The puzzling death of Bart Schleyer in the Yukon Territory of Canada

October 27, 2017 StrangeOutdoors

Bart Schleyer disappeared September 14 2004. Remains found October 3, 2004, Reid Lakes, Yukon Territory, Canada.

Revised September 2024

Bart Schleyer was a famous outdoorsman, woodsmen hunter as well as a playboy. He was described as a survival expert.

In September 2004, Bart went off for a trip in the Canadian wilderness. His last contact was when a chartered floatplane left him at the larger of the Reid Lakes in Canada's Yukon Territory on September 14. Reid Lakes is on the southern slope of the Selwyn Mountains, about 175 miles north of the town of Whitehorse and the nearest settlement is Stewart Crossing about 15 miles from the lakes, on the road from Whitehorse to Dawson.

He was well-equipped for the trip with three plastic "Action Packer'' crates with enough food for at least 2 weeks, clothing and camp gear such as a tent and an inflatable boat.

When the plane that dropped Bart off, returned two weeks later to collect him and take him back to civilization, the experienced woodsman was gone.

A search by the RCMP that started on September 30, 2004, turned up nothing. Dib Williams, a friend of Schleyer's was sure that he was there and conducted a more thorough search when the RCMP left the scene. He found some remains on October 3, 2004. It looked like a bear had taken him out. But for this man, an expert in bear behavior and a highly experienced hunter, some remain skeptical of this explanation.

Almost everyone who knew Schleyer believe he was simply too good a woodsman, too alert while in the forest, to have a bear catch him by surprise.

Was it really a rogue bear attack or did something else happen out there in the Yukon?

Who was Bart Schleyer?

Bart Schleyer was a trained scientist who worked for the Grizzly Bear Recovery Project in Yellowstone National Park in the 1980s before moving north to Alaska. He was one of the world's foremost experts at capturing, radio-collaring and tracking Tigers and spent months in Russia working to help save endangered Siberian tigers. He had a Russian girlfriend, Tanya Perova, and they had a son, Artyom.

Bart was born in 1955 to Dr Otis Schleyer and his wife, Lula Rose, in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Dr Schleyer, a physician who practised in Cheyenne, loved hunting, and he took Bart with him from an early age. Bart’s sister, Claudia Downey, tells of his childhood animal obsession, “He didn’t just like them; he wanted to know everything about them, study where they lived and how they lived! My dad took Bart with him on a safari to Mozambique when he was ten years old. He had a chance to witness an incredible variety of animals that he could otherwise only read about. When he finally got a chance to hunt, he was drawn even closer. Hunting seemed to give purpose to his studies.” Bart would draw pictures of animals and continued to develop as an artist into adulthood.

Bart focused his education on wildlife biology and transferred to Montana State University, where he received his master’s degree in 1979. Professor Don Collins taught an undergraduate class called Man and the Environment for over 20 years. Dr Collins says, “Out of the 42,000 students who took that class, Bart was a standout! He was knowledgeable in everything wild, from animals and birds to flowers, trees, and shrubs. Bart spent a great deal of time alone in the mountains while working on his thesis, the activity patterns of grizzly bears in Yellowstone. It was as if he prepared his entire life to do this. He was superbly suited for the demands of the job. To conduct these studies, Bart used live capture techniques and then placed telemetry radio collars on the bears to monitor their activities.”

After college, Bart stayed in Montana, where he worked for Fish and Game and the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team. He made vital contributions to a team challenged with determining the reaction grizzly bears demonstrate after human encroachment. It was also important to know the bears' habitat requirements and birth and mortality rates, including those living in the remote Bob Marshall Wilderness. His experiences in backpacking and self-reliance fostered through years of bowhunting made the research work easy for him. He stayed out in the mountains for months at a time. Packing meat for bait and heavy cable for foot snares became routine. He didn’t just endure physical hardship; he enjoyed it.

Schleyer organized his life so that he could spend as much time as possible in the field. He was about as tough as it gets when he was in the outdoors. He loved using a traditional bow and the arrows he made himself.

See this content in the original post

The disappearance of Bart Schleyer

When the plane that dropped Bart off, returned two weeks later to collect him and take him back to civilization, the experienced woodsman was gone.

The pilot thought this was strange as he was no "city slicker", he knew how to handle himself in even the most remote wilderness and could be described as a survival expert.

The official search by the RCMP

Bart was reported missing on September 30, 2004, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) promptly launched a comprehensive search but found nothing.

According to the RCMP, he had lunch or supper in camp since the remains of a meal were found. Bart had evidently used his boat and paddled it down the lake from camp, and it was found around half a mile from camp.

The Mounties thought Schleyer might have hiked out to the highway, but with deteriorating weather, they called it a day.

The search by Dib Williams and Wayne Curry

Dib Williams, a friend of Schleyer's in Whitehorse was dissatisfied with the RCMP efforts and got pilot friend Wayne Curry to fly them to the camp after they had departed.

They found Bart’s tent had been knocked down, either by wind or animals, but all the equipment was there. They searched the area around the tent and found his backpack, bear spray, a knife, and a VHF radio.

