Winter Yellowstone & Grand Teton Photo Expedition

I'll bring a bear spray for me. I think that if we're together we should be okay if you want. I've got two so you can bring one as well. This is a wolf track, Very old, but you've at least had one wolf coming through here. When I get track, I see how far I can follow it, what it will lead me to. Maybe it's a kill. I've even followed their tracks to their den. And I also look for scat. There's a lot of DNA we can take and do some genetic research with. So tracks, scat, kill sites, and then putting out trail cameras are kind of the biggest part of my job. I was tracking and studying one pack of wolves, and they lost two members of their pack earlier this year, just up that road. They're pups of this year, so, yeah, they're young wolves. Life's tough, especially when you're a wolf. Yellowstone is just this amazing wilderness destination, well over two million acres where the wildlife can exist. And as you follow the Yellowstone River out of the park to the north, it descends down a valley known as Paradise Valley, and sitting right between the border of the park and the beginning of the valley is Gardner. This unassuming town of some nine hundred year round residents is unlike any other rural town in Montana in that it's not really too agricultural. It's tourism. It's a bizarre, crazy little community of people that love nature. It's kind of a pride factor to say, yeah, no, we don't have a movie theater. How do you entertain yourself? And you just look around and you're like, how do you not entertain yourself? I love natural places. I love wildlife. So what better place to do that than Gardner. If I want to go fishing, all I got to do is walk out the door and go down to the river under the bridge and I can go fishing. There's always this sort of giving each other the benefit of the doubt and respectful friendliness that makes me feel like, oh yeah, I love this place. It's easy to live here. I know more people in this town than I've ever known anywhere that I've lived in my life. And that's good. Once they accept you as a member of the small town, they know that they can count on you. You know who you can count on, even if you don't agree with them on some issue. Everyone really does get along. Even if they don't, they do. But there is a learning curve. My daughter's first week at school here, got her a stuffed wolf and one of her classmates took it out and ripped its head off and said no we hate wolves here. Wolves. Finding somebody that is apathetic to wolves is probably possible. I've yet to find anyone that's totally neutral about wolves. I mean I think everyone's kind of has a strong opinion. Wolves and humans have had a very complicated relationship for millennia. For some of us, the wolf is admirable, it's persistent, it's noble. For others, it's a villain, dangerous, a threat. Think of all of the nursery rhymes and stories we have. This idea of the big bad wolf and all of their presence in folklore and There's the myth, know? It goes way, way, way, way back. I think there's the one side that wolves are deadly creatures. They hurt our livestock. They hunt our chickens. They're nuisances. You know, you hear people say, Oh, they killed all those calves just for fun. I didn't even eat any of them. And so there's a little bit of a stigma attached as if they're evil. These feelings of resentment and hostility have simmered for the last twenty five years. On January twelfth nineteen ninety five, the horse trailer carrying Canadian wolves passed through the gate into Yellowstone's northwest entrance. I was hired in nineteen ninety four by the park to reintroduce wolves. The first job was to get them established. I remember that day really well because I was in school and actually the whole school went out and, you know, each class stood by the archway and watched the trucks and trailers bringing the wolves into the park. A lot of people think we shouldn't have done this. They saw this as sort of a liberal coup to kind of take back the lands with these controversial predators. It's been a contentious story. One that is still going on twenty six years later. State regulations around the park in Montana and Idaho have recently changed. Before there was a limit, you can shoot, I think it was two wolves just above Gardner, Montana, and that was it. After two wolves were shot, no more hunting tags are issued for that area. Recently those hunt units have been removed, And right now, we are in the midst of losing as many wolves as we've ever lost. You know, it is true that it's easier to live without wolves than with them. You know, when they come around, you see a track on your ranch, you're gonna worry. Even though it's rare, there's a wolf there, it might kill my livestock. That is real. That's legitimate. We lost some sheep over a period of a couple of years. We lost three guard dogs and one good stock dog. Those were by far the hardest. Know, everybody loves their dogs. That was an interesting moment for my whole family in terms of like, oh, okay. Do we really, how do we, now how do we feel about wolves being here? The more that we sat with it and worked through the process of just the sorrow of losing the animals that you love, the more we just came to the conclusion as a family that we live in an incredibly wild place and we're incredibly blessed to have this opportunity. This is part of the deal. Complicated environment and we needed to restore wolves in order to have a complete and an intact ecosystem. They're an essential component to it that makes it function more like it did prior to European settlement. By creating healthier environments, healthier ecosystems, we are inadvertently benefiting ourselves. Since their reintroduction, reintroduction, businesses have been created to visit Yellowstone, to view wolves, and we have generated a regional economy that is bringing in sixty to seventy million dollars annually. That's quite a lot. That's a substantial industry. It does employ a lot of people. We have hundreds of thousands of people here coming just to see wolves per year. So wolves are tough. They're just always controversial. They're not everyday wildlife. However, our job is to protect and preserve nature. Wolves are part of it. Do we value having a species as wild as the wolf in our modern world? Are we going to choose to make room for it? Because it is a choice. We can choose to annihilate them. We did once. We have to choose to keep them here. These are amazing animals. They're like us. They're fiercely independent and playful. When you get to see them play, that's even more fun. They live in family groups. They're very social. They're so intelligent. They're smarter than some of the would be hunters. They're extremely good at what they do. Their behavior is so complex. Complicated and dynamic. They have lifelong pair bonds. They show love, they show compassion. And they kill. And those are all things that we do. They should be here one hundred percent. For the same reason that I think it's important that beavers are here and that the sage grouse is here and that the coyote is here. They're part of this amazing place. In my mind, there's not another creature on the planet that defines wilderness like wolves. I want wolves on the landscape because as simple as it may sound, they are symbols of a wilderness that I want to keep on this earth forever. I have kids. I want my kids to have wildness. I want them to have forests and mountains to climb. I want them to have moose and elk and bison. I want them to hear wolves. For my children, I want there to be a complete heaven and a complete earth.