Anderson: Yellowstone sees rebirth of wolves along ancient Native American trails

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, WYO. – In 1877, five years after Yellowstone became the nation's first national park, an unlikely band of visitors showed up at its western border.

Chased by a phalanx of Cavalry regulars and volunteers, Chief Joseph was leading a weary and bloodied band of 800 Nez Perce and their 2,000 horses into this giant wonderland of geysers, mudpots, lodgepole forests and high plains.

The Nez Perce had lived peacefully at the juncture of what would become Idaho, Washington and Oregon. Now, run out of their homeland and refusing to resettle on reservations, they were attempting a 1,300-mile escape over the Rockies following Indigenous routes forged centuries earlier.

The Indians weren't the only Western inhabitants being hunted.

Freelance "wolfers'' were already lacing Yellowstone elk carcasses with strychnine, hoping to skin and sell the animals' pelts while wiping the park clean of wild canines.

The park's founding legislation, after all, declared that Yellowstone was established "for the benefit and enjoyment of the people."

Which meant its wolves had to be exterminated.

By 1926, they were.

* * *

On a recent early morning not far from Yellowstone's Soda Butte Creek, Rick McIntyre pulled up in a small Honda SUV.

This was just before daylight, and already perhaps 200 people were crowded along a gravel road leading to a nearby campground.

Guarding against September's mountain chill, many of the early risers were bundled in down jackets, with knit caps pulled over their heads.

Word had spread the night before via social media that a bison carcass was sprawled in a broad declination below the road, and that wolves and perhaps grizzlies and ravens might descend on it overnight and be visible at sunup.

If the park's two apex predators did indeed show up to chomp on the dead bison, the chilled onlookers were ready. Most were armed with spotting scopes that had set them back a grand or two. Others had cameras with lenses as long as a man's forearm.

Widely regarded as the world's preeminent observer of wolves and wolf behavior, McIntyre quickly sized up the situation at Soda Butte.

"The carcass here is too close,'' he said. "With all these people, no bears or wolves will show up. Follow me.''

Some people describe McIntyre as a character. Others, in the vernacular of the day, might say he's a whacky dude. Everyone acknowledges he's passionate.

Doug Smith, Yellowstone's project leader for wolf restoration who recently retired, was McIntyre's boss during their long careers together at the park.

"Rick has made major contributions to wolves, primarily as a storyteller who can make wolves' lives understandable to people,'' Smith said. "That said, he was impossible to supervise. If I tried being his boss, it was a car wreck. It was better when we just worked together as friends.''

McIntyre is famous for one 15-year stretch during which he drove into Yellowstone every day to watch wolves through his spotting scope — a streak that might continue today if he hadn't needed heart surgery.

Transcriptions from those outings blanket more than 13,000 single-space pages, and the notes have been fodder for McIntyre's half-dozen books about wolves. (His latest, "Thinking Like a Wolf. Lessons from the Yellowstone Packs,'' comes out next month.)

"When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone in January 1995 as part of an effort to restore the ecological balance of the park, no one was sure whether any of the wolves would be visible to people,'' McIntyre said. "It was thought they might remain largely unseen, like Minnesota wolves are. But we can see our wolves.''

Yellowstone's wolves now number about 100 in 10 packs that inhabit all of the park's 3,500 square miles. But they're most often spotted in the Hayden Valley and perhaps especially in the Lamar Valley, where prey species such as pronghorn antelope, mule deer and elk thrive.

McIntyre estimates that on some days as many as 400 people from throughout the world come to Yellowstone hoping for what often is only a fleeting glimpse of a distant wolf.

Some visitors pay $600 or more to travel in vans on day-long wolf-sighting excursions offered by tour businesses.

Cara McGary of In Our Nature Guiding Services of Gardiner, Montana, said wolf watching generates about $82 million annually for local businesses.

"Seeing a wolf in the wild is on the bucket list for a lot of people,'' she said.

Leaving the crowd at Soda Butte, McIntyre peeled onto the two-lane blacktop that divides Yellowstone's majestic Lamar Valley. Driving west, then north, then back east, he finally shoehorned his Honda into a roadside pullout jammed with other vehicles.

Quickly, he set up his spotting scope.

"There, look there,'' he said.

Sure enough, appearing in his optic's reticle some 400 yards away was a blackish wolf that McIntyre identified readily, as if it were a member of his own family.

So it went until mid-afternoon, driving, stopping and driving again, until another wolf was pinpointed. This one was also a lone animal, more gray than the first, and McIntyre theorized it might have been returning to its den to regurgitate what it had killed that morning to feed the pack's younger members.

Smith, the retired wolf project leader, said authenticity draws people to Yellowstone's wolves.

"Nowadays, most people see animals in a zoo or on TV,'' he said. "Seeing wild wolves in Yellowstone is different than that. And better.''

* * *

Sensing a trap laid by the Cavalry, the Nez Perce were uncertain which route to take out of Yellowstone and over the Absaroka Range of the Rockies.

Historians believe the trail they most likely followed wound for a time in the park along the Lamar River, and after I left McIntyre and the other wolf watchers, I descended through steep rocks to that ribbon of blue water, fly rod in hand.

The wolves were back in Yellowstone, and that was good.

But cutthroat trout have always inhabited the park's rivers, and the Nez Perce and the Cavalry both caught and ate them, much, I was sure, to the delight of each.

Reaching the Lamar, and finding myself for the first time that day alone in Yellowstone, and thankfully so, I looped a fly onto a quiet pool that lay at end of a short riffle.

Everything had changed in the nation's first national park since its founding 152 years ago.

But for that moment at least, beneath a late afternoon sun, as a spectacularly colored cutthroat trout tipped its nose toward my fly, nothing seemed so much different.