coroner from Grizzly Man like sent those to a number of people. So those will probably get out at some point, but I'm not gonna leak them. So they're not online right now. You guys ready for categories? We're just gonna do a couple because we're already a couple hours in it, it's probably. Okay. Jeff, you came up with this one. I thought it was a good category. Your favorite recent bear from pop culture?
1:28:09 Jeff Larson? I'm just gonna go with the show Shrinking. It's like a fun, feel-good show. Actually, it feels like it's a feel-good show, but it's actually kind of depressing. But it's about like getting through stuff with therapy. But anyways, one of the characters is being like very really just kind of like attacked a little bit by their friend and they do a bear noise at him.
1:28:33 Wes Larson? Uh huh.
1:28:33 Jeff Larson? And the person just like stops talking immediately and he's like, oh, wow, that worked. And it's just like, it's really funny to me.
1:28:43 Wes Larson? I like it. Mike?
1:28:44 Mike Smith? Uh, I'm gonna go with Kuma from Tekken 8. He's in a lot of the Tekken games, but he's one of the playable fighter characters. He's Heihachi's pet. He's like a really nice bear, though. He works, he does a lot of disaster relief effort type of work. And people are like scared of him at first, but then eventually they see he's trying to help him. That's all he's trying to do and they welcome him into their little helping circle. It's great, dude. His special move, he like launches a fish missile at the other guy. Oh, man. You gotta watch a video of that.
1:29:14 Wes Larson? When I used to be like an arcade rat in the nineties, that's the game I would love just watching people play. Cause there was like a leopard and a bear and stuff.
1:29:23 Mike Smith? Oh, yeah.
1:29:23 Wes Larson? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I'm just gonna pick, it's kind of a throwback to an episode we did already, but the people that pretended to be a bear to defraud insurance companies.
1:29:36 Mike Smith? Amazing.
1:29:37 Wes Larson? It's just still like one of my favorite stories from this year. So that's what I'm picking. All right. So they, they died in 2003. So just to put a little more pop culture in this, I wanted you guys to pick your favorite movie from 2003. And my goalpost were it can't be Return of the King.
1:29:55 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:29:56 Wes Larson? Goalpost isn't the right word for that, but you know what I'm saying.
1:29:58 Mike Smith? I, I've brought up Old Boy, it feels like too many times at this point. So if it's not that, I'm actually gonna go with Master and Commander. I think it's like a pretty severely underappreciated movie. I love it. I'd, some people think it's a little boring. It's, it's long, but I love every, every second of it. It's just such an adventure.
1:30:16 Wes Larson? Yeah. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go with like, not my actual favorite, but a recent one that I discovered that I really liked. I just watched it like two nights ago. It's called Out of Time. It stars Denzel Washington and Eva Mendes. And he's like a cop who gets wrapped up in this crime and she is his ex-wife and a homicide detective.
1:30:39 Wes Larson? And they're investigating this crime together and he has to keep kind of like scrubbing evidence and clearing up his path and it's like just one terrible situation after another. It's really good. It's kind of like a noir. I really like it. It's called Out of Time. Jeff?
1:30:56 Jeff Larson? Mine would be Pirates of the Caribbean. I just absolutely love that movie.
1:31:02 Wes Larson? It's a great pick.
1:31:03 Jeff Larson? Yeah. Elf also came out that year and I feel like I don't like Elf that much anymore. But like when Elf came out, it was just like, it was like my favorite Christmas movie for a little bit.
1:31:17 Wes Larson? Totally.
1:31:17 Mike Smith? I feel like I made a really gross oversight. I didn't know Pirates was 2003 because that would have been my answer too.
1:31:23 Wes Larson? And Kill Bill was 2003 too.
1:31:26 Mike Smith? I'm partial to Kill Bill 2, which always, but they're both amazing.
1:31:30 Wes Larson? All right. So the next category that I came up with is if you had two minutes with Timothy Treadwell in early 2003, you can't tell him you're from the future, what would you say to him?
1:31:40 Jeff Larson? I mean, I feel like people knew his future and were telling him.
