Dear President Obama:

We are writing to thank you for your leadership on climate change and to ask for yourĚýhelp: Yellowstone grizzly bears are in grave danger.

Your administration has regrettably taken steps to strip the bear’s federal protections under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), opening up a grizzly bear trophy hunt on the edges of Yellowstone National Park. Yellowstone’s bears are a remnant and isolatedĚýpopulation. They must be allowed to wander safely outside of Yellowstone National Park.

Americans would never permit hunting of America’s bald eagle; hunting Yellowstone grizzly bears is equally unacceptable.

To make matters worse, America’s great bears face the same looming threats as many species across the country due to climate change. In the last decade, climate change has decimated the Yellowstone grizzly’s most important food, the white bark pine nut.

Unfortunately, the March 3, 2016, delisting announcement by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) came paired with an astonishing declaration in the Federal Register:

“Therefore, we conclude that the effects of climate change do not constitute a threat to the [Yellowstone grizzly bear population] now, nor are they anticipated to in the future.”

This statement is even more disturbing in light of your administration’s commitment to addressing climate change, because climate change predictions are dire for all our planet’s species. How can it be that the military considers climate change in all its decisions, while the agency responsible for our wildlife, the FWS, does not?

The same argument—the denial of climate change—was used by the FWS in 2014 to deny listing the wolverine in the lower 48 states. On April 4, 2016, that decision was reversed in federal court, and declared “arbitrary and capricious.” The FWS was ordered to reconsider its reasoning about climate change. It’s now time for this federal agency to play catch up and use “the best available science” to keep grizzly bears on the ESA list.

A critical question: Who benefits from delisting Yellowstone’s grizzly bears? The only certain outcome of delisting bears will be trophy hunts in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.

We ask you to instruct our federal wildlife managers to withdraw the March 3 rule and order the FWS to take another look at how climate change impacts grizzly bears. Any decision about the bear’s future should be put on hold until independent scientific review can explore potential impacts to bears from climate change. We strongly suspect that America’s great bears face a dire future, even with the continued protection of theĚýEndangered Species Act.

Respectfully yours,

Doug Peacock
Disabled veteran, Guggenheim fellow

Concerned scientists:

Professor Edward O. Wilson, Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology

George B. Schaller, Panthera Corporation and Wildlife Conservation Society

Jane Goodall, Jane Goodall Institute and UN Messenger of Peace

Michael Soule, Professor Emeritus, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz

Friends of the Yellowstone ecosystem:

Jeff Bridges, Academy Award-winning actor

Douglas Brinkley, Author and professor of history

Yvon Chouinard, Founder of Patagonia, Inc.

Michael Finley, Former superintendent Yellowstone National Park

Harrison Ford, Award-winning actor

Carl Hiaasen, Journalist, author

Michael Keaton, Award-winning actor

Thomas McGuane, American Academy of Arts & Letters

N. Scott Momaday, Pulitzer Prize winner

Terry Tempest Williams, Author and Guggenheim fellow

Ted Turner, Philanthropist and conservationist

Doug Peacock is a former Green Beret medic who has been writing and lecturing about Yellowstone’s bears for more than 40 years. He is the author of five books, includingĚý, andĚý. He wrote an op-ed about the decision to delist the Yellowstone grizzly bear for şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř in March.

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Last week, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to strip federal Endangered Species Act protections from Yellowstone’s grizzly bears. This process is called “delisting” and it means that the feds think the grizzly population around Yellowstone is safe from threats to their survival that date back to 1975. If this proposal is successful, bear management will be turned over to the surrounding states, and they will issue hunting permits.

The decision is required by law to be based on “the best available science.” Nonetheless, tremendous controversy remains concerning the wisdom of delisting Yellowstone’s great bear. Considerable debate rages among independent scientists and conservationists about what constitutes the best science, and how the federal government has interpreted that science. Delisting is not a done deal.

At the time that Lewis and Clark dragged their keelboats up the Missouri River, some 50,000-to-100,000 grizzly bears roamed the West from the Arctic Sea to the Sierra Madre Mountains of Mexico. Today, as few as 1,500 grizzly bears survive south of Canada, most of them in or around Glacier and Yellowstone national parks. The Yellowstone population is isolated, an island ecosystem cut off geographically and genetically from bears along the Canadian border. The feds claim about 700 grizzlies may live in the Yellowstone ecosystem.

Yellowstone’s grizzlies are currently facing two great threats to their survival: global warming, which has already decimated the most important grizzly food in Yellowstone; and delisting, with the attendant plans to open up trophy hunting in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming.

