This is the story of how 30 years ago, biologists sought to restore America’s wildest predator in Idaho and Yellowstone
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first installment of Howl, a five-part written series and podcast season brought you in partnership between the Idaho Capital Sun, States Newsroom and Boise State Public Radio. Journalists Clark Corbin and Heath Druzin reported and wrote Howl over the course of 14 months, trekking deep into the backcountry in some of the most remote places in the Lower 48 chasing the story of America's wildest and most controversial wildlife comeback story – wolf reintroduction. New installments of the written series will be published in the Idaho Capital Sun each Wednesday through July 2. The Howl podcast is available free everywhere that podcasts are available.
The helicopter was flying low above a remote snow-covered mountain ridge outside Hinton, Alberta, Canada, when pilot Clay Wilson jumped the wolves and gave chase.
Carter Niemeyer picked the tranquilizer gun off his lap and sighted through the opening where the helicopter's passenger side door had been removed especially for the mission.
Less than 50 feet below, a 9-month-old wolf pup broke into a run, bounding through the December snowpack.
His coat was the color of coal.
Even though the pup wasn't yet a year old, he weighed 83 pounds and had developed a thick coat that would help him endure his first winter in the mountains.
The chopper made a pass at the wolf and doubled back, but Niemeyer wasn’t close enough to fire a dart loaded with tranquilizer drugs.
After essentially killing off all wolves in the U.S. Rocky Mountains by the 1930s, the United States government sent Niemeyer and a small team to Canada just over 30 years ago to sedate, catch, study and reintroduce wolves to the American West, where wolves were a native species.
Wilson and Niemeyer had never flown together before this flight took off in December 1994.
Niemeyer was an experienced government trapper and wildlife biologist with a United States government agency called Animal Damage Control (which later changed its name to USDA Wildlife Services), but he had never been to Hinton and didn't know his way around Alberta's Northern Rockies.
To make matters worse, the local tranquilizer gunners the government hired for the mission hadn't shown up yet.
Niemeyer was supposed to be on the ground, carrying wolves out of the snow to a safe spot to land the helicopter after the wolves were darted from the air.
“I was mostly mugging,” Niemeyer said. “The mugger is the guy who you dump out in snow 20 feet deep. And you roll and crawl and drag yourself through this ungodly deep snow, sometimes where just the little tops of the pine trees were sticking out, because the wolves get darted in there and you can't land (a helicopter). It's too dangerous, between snags and deep snow that could collapse. So the mugger, you’ve got to get that wolf out of that deep snow situation, down the slope and try and drag them to river ice, somewhere where you’ve got a footing, where the helicopter can land securely.”
An average adult male wolf weighs about 100 pounds.
The largest wolf caught for wolf reintroduction in 1995 and 1996 weighed 135 pounds, Niemeyer said.“And, yeah, talk about a workout,” Niemeyer said. “Sometimes it was something else.”
Capturing wolves in Canada to release them into Yellowstone, Frank Church wilderness
The reason Niemeyer was in Hinton is because the U.S. government decided to bring back wolves after a decades-long extermination campaign.
The controversial plan called for Niemeyer and the reintroduction team to capture gray wolves from Canada and release them in Yellowstone National Park and the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho. And the only way to do so was by hand.
But when Niemeyer showed up to Canada searching for wolves to bring back to the Lower 48, he found the local trappers who were supposed to be capturing live wolves for collaring and medical exams had grown distrustful of the American government.
Instead of caring for live wolves, the local trappers were killing them.
“The guys were killing them, skinning them and putting them on stretching boards and then I got up there and met them, and we had a confrontation, me and them, and they told me (to) take my truck and get the hell out of town,” Niemeyer said.An already tense situation in Canada came to a head when a local trapper hauled in two dead wolves and threw them at Niemeyer's feet.
Standing 6 feet, 6 inches tall and fond of wearing a mustache and a fur trappers hat, Niemeyer wasn't one to back down from a challenge.
Since he was a boy following in his father’s footsteps, Niemeyer had trapped, skinned or taxidermied just about every predator and varmint in the West. It started with pocket gophers – 10 cents a head.