1:31:45 Wes Larson? Right. It's true. Like he hadn't. Yeah. He definitely heard.
1:31:49 Jeff Larson? Everyone he talked to was like, you're gonna get killed by a bear.
1:31:53 Mike Smith? Yeah. My move would be, you know how they always say like, you can't meet yourself when you time travel or else it'll throw. So what I would do is I'd make like a perfect Timothy Treadwell costume and wear it when I meet him. So he thinks he's talking to himself and that'll throw things off for him to think a little bit. I like that.
1:32:12 Wes Larson? Change it up. I think I would just try and use my two minutes to convince him not to take Amy to the Grizzlies.
1:32:20 Mike Smith? That's the right answer.
1:32:21 Wes Larson? I, I feel like he's on a collision course with death no matter what, but I'm trying to get Amy out of there. So I'm using my two minutes for that.
1:32:29 Jeff Larson? Maybe I'd try to get him like onto pandas.
1:32:33 Jeff Larson? Yeah. Panda bears. So you gotta live with panda bears.
1:32:39 Wes Larson? It's a good idea. I like that. All right. And then to close this up, we're gonna do a few more listener questions. Thanks, everyone, again, for sending in so many.
1:32:47 Jeff Larson? Weren't you gonna ask us how we would do if we were?
1:32:51 Wes Larson? Yeah, that's a listener question.
1:32:52 Jeff Larson? Had a bear living with us?
1:32:53 Wes Larson? It's a listener, yeah. All right. So the first one is from MB Doodles. They say, how do you think his view of bears changed public perception for good or bad? And I do think it led to a bad perception for a while. And Sterling Miller, that biologist that we referenced earlier, actually wrote a paper about how attacks have these long lasting effects on the perception of bears. And they lead to more bears being killed defensively. And I do think that's ultimately what his work did, was more of a negative perception.
1:33:28 Jeff Larson? See, for me, he definitely made, even though he got killed by a bear, he definitely made bears seem nicer to me than like most people. Cause like, until him, I didn't think that it was possible to like be that close to bears and touch
1:33:44 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:33:45 Jeff Larson? A wild grizzly bear. So to me, like, I was like, oh, I didn't know like bears could be this nice for brown bears.
1:33:52 Wes Larson? Yeah. And I do think people that know more about him kind of land on that side. But I think for most people, the like loudest thing about his story is that he was killed and eaten by bears. And so that's kind of what sticks in their head. More so than he was like touching them and naming them and stuff.
1:34:09 Mike Smith? I think maybe in a twisted sense, his impact was probably in some ways positive that he was killed by a bear, just to reinforce that this is a dangerous animal that you can't be messing around with. Um, it cost him his and Amy's life and a couple of bears. So, wrong way to get that message across, but.
1:34:31 Wes Larson? Yeah. All right. So, JS Cobal.
1:34:35 Wes Larson? 218 says, has doing this podcast changed your outlook on him in any way? And I want all of us to answer this quickly. For me, it's made me more sympathetic toward him, for sure. I do see him as a much more complicated nuanced person than I used to. So it definitely has changed my outlook.
1:34:51 Mike Smith? Yeah, having a public platform to talk about these kinds of people, you start having to to find the nuances because everyone's complicated. And it's a lot less black and white for me. Still, I don't think positively of him or his impact. But yeah, a lot different than I used to.
1:35:07 Jeff Larson? I'd say mainly from this podcast, I've learned that bears are the last animal I'd ever want to be killed by. So even though I think more than anyone I can think of, he was asking to get killed by an animal. Like, he was just asking for it. So it's hard for me to feel completely sympathetic. I at least feel sympathetic in that, like, no one deserves to die like that.
1:35:32 Wes Larson? Yeah. All right, a lot of people had this question, but the person I saw first was K Hilton 25 dot underscore equestrian. They say, do you think the foxes he was with had issues after his death because they were habituated? And they were more than just habituated, like they were food conditioned. He was feeding those foxes, but they were in remote enough of a place that I doubt it had any real negative repercussions for them. I'm not saying you should go feed foxes because of that. But because they were in such a wilderness setting, I don't think they were like then approaching cabins or getting in roads or whatever and getting hit by cars, obviously. Probably the only negative repercussions is there's probably guides that like would kick at him
1:36:15 Wes Larson? or whenever when they'd run up and ask for food, you know?