For centuries, the grizzlies of Yellowstone have fed on nuts from whitebark pine trees. The nut is highly caloric, and the trees grow at a high elevation pine in remote places, serving to separate vulnerable young and mother bears from armed hunters at lower elevations outside the park during hunting season. Mother grizzlies who fed on pine nuts had more cubs and better survival rates. You’d have to go to Siberia to find another such unique relationship.

That symbiosis ended a decade ago. Around 2002, global warming began to heat up the winter temperature around Yellowstone to the point where the larva of the mountain pine beetle could overwinter at higher elevations in the pine trees’ bark. Within five years, 95 percent of the mature, cone-bearing trees were dead. Whitebark pine nuts, the Yellowstone grizzly’s most important food sources were gone and they will not come back in our lifetime.

Nor will it stop there: global warming is the hot wind challenging all species of plants and animals in the Northern Rockies. In Yellowstone, we can expect hot dry weather, a terrifying drought that will bring weeds and diminish the habitat, the carrying capacity for bears. Grizzlies will be forced to forage far afield.

The threat of global warming should be enough in itself to preclude delisting. But the federal government is not impressed by climate change. As evidenced by a recent lawsuit over wolverines, Fish and Wildlife administrators dismiss the predictions of climate models as unreliable. The government wants accurate climate predictions out to 2085 before they act. That’s crazy: Nobody has a clue if the bears, or their human constituencies, will even be around in 2085. You can’t dismiss climate change.

The only certain outcome of delisting the Yellowstone grizzly bears is that it will result in a trophy bear hunt. The three states have pushed the feds hard for delisting in anticipation of the revenue such a hunt will bring. But once an isolated group of bears, like Yellowstone’s, begins to die off faster that they are born, they are on the road to extinction.

The growth of the grizzly population has leveled off; the current population estimate is down sixĚýpercent from 2014. Mortality from all causes, as reported by the government, was 59 dead grizzlies in 2015. Reported mortality is about half of actual dead bears—an accepted rule of thumb. Start adding in the bears that will be shot in the trophy hunt and you could easily approach 200 dead grizzlies in a single year. Even a population of 700 grizzly bears would be doomed to extinction by that much mortality.

Fish and Wildlife pledges to monitor grizzly deaths, but has no funding to do so. With delisting, the federal government will turn over grizzly management decisions outside of the park’s boundaries to three states that everyone knows will show no restraint in killing grizzlies.

The Yellowstone grizzly is marooned, making a last stand against global warming and the guns of autumn. Stripping the great bear of its Endangered Species Act protections will directly contribute to its demise.

Doug Peacock is a former Green Beret medic who has been writing and lecturing about Yellowstone’s bears for more than 40 years. He is the author of five books, including , and .

The post Op-Ed: Don’t Delist Yellowstone Grizzly Bears appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

If you were to ride withan eagle (or a condor) soaring high above, the Escalante might looklike the branches of an ancient tree or the circulatory drainage of thehuman heart. This land is shaped by the way water runs. There’s onebranch in particular that runs through my days like the blood in my ownveins.

Edward Abbey first introduced me to this rich,untrammeled country. In the spring of 1971, we dropped off the northside of the Kaiparowits Plateau into the lower canyons of the EscalanteRiver, backpacked down a branch to the main artery, then climbed outanother. Humbled by the immense scale, we started exploring,bushwhacking for days up smaller canyons that gnawed north into thehigh country. We found the canyon at the end of our trip; a tiny, clearcreek trickled out between sheer sandstone walls. Sipping whiskey andsmoking cheap cigars around a piñon fire, we vowed to come back andexplore its length.

Time passed, we buried Ed, and I started exploring the maze ofcanyons by myself. Years later, I found and reburied a 13,000-year-oldspear point used by ancient people to hunt mammoth. I looked around,thinking the topography must look exactly like it did when saber-toothcats prowled the land. What was it that drew those elephant huntersdown into these canyons? Could it have been the same timeless lure thatbit me and Ed on the ass just yesterday?

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Al, Dennis, and I linger in the pale light of evening until long after the guides have turned in. Al, who has been climbing in the Himalayas for 20 years, regales us with stories. During one expeditionary climb of Everest in 1987, Al’s job was to ferry loads across the fearsome Khumbu Icefall, one of the most treacherous spots on the mountain. To relieve himself of the monotony, he waited to watch an attractive woman climber slowly make her way past him. Al followed close behind, one eye out for danger, the other fixed on his lovely companion. Just as they approached a ladder breaching a crevasse, an ice tower fell with the jolt of an earthquake and the crevasse collapsed, sucking the ladder into its white belly. Were it not for his sophomoric dawdling, Al would have gone down with it.