Williams and Curry became increasingly concerned as they didn't buy the story Schleyer had hiked out when he left such key equipment behind. On their second search day, they found his bow near the inflatable boat.

About 60 yards back in the woods from the boat, the bow and arrows in a handmade buckskin quiver were leaned up against a tree next to a dry bag full of gear on which he'd probably been sitting, and this was located on flat ground next to a thicket of black spruce and willows. Curtis, an experienced moose hunter, said it looked like the sort of place an archer might set up if trying to call a moose into range. A little further on, they found a camouflage face mask with blood and hair on it, and at this point, they called the RCMP back to the area.

The official search resumes and more remains located

On October 3, the Mounties, Yukon conservation officers, and civilian volunteers flew back to the area to begin a more detailed grid search. At first, they found little but bear and wolf tracks. Then, the searchers spotted a baseball cap, camouflage pants, a camera, part of a skull, and just a few small bones. All these items were 60 meters from the bow and the Spruce tree.

The teeth in the skull allowed the subsequent identification of the remains as being Bart Schleyer. There wasn't much more of his body found.

What happened to Bart Schleyer?

Since there was quite a bit of Grizzly scat in the area, it fuelled speculation that Schleyer had been unexpectedly killed and eaten by a bear, as happened with the famous Timothy Treadwell, whose death was captured in a documentary by Wener Herzog in 2006 called "Grizzly Man" based on video footage that Treadwell and his girlfriend had been filming.

Some of the bear scat samples had some bone fragments but no fabric. In Treadwell's case, not only were human remains found in the bear's stomach contents that had killed him and his girlfriend, but also large amounts of their clothing. Most of Schleyer's clothes were never found.

But searchers and friends were skeptical it was a bear attack that had taken Bart out. First, there was no sign of a death struggle; no vegetation or ground had been disturbed. The remains were found in a little patch of sparse spruce lying on the moss, and if a bear killed him, this would be unusual as they usually bury their kills in a cache. The remains of Treadwell and his girlfriend were found in such a cache after they were killed. But there was no cache anywhere in the area that searchers could locate.

The Vancouver pathologist who examined Schleyer's remains found no tooth punctures in his skull nor indications of scratch marks from teeth. When bears attack people, they almost always go for the head.

Even if he started off playing dead, a recommended tactic for surviving a grizzly bear attack, friends said he would have known that if the animal continued the attack, the only chance for survival would be to fight back, and generally speaking, a bear attack is prolonged and violent. A friend said, "I think the least likely scenario is some sort of surprise encounter,'' "(But) it's hard for me to imagine having a bear sneak up and get him.''

Almost everyone who knew Schleyer believed he was too good a woodsman, too alert while in the forest, to have a bear catch him by surprise. Bart’s hat, for example, was completely undamaged.

If a bear had got him, it's even harder to imagine the animal killing him without leaving signs of a struggle on a site covered with soft, easily disturbed moss. An attack goes on for a long time. The audiotape of Treadwell's death goes on for many minutes, recording the sounds of him and his partner being eaten alive.

The balaclava contained little blood and hair, and his pants even less. If a bear attacks a man, it won't remove his pants without them being shredded and soaked in blood. Usually, bears grab the end, especially when attacking from behind, causing profuse bleeding, so why wasn't the balaclava blood-soaked?

Others disagree and say that even for an experienced woodsman, a predatory bear could sneak up and deliver a fatal attack.

The plastic container that held his food there had not been disturbed, and bear experts said that if a grizzly had killed Schleyer, the same bear would likely have gone to the camp, given the proximity, and even eaten canned food. Everything points to evidence related to scavenging and not caused by a direct, violent attack.

The circumstances of Bart’s death are extraordinary, even if experts and searchers disagree with the cause.

Brigittee Parker, a spokeswoman for the Mounties in Whitehorse, said the case remains open, but the organization leans toward the idea Schleyer was attacked and killed by a bear. "Everything at the scene suggested a bear attack and did not suggest ... foul play.''

Read about other bear attacks and The recent shocking deaths caused by bears in the United States and Canada

Apart from a bear attack, potential explanations include:

Wolf attacks, but these are even rarer than bear attacks. There was no physical evidence on the ground, and the bag he was sitting on was untouched, with no blood.
Natural death from a heart attack or brain aneurysm with the body later taken apart by scavenging animals. At 49 years of age and with peak physical fitness, it seems unlikely but possible.
Murdered by the Russian mafia or another assailant.

See the latest Exclusive members-only articles on StrangeOutdoors.com

Read other strange stories from Canada

The strange and disturbing death of David Koch on Grouse Mountain

The baffling disappearance of Sylvia Apps from Strathcona Provincial Park

The puzzling disappearance of Jonathan Jetté and Rachel Bagnall near Valentine Lake

The terrible story of Canada’s Highway of Tears

The unsolved disappearance of Ryan Shtuka in Sun Peaks

The mysterious disappearance of Gordon Sagoo on Baby Munday Peak

The shocking Ali Naderi Disappearance on British Columbia's Eagle Mountain

The controversial disappearance and death of Jordan Naterer in British Columbia

The Kamloops Triangle - The British Columbia murders and disappearances

The strange phenomenon of the human feet in running shoes on the coast of the Salish Sea in Canada