1:36:18 Mike Smith? So you think they would have pretty easily fallen back into a life where they were finding their own food?
1:36:23 Wes Larson? Okay. Yeah, I don't think there's, I don't think these foxes were completely relying on him for food. I think they were pretty good at finding their own.
1:36:30 Jeff Larson? I wonder if they, if they all need to wear hats now, now that they got that one hat?
1:36:36 Wes Larson? Yeah, they're like, oh, that's such a sick hat. I want one too.
1:36:40 Mike Smith? It's like whoever has the hat is the fox king now. And it's just a big fight, battle royale for the hat.
1:36:46 Jeff Larson? Change their whole ecosystem.
1:36:49 Wes Larson? All right, this is from John Franzak or Franz C Zach. Reverse Treadwell, the bears try and live among you in everyday life. What would Jeff and Mike do? Bears suddenly start showing up in your house. They're observing you, protecting you from poachers. What are you guys doing? Oh, they're protecting me from that's what they say. They say they're protecting you from poachers.
1:37:11 Jeff Larson? I think this already happened and I think they did a perfect job of explaining how it would work out. Paddington, one and two.
1:37:20 Wes Larson? Good point.
1:37:21 Jeff Larson? You know, a bear living with people. I would make friends with it. I'd give it a marmalade sandwich. I would give it a big red hat with a sandwich inside of it.
1:37:31 Wes Larson? Salt crimes.
1:37:32 Jeff Larson? Probably be my best friend. I'd probably change my whole life just because I love this bear so much.
1:37:38 Wes Larson? I like that. It's a perfect answer. I'd formulate an escape plan and then like assume a new identity somewhere else. I don't know. I wouldn't, I wouldn't enjoy it. I don't think.
1:37:48 Jeff Larson? What would you do if you were the bear to blend in?
1:37:52 Wes Larson? Yeah, put on human clothes. Shave. Yeah.
1:37:59 Wes Larson? Okay, a lot of people asked this, um, but Cray La La La and Sarah Beta are two that I saw right after each other. They said, if you could listen to the audio from the camera, would you? I would. I think at this point I would. There was a time when Tom offered me, and I do think at some point Tom has listened to the, the real audio, but maybe got a little jumbled with some fake audio. And I said, no. But now I think I would if I got the opportunity.
1:38:29 Jeff Larson? I would just so that I could kind of win against Wes.
1:38:33 Wes Larson? You could say you.
1:38:34 Jeff Larson? Like I wouldn't share it with Wes and then I'd be like, well, actually I listened to the audio.
1:38:39 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:38:39 Jeff Larson? So it actually wasn't even a bear that killed him.
1:38:43 Wes Larson? Could always hold that over me. Well, I'm thinking back.
1:38:47 Jeff Larson? It's actually the foxes that got him. If you listen to the audio.
1:38:50 Wes Larson? He's like, no, it's the fox.
1:38:54 Mike Smith? The idea that it'd be that bears are such a good conversation point to have on a first date, that would be my thing. I'd be like, so do you want to know exactly what Timothy was screaming when he died? And they'd be so impressed with me.
1:39:07 Wes Larson? All right. I'm gonna end on a really serious question from Cassidy Alexis Hill. Could Jeff have fought Timothy Treadwell in a cage match and won?
1:39:19 Jeff Larson? I think so. Yeah, I'm gonna say yes. I think where he has the advantage is like before we fight. I think he is really good at being intimidating. Like, he could scare off brown bears. Like, he was good at, like, making, he would definitely get in my head before the fight starts and make me think like, oh, this guy acts like a bear. This is gonna be tough. But I think once it, like, goes to blows, I'm taking him out.