During the night I lie in my tent, nursing a mild altitude headache and a chronic cough that’s kept me awake for two months. The distant roar of an avalanche off Dhaulagiri rolls over the foothills and fades down the valley. I listen to the silence, then rummage through my backpack for two codeine tablets to suppress the cough. I smile as I remember how my old friend, the writer Edward Abbey, looked forward to his nightly codeine fix as he battled complications of acute pancreatitis during the last year of his life.

By the time Ed died at age 62, he was renowned, the author of 20 books, including Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang, whose protagonist, George Washington Hayduke, was a former Green Beret medic who greatly resembled myself. Published in 1975, The Monkey Wrench Gang sold half a million copies, and the character of Hayduke became famous in a lowbrow sort of way. This was hardly an endorsement of excellence, nor was it flattery of any kind; Hayduke was a one-dimensional dolt. To the extent that I was seduced by the hype, it placed enormous strain on my friendship with Ed, which from the start carried the imbalance of paternalism.

I met Ed in the winter of 1969 at the home of a mutual friend, the writer William Eastlake; we talked about mountain lions. He was very funny, yet there was a stubborn finality to his judgments, which tended to be misanthropic toward adults and gentle toward children. Like myself, Ed had little use for religion of any variety, but he nevertheless believed there were observable guidelines for living, an accessible wisdom that resided in the land. He called the Taoist philosopher Chuang-tzu — who viewed government as deadly not only to mankind but all of creation — the first anarchist.

It was the love of wild country, and the need to protect it, that brought us together and kept us together through the two bumpy decades of our friendship. Ed, who was 15 years older, became a guide in my life, introducing me to some of America’s greatest desert spots, and I tried to return the favor. After I began to closely study the biology and sociology of grizzly bears in the midseventies, Ed and I made many trips to Glacier National Park in the hope that he would spot a bear. He traveled to Alaska and the Arctic but was fated never to lay eyes on one. To the end, Ed called the silver-tipped bear “the alleged grizzly.”

Now, years after his death, I’m taking another trip in honor of Ed, my first return to Asia since the Vietnam War. I didn’t travel abroad much before Ed’s passing, but his death radically altered the declination of my compass, sending me beyond the familiar and outside my own culture. I started hesitantly, visiting the Athabascans of Alaska and the Inuit of Lancaster Sound, in the Canadian Arctic. On my meandering way to Nepal I explored the salmon rivers at the edge of Siberia and followed tiger tracks along the Sea of Japan. I wanted to see places Ed had missed in his life and to get more out of what life I myself had left. I wanted to take what Ed would call “great walks.” It was a way to pay tribute, to shed an entrenched existence for a new beginning, to get out in order to look back in.

In the morning we start up the faint, winding trail to the pass, crossing a few steep patches of snow and scree. Pemba, our head guide from Makalu, uses his knife to cut steps in the hard snow of the gullies. I gasp in the thin air, my mind fuzzy as I struggle along the path. I watch my boots and try to regulate my breathing. My pack is nearly empty; the others saw to that. I’m the oldest and the least fit of our little group, and feel old enough to be a grandfather to our youngest guide, also named Pemba, who’s merely 16.

I breathe deeply, blowing out every two seconds, trying to keep a rhythm. Eventually my head clears and I forget about the pain in my back and legs. One of the best things about walking in the backcountry is that it allows me to get in touch with my body. On my solo trips in Montana or the Arizona desert, something starts to happen on the fourth or fifth day: I lose my desire for caffeine, booze, sugar, salt. It’s as if the body’s consciousness wants me to walk off the fat, to streamline this much-abused corporeal seat of the soul.

We reach Thampus Pass at 16,500 feet and Hidden Valley comes into view, a high grassland covering the morainal debris of a U-shaped basin. A slot of blue sky hovers over this high meadow, hemmed in on all four sides by rain clouds. We take a break on a muddy bench sloping off the wide saddle of the pass. Pemba the elder uses cedar twigs carried from far below to heat water for tea. Al studies the topographic map and picks various routes out of the valley, all of which entail steep glacier travel or technical rock work. Dennis goes off by himself, picking over the bedrock and thin patches of soil. He squats and plucks a piece of quartzite from the loam. He opens his Arapaho medicine bag and adds the stone. Afterward, he tells me this is the first time he’s opened his bag in years.