That night he ended up squaring off with a local trapper in a drunken wolf skinning competition inside the man's cabin.
It had been about 60 years since the wolves' howl fell silent across the U.S. Rocky Mountains. If wolves were going to make a comeback, things were off to a bad start.
Wolves driven out of the Rocky Mountains
Wolves are a keystone species of apex predators that ranged from the Arctic, down through the Rocky Mountains and plains of the United States and into Mexico for thousands of years.
There used to be tens of thousands of wolves in the U.S. Rocky Mountains. But thanks to government bounties meant to encourage westward expansion, settlers used trapping and widespread poisoning to kill off virtually every wolf in the American West by the 1930s.
Between 1914 and 1926, at least 136 wolves were killed in Yellowstone, including two wolf pups killed in 1926 near a geologic feature named Soda Butte.
Yellowstone National Park reports that the last wolf pack in the park was killed in 1926. It wasn't hunters or poachers who killed off the last Yellowstone wolves.
It was park rangers.
Congress had put up $125,000 to remove wolves and other predators from public lands, and it worked. The Idaho Department of Fish and Game says the last wolf in Idaho was believed to have been killed in the 1930s.
At the same time, wolves survived in Alaska, Canada and Minnesota.
Although lone wolves were occasionally reported in Yellowstone after 1926, and small numbers of wolves occasionally dispersed from Canada into Western Montana and Central Idaho, wolves were functionally extinct in the Western U.S.
But in 1974 things began to change for wolves, slowly at first.
Four subspecies of gray wolves, including the gray wolf of the Northern Rocky Mountains, were listed under the Endangered Species Act, which had just been signed into law the year before by President Richard Nixon.
Dozens of conservation groups, nonprofit organizations, biologists, veterinarians and members of the public pushed to save and restore wolves.
Meanwhile ranchers, hunters, politicians across Idaho, Montana and Wyoming and countless residents of small rural communities pushed just as hard in the opposite direction.
By 1980, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Northern Rocky Mountain Wolf Recovery plan recommended reintroducing wolves to Central Idaho and Yellowstone National Park.
As the federal government set wolf reintroduction in motion, hunters and ranchers vehemently opposed the plan. They warned of conflicts between humans, wolves and livestock.
‘Wolf ground zero’: How wolves and livestock can collide in the West
Ranchers said the loss of livestock like sheep and cattle would threaten to wipe out generations-old family businesses.They were already struggling with the thinnest of margins and facing uncertainties like drought.
They didn't need wolves eating their livestock.“We have family stories from my grandfather and great grandfather about the first generation of wolves and how they warned us about keeping them away from our livestock, and how important it was to not have livestock interactions with wolves,” said Jay Smith, owner of J Lazy S Angus Rancher in Carmen, Idaho. “So we have that long, long family history of knowledge on top of our own.”
Smith is a fourth-generation rancher. His ancestors first bought a ranch on Carmen Creek in 1924.
His ranch is located a few ridges over from Corn Creek in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness – the original site of wolf reintroduction in Idaho in 1995.Smith calls the area “wolf ground zero.”From the ranch, Smith can gaze across the valley and see the Diamond Moose grazing allotment. It was one of the first – and remains one of the most consistent – sites of conflict between wolves and livestock, Smith said.
“There's no rhyme or reason,” Smith said. “You know, in 30 years, we never know what to expect. One year we'll lose 20 head of cattle, and one year we'll lose zero. And we just never quite know how to explain or how to do better, or how to mitigate that risk. It's very variable, and it's very unknown. But it's remained over the years. It hasn't gone away. It sounds like it's come, come and gone. But the wolves are still back there.”
Tense public meetings showed just how controversial wolf reintroduction was, not just to the West, but to the world
Ranchers weren’t the only ones worried about wolf reintroduction. Hunters warned the return of wolves would lead to the decimation of elk herds, which would threaten a way of life for generations of passionate hunters who cherish the ability to hunt elk, deer and other wildlife on public lands. A series of heated wolf reintroduction public meetings played out in cities and small towns across Idaho, Wyoming and Montana in the 1990s.