1:39:47 Wes Larson? All right. Apparently Timothy did get in a lot of fights. But yeah, I don't know. I, I, I'm gonna give it to Jeff. All right. Well, that wraps it up, guys. I am excited to-
1:39:59 Jeff Larson? I've gotten a lot of fights.
1:40:00 Wes Larson? Yeah, okay. Yeah, with us.
1:40:02 Mike Smith? No, we'll get, we're giving you the win, Jeff.
1:40:05 Wes Larson? Yeah, Jeff, we gave it to you.
1:40:06 Jeff Larson? Fake from fighting.
1:40:07 Wes Larson? Okay. Well, that wraps up this story. I'm really excited to have it out there for the world. I know these episodes were a little bit longer, but thanks for bearing with us. It's a really big story, and I wanted to do it in two parts. So I hope you guys enjoyed it. If you did, please share it with your friends. Post about it. Share it, because we put a lot of time into this one.
1:40:27 Mike Smith? Do you think that's what Timothy said at the end of each season? Thanks for bearing with me to all the bears? Probably what he said to him.
1:40:35 Wes Larson? Parting words. He scribbled, he wrote it in the sand.
1:40:38 Mike Smith? Exactly.
1:40:40 Wes Larson? I do think, this has been our most requested episode, but I do want everyone to know, we still have a lot of really big episodes ahead of us.
1:40:48 Jeff Larson? No, this is it. We peaked.
1:40:54 Jeff Larson? I would recommend finding another podcast.
1:40:57 Wes Larson? No.
1:40:57 Jeff Larson? But I'm sorry, go ahead, Wes.
1:40:59 Wes Larson? This was the Grizzly Sanctuary. We still got the Grizzly Maze. We've got Steve Irwin, this, the, that big bear attack in Japan, I forget.
1:41:08 Mike Smith? Sankabatsu or whatever.
1:41:09 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:41:10 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:41:10 Wes Larson? We've got the, the book, The Tiger by John Valiant, which is a crazy story. Um, we've got a lot of animals that we haven't covered still. There's a lot.
1:41:18 Mike Smith? We could just do Treadwell again.
1:41:20 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:41:21 Jeff Larson? Retread.
1:41:23 Mike Smith? Read the retread.
1:41:24 Wes Larson? Retread, yeah. We might, who knows? But I just want to thank you guys for, for listening. Um, and I'm really excited to finally get this out.
1:41:31 Mike Smith? Yeah, you did an amazing job, Wes. Really.
1:41:35 Wes Larson? Thanks, guys.
1:41:36 Jeff Larson? And I'll just say, uh, it was like a really, I mean, I think people who, who aren't on subscription might complain about it, but we want to spoil our subscription people every once in a while because they mean the world to us. And having Wes's professor on to talk Treadwell was just really amazing.
1:41:57 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:41:57 Jeff Larson? And Patreon allows you to gift people a subscription now. So Christmas is coming up and that was a really good one. So I would just recommend that.
1:42:07 Wes Larson? Yeah, we'll probably put that link. Can we put that link in our show notes for the gift?
1:42:11 Mike Smith? I think so. We, if we can, we will.
1:42:14 Wes Larson? Yeah. Okay. Great. Thanks, guys. Uh, we love you and we're, again, like, sorry, I've already said this, but I'm going to say one more time. When you guys were getting so excited about part one, it made me feel so good. There, there was something that our audience was looking forward to that much. Just really like warmed my heart like nothing else. So thank you.
1:42:34 Jeff Larson? Like everyone who's.
1:42:35 Wes Larson? Appreciate it.
1:42:36 Jeff Larson? Shared it on Instagram, who sent it to a friend who talked about it. Like, thank you for that.
1:42:42 Wes Larson? Yeah. All right.
1:42:43 Jeff Larson? Mike, did you send it to anyone? One person?
1:42:47 Mike Smith? I sent it to, no, I didn't even send it to Braxton because he's not helping us edit these. So no.
1:42:55 Jeff Larson? No, don't be like.
1:42:56 Mike Smith? Our hype, man. All right. Love you guys.
1:42:58 Jeff Larson? Love you.
1:42:59 Mike Smith? See you next time.
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