A black vulture flies over, and I’m reminded of one of my early road trips with Ed. It was December 1974. At the time he and I were unattached and without families. We had just spent a sniffling, lonely Christmas Eve in a topless bar in Tucson, drinking whiskey. Thinking we could improve on that, we packed up and drove 150 miles west over Charlie Bell Pass into the Cabeza Prieta desert, hard against the Mexican border in southwestern Arizona. We sipped beer the whole way and were a tad plastered by the time we arrived. At the bottom of the pass we got out of the truck to look at the petroglyphs carved into a group of basalt boulders. There were birds and thunderstorms and curved patterns that didn’t resemble anything. Ed studied one of the birds and said that he wanted to come back as a buzzard after he died and soar above Barrier Canyon in Utah, where the greatest Indian rock art in North America is located, a place I had never been. He described life-size cliff paintings of mummylike figures with bucket-shaped heads, square shoulders, and long, tapered trunks decorated with birds and other small “spirit helpers.” Go there, he said. It’s the gateway between worlds.

We continued on for one more six-pack until we hit the Granite Mountains, where we got stuck in a ditch. We hiked for a while and found a pile of rocks, probably marking the old grave of a prospector. “A good place to end up,” Ed noted.

I sip my tea and wonder how old Ed would have fared up here in the Himalayas. He felt weak on his last trips to our beloved Cabeza Prieta. He was low on blood those last months of his life. The doctor said he had lost half of his blood volume during one weekend in early 1989 when the veins in his throat ruptured, a complication brought on by hepatic hypertension. The resulting anemia starved his brain of oxygen and produced an odd, insular humor. He knew the end was near, and he seemed relieved to be finally free of the conceits of the society he’d railed against for so long. By the time Ed died, he had the clearest eyes I’d ever seen.

The eyes still haunt me. Ed’s dying revealed that being willing to die was not the same as being prepared for death. I’d witnessed death many times over the years, and I had no fear of it. I’d survived two tours in Vietnam and later courted trouble with grizzlies. My favorite animals remain those that occasionally kill and eat humans. But I’ve never glimpsed what Ed found at his end. In a world where no one gets out alive, in a culture in which death still comes as an unexpected shock, Ed’s dying with grace was the greatest of all the gifts he gave me.

Ed died in March 1989 after four days of esophageal hemorrhaging. My Nepalese companions tell me the throat is supposed to be the seat of communication and that speech is the link between the peaceful divinities of the heart and the wrathful deities of the brain. But neither Ed nor I was ever very good at communication. Ed could be a real crank; he was the most difficult close friend I ever had. And I was a moody bastard myself. Even now, it gives me a chill remembering our last big quarrel, over a .357 Magnum pistol Ed thought about using to hasten his exit. Though Ed and I had always laughed at the frail psychology of members of our sex who spent half their lives getting over their relationships with their fathers, there was an edge to our brotherhood, elements of the macho and the authoritarian that took many years to leave behind. It’s a sad irony that this most masculine of friendships would yield to openness only at the very end. It wasn’t until four days before his death that I finally told Ed how much I’d always loved him.

We drop off Thampus Pass and scramble to the grassy bottom of Hidden Valley. I hit the ground almost running, eager to explore this wild place and see what kind of animals live here. The remote habitat is especially suitable for blue sheep, and if the sheep are here, snow leopards will be, too.

I pitch my tent on a ridge a couple hundred yards above my companions. The pass marks the highest altitude I’ve ever reached, and I feel high in spirits, too, happy that I’ve made it. I wander in a gentle breeze blowing off the mountains, the rare sunlight of the monsoon season raining down on me. A horned lark picks flies out of fresh piles of yak manure. I flip the chips over to dry in the sun; dung is the only available fuel up here. As I work, a flock of Tibetan snow finches bursts over the ridge and alights among the buttercups, asters, and ice plants that surround my camp. I think of my earliest memory of the outdoors: riding on my dad’s shoulders during World War II, when he led his Boy Scout troops into the Michigan countryside, collecting milkweed pods to fill navy life preservers.

After sunset a thick fog ebbs and flows through the valley like a diurnal tide, twice rising to a level just shy of my tent site, engulfing my friends camped below. About two in the morning I awaken to a tortured round of coughing. I take two codeine tablets and lie back down, willing myself to sleep. A few minutes later I notice a gurgling in my belly, followed by a deeper rumbling down in my bowels. I step outside and have a brief but violent bout of the runs; I’m astonished to see blood on the ground. I try to stay calm and assess the situation, but another rush of hot blood hits my stomach, and I gag.

After a few minutes the retching stops and I crawl back into my tent. I feel a trickle of blood in my throat; all that coughing must have broken a vein.

Woozy, I lie in my sleeping bag until daylight and then creep outside to check the damage. It’s hard to tell how much blood I lost, but it looks like a lot. My coughing has stopped, though, and the bleeding in my throat is now just a slow drip. I gaze down on the ghostly tents below me, barely visible through the mist. Weak and confused, I decide not to wake the others. Since I can still walk some, I dimly reason that that is what I should do.