Yellowstone National Park staff reported that over about 2.5 years, the team developing the environmental impact state conducted more than 130 meetings and considered more than 160,000 public comments, which came in from all 50 states and 40 foreign countries. Several people in the room during those meetings described increasingly tense hearings, where emotion and fear trumped science and reason.
“Working with wolves all the years I did before coming here, you can't underestimate human hatred of wolves,” said Doug Smith, a biologist who led wolf reintroduction and monitoring in Yellowstone for nearly 30 years until he retired in 2022. “I mean reason, compromise, facts, science doesn't have anything, doesn't even dent people's attitudes about (wolves).”
“Wolf hatred,” Smith continued. “Prior to wolves being listed as an endangered species, they weren't just killed, they were tortured. People cut their lower jaws off and set them free, and they died that way. They would wire their jaws shut. They would take nails or razor blades and put it in hunks of meat … So they'd swallow the razor blades and nails. This is human hatred.
”Some wolf meetings ended in screaming matches.But in 1994, former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt authorized the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park and Central Idaho.
“It was a long slog,” Smith said. “Wolves were listed in 1974, so it was a 20 year process to get wolves back.”
After it became clear wolf reintroduction was going to happen, Doug Smith landed his dream job in 1994 – becoming a wolf project biologist at Yellowstone National Park. There were no wolves there yet, but he was there to lay the groundwork for reintroduction.
Within two years, Smith was named leader of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, a post he held until 2022.
“If you'd studied wolves at all, or carnivores at all, it was the biggest opportunity in decades to come along,” Smith said. “I mean, wolves are eradicated from Yellowstone by the government. The government decides to restore them. It's the largest intact temperate zone ecosystem in the world, and the government's going to undertake wolf reduction – as controversial a thing as you can get.”
Babbitt's authorization to reintroduce wolves didn't ease the tension.
Howling for wolves – and a wake up call
A few weeks before wolves were to be reintroduced, Suzanne Asha Stone was out with researchers surveying the land where the wolves would be reintroduced in Idaho's Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness.
Stone is the co-founder of the International Wildlife Coexistence Network. At the time, she was an intern working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and a member of the wolf reintroduction team.
After landing a small plane on a wilderness airstrip, the researchers received a report of a wolf sighting in an area called Bear Valley, just outside of the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness.
The researchers decided to investigate, drove over to Bear Valley and began howling.
“Dr. (Steven) Fritz was teaching me how to howl for wolves,” Stone said. “That's how we used to look for wolves before there were more of the digital type recordings that you would play for them. You just go out and do some howling. And so he was teaching me how to do that. And it was my first time to go solo.”
“We were on a Forest Service road out in the backcountry on the national forest and I got to my second howl, and we had rifle bullets just zing right over the top of our heads,” Stone said.
Nobody was hurt, and Stone still doesn't know if the shooters knew people were in the area.
But the episode served as a wakeup call, a visceral reminder of how deep wolf hatred ran for some. By the time Stone and the reintroduction team arrived in Salmon to prepare to reintroduce wolves in Idaho, Stone was concerned for the team's safety and worried about the potential for violence.
Members of the reintroduction team began to travel with an armed guard.
“We'd already received death threats in town from people's signs,” Stone said. “They were handwritten. And it said, ‘kill all the wolves and all the people who brought them here.'”
‘Carter’s Hope’: How one man and one wolf made the West a little more wild
Babbitt's signature cleared the way for Carter Niemeyer and the reintroduction team to head to Hinton in November 1994. And that brings us back to that alcohol-fueled wolf-skinning competition.
Niemeyer, refusing to blink, won the competition with the local trappers and earned their respect. That's when the capture and reintroduction mission finally got off the ground.
With his credibility firmly established, Niemeyer got in touch with Clay Wilson, a helicopter pilot out of Cranbrook, British Columbia.
Niemeyer and Wilson were hoping to search for wolves by air, dart them with tranquilizers fired from the helicopter and then fit the wolves with radio collars.
Once the captured wolves were temporarily released again, the radio collars would help the reintroduction team track the wolves, which would lead the team to the location of the larger pack.
