Wolves

October 11, 2021

We drove across Colorado in 2015 on our way to Montana. Now we were back to see youngest daughter Kathleen and her special guy, Steve. They settled in Colorado Springs in June after a few years in Steamboat Springs, the ski town near the Wyoming border. Her birthday is a few days away.

Kathleen left her admin assistant job in Washington ten years ago, headed west, and made a home in the cold-weather mountain states, Colorado and Montana. She’ll never move back. We visited her in Fort Collins, the last time six years ago. It was high time to go back to see her, which is to enter her Rocky Mountain world of soaring, sharp peaks, sparkling clear trout streams, spectacular national parks and forests, and noble wildlife.

The majesty of nature is reason by itself for living in the mountain West, in the vast spaces where golden Aspens blend with dense evergreens to form wide expanses of near-impenetrable wilderness. To live in these places is to love nature and share it with America’s unique wildlife.

The dark story of the West today is that the wonders of the natural world are endangered by the pressures of modern life, the raw economics of ranching, agriculture, and mining, and other things: population sprawl, pollution, careless, destructive tourism. Good people here fight policy battles to preserve the boundaries of virgin nature and its rough beauty. We had the vague, tourist’s sense of all of this. These same battles are fought back East. We did not know about wolves, once North America’s apex predators, now exterminated from all but a few states.

Kathleen and Steve escorted us to the Colorado Wolf and Wildlife Center a couple of miles past the little hamlet of Divide, maybe 20 miles from Colorado Springs. The non-profit Center cares for more than a dozen animals rescued from private owners, a few born in captivity. These are the majestic gray wolves once common throughout the U.S.: red wolves that once lived in the Eastern and Southern states, Mexican gray wolves, Arctic wolves, and other canid species, including foxes and coyotes.

We were in wolf country, at about 9,000 feet elevation. Sandy and I panted as we slogged uphill in the thin air. The scrub oak, birch, and Aspens were well into bright fall foliage across the Front Range, which runs hundreds of miles north-south.

We took the tour of the wolf pens, which allow plenty of space to the husky animals, some weighing 130 pounds, with jaws capable of 1,700 pounds of pressure, more than that of an African lion. They stared at us silently with their glowing amber eyes while waiting for their dinner; some eat 30 pounds of meat at a single feeding.

The tour guide explained the impact of the decimation of the wolf population in Yellowstone National Park. Mule deer and other grazing species, without their natural predator, proliferated in large numbers and consumed wide tracts foliage and grassland. The loss of ground cover led to erosion along streams and rivers, allowing flooding and further destruction of wildlife. In the early 1990s a pack of gray wolves from Alberta were reintroduced to the park. The wolves quickly began reducing the deer population and started the process, already visible, of restoring nature’s balance.

Ranchers shoot the grays, claiming they are a threat to livestock. A few years ago a Department of Agriculture study found that wolves accounted for 0.2 percent of livestock losses. Hunters kill them in the belief the wolves are a threat to deer, elk, and moose. But the wolves instinctively go after old and infirm animals, allowing the strong, fit ones to survive and produce healthy offspring.

While wolf populations have been extinguished in most states, federal protections now are having an impact. Government and private studies show that the gray wolf, once common throughout the U.S. is making a slow comeback, with about 3,700 around the Great Lakes, 1,700 in the northern Rockies, and 7,000 to 11,000 in Alaska. The Mexican gray wolf was eliminated from the southwestern U.S. Today only 300 survive in captivity, and slightly more than 100 in the wild. A tiny number of red wolves remain in eastern North Carolina. The snow-white Arctic wolf survives now in Alaska and Canada, their numbers reduced as populations of caribou and muskoxen have declined.

We left the wolf center with the sense of a unique experience. We stepped forward, up to the fences, and felt the impassive stares of these graceful animals. This was no National Geographic Nature special, they stood before us, then turned and glided quickly across their rocky spaces. The half-acre pens replicate their habitats here in the parched, semi-arid terrain of eastern Colorado.

The next day Kathleen and Steve treated us to a couple of hours at Garden of the Gods, the mysterious cluster of sandstone rock formations that rise from the hills north of the city. We learned that some of the structures, formed by prehistoric rivers, had been here for 300 million years. “Millions of years from now, these formations may again become mud and pebbles,” an engraved marker said.

Twelve miles west, Pike’s Peak was swept by high winds, frigid temperatures, and snow squalls that closed the mountain road to the summit. We looked up from the sunlit surface; thick clouds  scattered snow across the peak. The unforgiving nature of the Rockies was in charge today. We felt the chill wind graze us, and pulled our jackets tighter. This was the world the gray wolves once crossed in packs. We stumbled into that world for a few days and learned their story, a rough story of wilderness, in its hard beauty and mystery. We turned and looked once more at the snowy peaks, and headed for the gravel path.