I grab my binoculars, take another codeine tablet, and head out. The dewy grass sparkles in the early light; I can smell the sun on the wet willow leaves. I wander toward a boulder field dotted with iridescent green lichens. Under one of the boulders sprout tiny purple mycena mushrooms. Nearby are panaeolus. I squat down and mechanically pinch the base of a stalk. A blue stain will indicate the presence of psilocybin, meaning that these are “magic mushrooms.” Maybe I’ll eat a handful and see the face of God. But there is no blue stain.

Up ahead by a miniature creek I spot animal trails in the steep scree. I take two steps forward for a better look and freeze; a hundred feet away a dozen or more Himalayan blue sheep are staring at me. They’re all females and juveniles, including a single tiny lamb. I stand motionless for two or three minutes and the sheep resume grazing, nibbling on clumps of coarse, dry grass. Slowly, I drop to one knee and ease my binoculars up to my eyes. It’s the wrong move, and the sheep bound away. One ewe remains, watching me for a moment before loping away to join the herd.

A wave of dizziness shudders through my body. I stumble to the creek to splash water on my face then lie down to dry in the morning sun. I feel as if I’m outside of my body, watching my crumpled figure sprawled out along the bank. Humans are such frail, helpless creatures, I muse dreamily. A warm wetness creeps across my back; I’m probably bleeding again. I roll over and wipe myself, checking for blood, just as I did with Ed two hours before he died.

“I can’t do it myself,” Ed said.

“That’s what I’m here for,” I answered.

Maybe that’s what it comes down to, this final humility, this acceptance of service — all preparation for the big trip, all shrouded in wretched comedy.

I push myself up from the ground. Though it occurs to me that I could be bleeding to death in much the same manner as Ed, I’m too oxygen-starved to be alarmed. I feel dazed, almost giddy. I find it enough of a laugh to savor the rich irony of my situation. So this is what it’s like, I think, Ed’s dark wit coming back to get me in the end. I take a few tentative steps and sit back down with a nervous chuckle, my hypoxic cerebral circuitry joking with itself.

I dig out my notebook and scribble a short but adequate will and a note to my family. “Larry, I salute you. Laurel, Colin, I am sorry. I love you all.” I add for myself, “I am going to die and it will be OK if not wonderful.”

I pack the notebook away and stand up again. I manage to stagger back to camp, where I explain to my companions that I’m sick. I feel self-conscious and embarrassed as I tell them that I’m bleeding and that if it continues I might not make it out of the valley. Little Pemba and the other young Sherpa, Ngwang, look slightly uncomfortable. Perhaps they’re worried that I indeed will die and they’ll have to carry my large carcass off the mountain.

I lie back in the grass and rest my head on a rock. I think back to the frigid winter of 1962, when I became hypothermic during a camping trip in Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario. I wanted to lie down in the snow and go to sleep and never get up again. Now it is much the same. The climb back over the pass seems both unnecessary and impossible. I’m content to stay here in Hidden Valley, on this little grass-covered knoll.

But Dennis is gently pulling me to my feet, and Alan and the Sherpas are hustling to break camp. As I stare at the ground, battling faintness, I notice the white feather of an Egyptian buzzard lying on a patch of heather. I carefully bend over and pick it up, telling Dennis, “I’m going to need a bit of luck.” He takes the medicine bundle from around his neck and places it around mine without comment.

We strike off to the east, toward the steep scree below the pass, now 1,500 feet above us. I carry no pack, no extra weight, yet it’s all I can do to inch up the slope. I start to black out and squat in the rocks with my head between my knees. The wildly spinning valley below returns to a still frame.

One pitch leads to another, one slope to another, and before the sun disappears behind Dhaulagiri, I step up and see an expanse of rock, the top of the pass. I clench the white buzzard feather in my fist and make a lame joke about the tough job of burying me up here in this thin, rocky soil.

Where I get planted is important to me. I never wanted to be cremated or fed to the buzzards, Tibetan sky-burial style. I learned that for myself years ago, when one of my best friends committed suicide and was cremated and scattered before I got the news. I wanted somewhere I could go to visit him. Later, when Ed died, I was on hand to see to his burial. He’d wanted to nourish a plant, a cactus or a tree. He was buried illegally, deep in the desert, and just moments before we laid him to rest, I lay down in the grave to check out the view. There was blue sky and a faint desert breeze stirring the blossoms of a brittlebush. We should all be so blessed.