But the gunners hired for the operation hadn’t arrived yet.
Wilson decided to take a test flight and invited Niemeyer along, hoping they could get the lay of the land. Niemeyer was a seasoned hunter and government trapper who had experience using sedative drugs like telazol and ketamine.
But he did not know the area or have any leads on local wolves.
“When the pilots got there they go, ‘So do we have anybody who knows how to gun that could go ride with us to go dart a wolf?’” Niemeyer said. “And I was the only one.”The team took two helicopters up.
Wilson and Niemeyer eventually spotted a group of three or four wolves, including that 9-month-old male pup with the thick black winter coat.After several passes, Wilson flew in low and Niemeyer finally fired at the running pup, calling it a “Hail Mary” shot.
The dart struck the running wolf pup on one its front paws – just barely.
Wilson landed the helicopter, and Niemeyer sprang after the young wolf. The wolf was only partially sedated, still staggering and thrashing through the snow. After a mad dash, Niemeyer got close enough to slip a catchpole over the wolf's head and administer another round of drugs to sedate the pup. It was a moment he will never forget: Niemeyer had just darted and captured the first wolf for relocation to America.
“I named it Carter's Hope, because it was the first wolf we caught up in Canada by darting,” Niemeyer said. “And I was just being silly and called it Carter's Hope. Hoping that this was the beginning of a successful project, which it turned out to be.”
Once the wolves were darted and captured, they were sent to Idaho and Yellowstone National Park, where they underwent medical examinations, were given vaccinations and tested for disease.
During exams, the wolves were given numbered radio collars that allowed biologists or park rangers to track the wolf's location. Idaho elementary school students decorated collars for each of the wolves bound for Central Idaho.
Each collar has a different number and Carter's Hope, who was bound for Yellowstone, received collar number 15. (Niemeyer said the collars don't have any negative effects on the wolves who wear them.)
After his capture, Carter's Hope was flown to Montana and then driven to Yellowstone National Park in January 1995.
As the horse trailers carrying Carter’s Hope and the other wolves entered Yellowstone's North Entrance at Gardiner, Montana, and passed under the iconic Roosevelt Arch, crowds of people lining the side of the road cheered and waved.
A soft release into Yellowstone country
Carter's Hope became one of the original members of the Soda Butte Pack, one of the first three packs of wild wolves to live in Yellowstone in nearly 70 years.Initially, the Yellowstone wolves were kept in one-acre acclimation pens, set back from the park’s roads, as part of a so-called soft release.
“We were on the receiving team, so our job was to take care of the wolves in the pens for 10 weeks. That meant visiting them twice a week, every week, to feed them, check on them, and then release them,” Smith said.
Yellowstone staffers used horse-drawn sleds to haul animal carcasses to the pens to feed the wolves. But outside of the temporary acclimation pens where the new wolves were first held upon reintroduction, Yellowstone National Park is wild landscape with no fences – the park boundary is an invisible line.
After the wolves were released from Yellowstone's acclimation pens in March 1995, Carter's Hope didn't stay within the boundaries of Yellowstone, where rangers patrolled and poaching was almost unheard of. Wolves were still listed as an endangered species in 1995, but protecting them in the vast tracts of national forest and ranchland outside of the park would be almost impossible.
After Carter's Hope and the Soda Butte Pack left the park in April 1995, Niemeyer and Smith worried the wolves could be at risk of poaching anytime they strayed beyond Yellowstone's invisible boundaries.
“We've learned through decades of wolf research that making it illegal to kill wolves doesn't stop people from killing them,” Smith said in an interview in the Yellowstone backcountry. “Wolves are one of those cultural lightning rods that a ton of society doesn't care about what the rules are. They hate wolves so much they're going to shoot them. And you know, a country like this that I'm looking out upon is broken country. It's forested. The wolves have got a chance to get away from human killing. (But) ringing the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is a sea of humanity, and it's open country. And what I mean by open county is no place to hide. People jump on four wheelers. People jump in pickup trucks, and they'll run them down… Yeah, they run them down with snowmobiles, or four wheelers. Or they get close enough where they can take a rifle shot on them when there's no place to hide. And there's no place to hide all around the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.”
