Section B
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From the www.artofmanliness.com (2013)
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Public policy can turn on a single case of grizzly predation. During the summer of 1967, in
Glacier National Park, two young women were killed by two different grizzlies on the same night, an
incident memorialized in the 1969 book Night of the Grizzlies. Both bears had fed on garbage and
associated humans with food. The National Park Service had been a bit cavalier about bears eating
rubbish; in Yellowstone, virtually all grizzlies fed at open-pit dumps. Accused of near-criminal
negligence by the press, the Park Service did an about-face. Against the advice of biologists who
urged that bears be weaned slowly, Yellowstone abruptly closed the dumps, and bears began foraging
for garbage in campgrounds and towns. Wildlife managers killed more than 200 grizzlies in a five year period.
Post-Treadwell *, policies may change again. A shared view among bear observers is that bad
press following a fatal mauling leads not only to dead bears, but also to new restrictions. Already, the
growing trend is to keep people and bears separated. That's good in some ways, but I worry that we'll
take it too far.
At Alaska's McNeill River Falls, for example, observers are confined to a discrete space and
led by an armed ranger from the Alaska Department of Fish and Wildlife—a practice that has kept
people and bears safe for 28 years, but can't qualify as a real wilderness experience. In Yellowstone,
seasonal closures rightly keep humans out of critical grizzly feeding grounds. But though people
can't walk in, bears can walk out: Increasingly, young bears and mothers with cubs seek food near
the park's roads, where they are hit by cars and fed by idiots. Keeping people and grizzlies distant is
partly legitimate management strategy and partly, to my mind, chickenshit. In Glacier, the din of
Park Service-recommended shouting and whistle blowing drifts down every trail. The message is
that photography is fine, but please don't interact with nature. The spectrum of backcountry
adventure is truncated at the wild extreme.
What is the value, then, of face-to-face encounters with carnivores, who on rare occasions
size up Homo sapiens as chow? The beasts that used to sweep down on a village and carry off a
person are gone—so rare that maulings like this one make headlines in a way head-ons along the
Alcan Highway never will. But here's an animal essential to us all, useful to distant corners of the
soul: the grizzly roaring out an enforced humility, reminding us of our place in the food chain.
In our charge to domesticate this continent, we missed a few pockets of wildness where risk
still dwells. We could live without these beasts, though something in the imagination would stray
aimlessly. That anchor of wild risk keeps us tethered.
In our charge to domesticate this continent, we missed a few pockets of wildness where risk
still dwells. We could live without these beasts, though something in the imagination would stray
aimlessly. That anchor of wild risk keeps us tethered.
That risk also delivers the salient lesson of bear encounters. Timothy Treadwell was not in
control: He had a great run of luck that lasted more than a decade, and it ran out. In the grizzly
business, it happens.
From “Blood Brothers: Timothy Treadwell,” Doug Peacock, Outside Magazine, January (2004)
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* In 2003 a grizzly bear killed and ate Timothy Treadwell.
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