Two and a half miles above the town of Marpha, I start coughing again. I stagger, and Dennis props me up. He asks Al if they should rope me to someone, but Al says no: “If he falls, he falls.” Al has slipped into professional climber mode. It’s up to me to get myself out of here, he says.

Since there’s no way we’ll reach town by dark, Dennis and Al decide to stop for the night. I feel too far gone to make sense of anything. Somebody puts up my tent and hands me a cup of sweet tea. Dennis asks if he should stay with me, throw his sleeping bag in with mine, but I prefer to be alone. I try to think about Ed, to borrow some of his courage, but it’s hard.

It rains in the night, and Al and Dennis go out in the flailing wind to check my tent. They stay up until dawn, listening for my cough, exchanging whispers. Dennis recklessly suggests a transfusion — his blood type is compatible with mine — but of course we have no tubes or needles.

In the morning I stick my head out the tent flap to see a crystalline blue sky. Everything is white with fresh snow. Dennis, visibly relieved that I’ve made it through the night, packs up my gear, and together we head out, leaving Al and the Sherpas to break camp again. Soon the faint yak trails converge into a wider path, which after a couple of hours leads to the trail we climbed only a few days ago.

Finally, in the distance, we see the stacks of firewood that outline the rooftops of the small thatch houses of Marpha. I lurch toward them over the slippery alluvium of the trail. Dennis is suffering excruciating pain in his quadriceps, having descended 8,000 feet in a single day. I’m simply grateful to be breathing. My throat is raw, but I’ve stopped coughing and can no longer taste blood in my throat. My wound seems to have clotted over.

In town we’re greeted by the strong aroma of yaks and cooking fires. I hear a tinkle of bells and turn to watch a lively Mustang horse trot by, its saddle blanket woven with bright images of snow leopards. Beautiful.

We arrive at Bhakti’s tea house, where Al buys a bottle of brandy, distilled locally from home-grown apples. I add a tablespoon to a cup of weak tea; the sweet fragrance rises to my nostrils and I remember where I last smelled this scent: an abandoned orchard swallowed up in sumac and jack pine on a hillside in northern Michigan, just about the last place in the country where you could still buy an acre of land for $150. I discourse at length on the olfactory power of place, of bears and big cats, of brandies and wild mushrooms. My friends listen indulgently.

The next morning Dennis asks if I want to see a doctor at the army compound here in town. I say no; as long as the bleeding remains stabilized, I prefer not to be examined by a military sawbones who will likely dislodge the clot and restart the hemorrhaging. Instead, I stock up on more codeine pills and cough syrup from the small local pharmacy.
From Marpha we make it to the town of Jomsom, then on to Kathmandu. We check in at the Mustang Holiday Inn, and Dennis calls the airport. All flights are booked, and we’re on standby. It could mean several days of waiting.

We walk the streets of the city, hiring bicycle carts when we get tired. As we ride, I play a game with myself: I pick out the homeliest face I can find and try to get inside that person’s mind to see something beautiful. We pass a legless beggar and I stop our driver, climb out of the cart, and walk back to the man. He has a broad face very much like that of my friend Jim Harrison. We both smile. I bow. “Namaste,” I say.

Each evening, from the roof of the Holiday Inn, I listen to the hum of the city and watch swarms of birds descend into the trees. As they settle in for the night, giant coppery fruit bats leave their roosts and hatch across the sky. Dennis and I walk down to the temples along the Bogmati River, a tributary of the sacred Ganges. Along the bank, greasy smoke billows from a funeral pyre of eucalyptus as another Hindu is reduced to ashes and transported seaward. The fire crackles and the choking smoke floats downstream over naked children frolicking in the filthy water. I wonder if there is enough firewood to complete the job; the cadaver appears to have been a big man. A local guide tells me I may take pictures of the corpse, whose black toes now curl in the flames, but I decline the offer.

The effluvium of death sticks in my lacerated throat, a memory of the others who have gone this way before me: my comrades in Vietnam, relatives, cherished pets and lovers, Ed — all those for whom I grieve each day and haven’t quite let go of.

Far up in the sky, fork-tailed kites wheel against the thunderheads of a building monsoon. They speak their message clearly: You, Peacock, have been granted a second chance. You’ll have a bit more time to do good work, to live a good life and get ready to die a good death.

The billowing wall of clouds closes in on the vault of Asian sky. A last message floats down: “Don’t blow it, idiot.”

Four weeks later, I’m stumbling up a volcanic boulder field in southwestern Arizona, a bit weak but otherwise all right. Doctors tell me that the blood I lost in Nepal resulted from a tear in my esophagus caused by violent coughing. I could have bled to death like Ed, but unlike him I got lucky and the bleeding stopped.