Aside from poaching, Smith and Niemeyer worried about wildlife control officers killing wolves if the wolves killed livestock outside of the park.
It turns out, that was only a matter of time.
The first report came in December 1995 – wolves killed a dog in Fishtail, Montana.
By spring and early summer 1996, wolves had killed sheep on a ranch about 30 miles north of Yellowstone's border.
This time, Niemeyer was able to capture Carter's Hope and bring the wolf back to a Yellowstone acclimation pen for two more months.
While Carter's Hope was in the pen, a young visitor took notice.
Wolf 26, a female wolf pup from the Nez Perce Pack, began hanging around the pen.
Wolf 26 was one of the wolves brought to Yellowstone from Canada during the second year of reintroduction, in 1996, Yellowstone National Park records show.
After inching closer and closer, Wolf 26 and Carter's Hope touched noses through the fence in the pen, Niemeyer wrote in his memoir, “Wolfer.”
No longer a part of the Soda Butte Pack, Carter's Hope paired off with Wolf 26 after he was re-released from the pen on Sept. 27, 1996.
Along with humans, wolves are among the few mammals that form longterm pair bonds – often remaining together for life and raising pups together.
Carter's Hope and Wolf 26 remained together and traveled throughout the southern portions of Yellowstone National Park through the end of 1996, Yellowstone records show.
Eventually the two wolves left Yellowstone National Park, heading south to Wyoming, where Wolf 26 had five pups.
The new pack was named the Washakie Pack.
Carter's Hope had become an alpha wolf and made history.
“He did successfully acclimate to being a wild wolf and got away from livestock, and he became the first breeding male wolf to establish a pack in the state of Wyoming,” Niemeyer said.
A long line of descendants – and fear for the future
But two years after Carter’s Hope arrived in Yellowstone, ranchers reported more calves were killed near the Washakie Pack's territory.
This time, Niemeyer couldn't save the wolf. Carter's Hope was shot and killed by a USDA Wildlife Services officer in October 1997 for killing livestock outside of Yellowstone National Park, according to the Yellowstone Wolf Project’s 1998 annual report.
Although wolves were still an endangered species, animal control officers tracked and killed Carter's Hope under rules established in connection with reintroduction to reduce conflict with ranchers.
Niemeyer still thinks killing Carter’s Hope was unnecessary.
“I was upset, and I was saddened,” Niemeyer said. “I was disappointed.”
But he also realized the place Carter's Hope holds in history.
Carter's Hope was one of the 66 wolves captured in Canada released in Idaho and Yellowstone National Park in 1995 and 1996.
“He made it a couple, three years, but he did have pups, and that's a nice thing with wolves – they're prolific animals, and some of his progeny lived to see another day,” Niemeyer said.
Today, just over 30 years later, there are an estimated 2,500 wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains.
Almost all of them descended from Carter's Hope and the other 65 other wolves that a small team of biologists, veterinarians, trappers, pilots and conservationists reintroduced to America.
Today, 30 years removed from reintroduction, Niemeyer, Stone and Smith say wolves are in danger once more. Wolves were removed from the Endangered Species List in 2011.
Now, Niemeyer, Smith and Stone worry about increased hunting and trapping and new government programs enacted in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming that are intended to reduce the wolf population.
“I am worried about the future, because the most important thing for wolf restoration is human attitudes, and human attitudes have not changed about wolves,” Smith said. “One of my favorite sound bites when I started working in Yellowstone 30 years ago was, ‘I hope in 30 years, some of the controversy has died down, and people have gotten used to the ideas that wolves aren't that bad.' And that hasn't happened at all. They are still hated as much as they were 30 years ago. They're still a political football. They're still controversial.”
Check back each Wednesday for a new installment of Howl.
Coming next week: Part 2: Find out how members of the Nez Perce Tribe stepped up to lead wolf reintroduction 30 years ago when the Idaho Legislature rejected the plan for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game to lead wolf reintroduction.