The lesson is a big one, and I don’t want it to merely slide away, so I’m paying a visit to Ed’s grave in the Cabeza Prieta desert. I’ve brought along a plastic bag full of desert flower seeds to scatter over the site: Mexican poppy, larkspur, lupine, Indian paintbrush, brittlebrush. It’s not the right time of year for proper germination, but I’m not much of a farmer, so I’ll leave the sprouting of these seeds to chance.

A steady breeze cools the beads of sweat on my forehead. I pick my way over the boulder-littered ridge toward the grave, hopping from stone to stone, careful to not leave any tracks. Very few people come out here, and only a handful of friends and family know the exact location. A bureaucrat somewhere might decide he should be dug up and moved, and I don’t want old Ed disturbed.

When you write a book of change, you don’t get to choose the last chapter. It arrives on the wind, fast. A month ago I thought I was dying. I was packed for that big trip, ready to go, but then I didn’t leave. Edward Abbey figures prominently in this trip, looming larger in my life now that he is dead. I’m not sure why; perhaps something about the feral nature of our friendship back then, combined with the closeness of our families afterward. Beyond the grave, all was forgiven. Though I miss him, he taught me that there are things worth dying for, that “one’s death should mean something.” I learned that the letting go of life could be encased in utter vitality.

Indian petroglyphs decorate basaltic boulders along a rim of volcanic caprock. The country falls away to the west, huge empty desert valleys and distant mountain ranges. As far as I can see, there is not a human sign upon the land — no roads, no trails, no power lines. I take my time getting to the grave, enjoying the walking, noting little changes in vegetation since my last visit. I recall the very last time Ed smiled, when I told him where he was going to be buried. I smile, too, when I look around this place and remember the small favor, the final duty, performed for a friend: the rudimentary shovel work, the sweaty labor consummating trust. Then came the sign — seven buzzards soaring above, joined by three others, all ten banking over the volcanic rubble and gliding across the freshly dug grave.

I pull another plastic bag from my pack and kneel before a torote bush. I repair the wind chime that hangs near the site, adding thin crescents of clamshell to replace slivers of volcanic glass that have disappeared. I carefully reconnect a devil’s claw seed pod hung with bits of obsidian — an offering from Ed’s sister-in-law Susan and her husband, Steve, who helped me dig the hole. Deer and bighorn sheep have browsed the small ocotillo planted by the lead singer of Tucson’s best white band. The ground is littered with seashells, crystals, and many heart-shaped rocks placed here by children — Ed’s children, my children, our friends’ children.

For a long time I stare at one of the boulders. An inscription is roughly carved into the rock:
Edward Paul Abbey
January 29, 1927-March 14, 1989
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ON OCTOBER 6, Willy Fulton eased his Beaver floatplane down into Alaska’s Katmai National Park and remote Kaflia Bay, a broad mosaic of ocean beach, braided waterways, dense thickets of alder, and sedge fields yellowing in the autumn chill. His plan was to pick up his friends Timothy Treadwell, 46, and Amie Huguenard, 37, both of Malibu, California, who spent each summer living among the many brown bears—as coastal Alaska’s large grizzlies are known—that congregate in this salmon-heavy wilderness at the base of the Alaska Peninsula.

A “Maze” grizzly gnaws a salmon.

But something was very wrong. Descending into camp, the bush pilot spotted a flattened tent, and a large grizzly on top of what looked like a human body. Fulton buzzed the bear with his plane, but it refused to budge. He landed on an adjacent lake and immediately called state troopers on Kodiak Island, across the bay, and Katmai National Park headquarters, in King Salmon, 100 miles to the north.


Katmai rangers touched down first. They hiked to a small knob above the camp, but before they could get closer, a large male grizzly approached out of the bushes. Ranger Joel Ellis, flanked by two others standing by with shotguns, fired his pistol 11 times at the lanky brown bear, which fell dead 12 feet away. At the camp, the team found Treadwell’s and Huguenard’s shoes lined up neatly outside the tent; Treadwell’s glasses were still in their case. Then they discovered the couple’s partially buried remains nearby, the bodies mostly consumed. As the rangers loaded their plane with the victims’ cameras, gear, and remains, a smaller bear approached—too persistently, they thought—and they killed it, too. The Cessna 206 lifted off, leaving Kaflia Bay looking as pristine as it had for thousands of years.


After two days of bad weather, authorities returned. The smaller grizzly, a three-year-old, had been eaten by other bears; only its head remained. There was no way to determine if it had fed on the couple’s bodies. A necropsy described the larger bear as a thousand-pound, 28-year-old male, reasonably healthy despite the fact that, like many older grizzlies, it had broken teeth. Its stomach contained human flesh and clothing.


The chilling facts disseminated to the international media were at once vague and disturbingly graphic. The state medical examiner could establish only that the cause of death was “multiple blunt-force injuries due to bear mauling.” But Treadwell’s video camera (its lens cap still on) yielded a six-minute audio recording, illuminating all too vividly the last moments of two people trying to save each other’s life. It starts with Treadwell investigating a bear that has come into camp. Something goes wrong, and the bear attacks him. “I’m getting killed!” he screams. Huguenard, still in the tent, tells him to play dead, and for a minute the bear backs off, suggesting that the initial attack was not predatory. But the grizzly returns, and Huguenard comes to Treadwell’s aid. In his last words, he yells to her to save herself.


Still unknown is which bear attacked, and why. It could have been a third grizzly, or a bear wandering down from the interior. Was it a predator hunting for a human meal—a rare but not unknown possibility—or a chance mauling followed by opportunistic feeding by other bears at the lean end of the salmon season? Anything dead is food for a grizzly.


Treadwell and Huguenard knew that well. They were not ordinary bear watchers; in fact, they were widely known bear activists. Huguenard was a physician’s assistant with a degree in molecular biology; she’d written to Treadwell after meeting him at a presentation in Boulder, Colorado, in 1996, and had spent parts of the past three summers with him in Katmai. Treadwell, meanwhile, had photographed the Katmai grizzlies for the past 13 years, and his 1997 book Among Grizzlies had brought him to the edge of fame: He’d appeared on David Letterman’s Late Show, the Discovery Channel’s Discovery Sunday, and other television programs. Eight months of the year, he traveled America giving slide shows about Alaskan wildlife to schoolchildren.


Treadwell’s methods of chumming up to grizzlies, however, were considered unsound by much of the bear-research community. He gave the bears names like Mr. Chocolate and Booble. He filmed himself chanting, “I love you, I love you,” as he inched up to a grizzly. Scientists belittled him for his anthropomorphizing. Mainstream researchers either cautioned Treadwell that his behavior would put bears and humans at risk or dismissed him as a loon. Even his friends worried—they thought he should carry bear spray. But after blasting one charging bear, Cupcake, with pepper spray in 1995, Treadwell refused.

TIMOTHY TREADWELL came to visit me in the early 1990s, after his first summers among Alaskan bears. He’d read my book, Grizzly Years, about the 14 seasons I spent camping in Montana and Wyoming’s grizzly country after my return from the Vietnam War, and we talked about his decision—after nearly killing himself with an overdose of opiates in California—to go live with bears in 1990. Treadwell possessed a fragile sincerity that shouldn’t be confused with naivetĂ©;. He was fearless, yet, as he wrote in Among Grizzlies, “keenly aware it takes only a single misinterpretation [of bear behavior] to get myself killed.” I issued the usual admonitions, among them that he should be careful about conditioning bears to humans: Legal bear hunting is big business outside the 4.7-million-acre park, and though no poaching episodes have been recorded in Katmai, Treadwell would later claim to have repeatedly driven poachers away.


But if people had taken exception to Treadwell’s methods during his lifetime, after his death the gloves came off. Former Katmai National Park superintendent Deb Liggett told the Anchorage Daily News how park officials had repeatedly warned Treadwell not to camp among bears—and even threatened to expel him from Katmai. She’d told Treadwell her staff would never forgive him if they had to kill a bear because of him.


Chuck Bartlebaugh, director of the national safety campaign Be Bear Aware, in Missoula, Montana, told the Anchorage paper that he worried about Treadwell’s example: “We have a trail of dead people and dead bears because of this trend that says, ‘Let’s show it’s not dangerous.'”


Treadwell’s supporters disputed that implication, stressing that he had always cautioned people to avoid bears. But even his friends were at a loss to put the deaths into perspective. Dave Mattson, a wildlife biologist based in Arizona, told me that he was “struggling, really conflicted. Tim was a friend whose courage and dedication I admire above all. I fear ego was a factor, as it sometimes is for all of us. I know that adrenaline rush of wanting to get close to grizzlies. Respect means, for me, giving them their space.”


Home in Montana, I went to see my friend Lance Craighead, one of the preeminent grizzly biologists working today. We lamented the loss—of Treadwell, of Huguenard, of the bears. We couldn’t help but like this guy who punched out as he’d wanted to, who’d told people he would be honored to “end up in bear scat,” though we agreed that he’d camped in terrible places and gotten way too close to bears. Still, Treadwell may have contributed a significant chapter to the study of grizzly behavior. “His legacy,” Craighead said, “may well prove that he did a lot more good for bears than any short-term harm.”

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.


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.

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