Here’s the inside scoop on the behind the scenes reporting on wolves in the some of the most remote places in the Lower 48
Like many outlandish schemes before it, the idea for Howl came together over a beer.
It was the summer of 2023 and the two of us – Idaho Capital Sun senior reporter Clark Corbin and Extremely American podcast host Heath Druzin – had just finished a game of pub trivia in Boise.
Although we are both journalists, we became friends because of our shared love of backpacking, skiing, climbing and causing trouble.
A year earlier, Corbin wrote Into the Zone of Death, a first-person account of a remote backpacking trip with Druzin into Yellowstone National Park.
Reporting the story took us deep in the Yellowstone backcountry. And even though the Bechler Meadows mosquitoes are highly evolved killing machines that bit us both thousands of times (even through our clothing!) Into the Zone of Death became Corbin’s favorite story.
Since then, we wanted to combine our love of outdoor adventure with a major longform reporting project.
That’s when Druzin leaned forward that night at the brewery.
“The 30th anniversary of wolf reintroduction is coming up in 2025, and I think a lot of people are going to be sleeping on the anniversary,” Duzin said.
Wolves are a native species that the American government and settlers essentially eradicated from the Western U.S. by the 1940s, thanks to bounties and poison.
Reintroducing wolves in 1995 was one of the most controversial and successful wildlife recovery stories in American history, and Idaho was on the front lines.
Over the summer of 2023 Druzin developed an outline, and we fine-tuned the most ambitious story pitch that Corbin had ever heard.
The pitch for Howl involved calling up some of the country’s most prominent wolf experts and convincing them to hike deep into some of the most remote places in the Lower 48 with two strangers as they shared their story and the wolves’ story in granular detail.
We wanted to give Howl a wild edge and help our audience understand a little bit about where wolves live.
We developed Howl as both a podcast season and written longform series, hoping the two could both complement each other and also be able to stand on their own.
Reporting the story would require pulling Corbin out of the Idaho Capital Sun’s small nonprofit newsroom for weeks of field reporting, undertaking a 1,000-mile road trip across the West and all the time, travel and expense that came with that.
After the reporting and research, writing would take several additional weeks.
Obviously Howl would never get off the ground and was doomed to fail under its own weight.
But then Corbin brought the pitch to Idaho Capital Sun Editor-in-Chief Christina Lords.
She said “yes.”
And Howl got the green light.
Reconstructing the story of wolf capture and reintroduction
The first major source to agree to participate in Howl was Carter Niemeyer, a wildlife biologist and former government trapper who darted the first wolf captured in Canada for reintroduction to the U.S. 30 years ago.
Niemeyer is a larger-than-life character who stands 6 feet, 6 inches tall and is as wild as the wolves that he captured and carried out of the 20-foot-deep Canadian snow.
Over the course of more than 10 interviews spread across almost a year and a half, Niemeyer told us in great detail how a small team traveled to Canada to capture wolves to bring back to Idaho and Yellowstone in 1995 and 1996.
The plan involved tranquilizer guns and helicopters.
Along the way, Niemeyer was challenged to an impromptu, drunken wolf-skinning competition (which he won).
On the same project, while capturing wolves in temperatures of 50 below zero, Niemeyer developed frostbite in his toe and was told to pack up and head home (he stayed, because the job wasn’t finished).
Due to his career working on controversial projects for various government agencies, Niemeyer kept detailed notes, records, journals, photographs and even homemade movies of his work with wolves over the decades, which proved extremely valuable in the reporting of Howl.
Niemeyer has also written three books of his own about wolves and wolf reintroduction.
During one Howl interview session, Corbin spent six hours at Niemeyer’s house watching movies Niemeyer made with a handheld video camera of wolf capture operations in Canada.
As they watched the movies, Corbin asked questions and Niemeyer narrated what they were seeing.
There was footage of helicopters, tranquilized wolves being given exams, kennels being loaded and unloaded into cargo planes and even clips from wolf reintroduction team briefings.
Corbin used the footage and interviews to write the narrative in the first episode of the Howl written series, Carter’s Hope, which opens with Niemeyer riding in the helicopter with a wolf in his sights.
Last summer, Niemeyer met us in Central Idaho. He led us into the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, which was one of the sites of wolf reintroduction in Idaho.
He demonstrated how he tracked wolves and pointed out wolf tracks and scat that we would have hiked right past.
Niemeyer taught us how to howl for wolves.
How wildlife cameras work.
How traps work.
About bait.
Niemeyer also told us that he has been tracking and capturing wolves since before they were reintroduced, and that he isn’t seeing wolves in Idaho like he used to.
He told us about the packs that no longer exist. And he told us about how he no longer sees wolves in many of the areas outside of Idaho City that used to be relative wolf hot spots.
We used that information in Ghost Wolves, the final episode of the Howl podcast and written series.
Reporting on wolves from Yellowstone National Park
The next major source to participate in Howl was Doug Smith, a biologist who headed up Yellowstone National Park’s wolf project for almost 30 years until he retired in 2022.
Druzin had interviewed Smith a couple of times over the years for other stories and somehow convinced Smith to backpack with us into wolf country in the northeast section of Yellowstone, along Cache Creek.
By his own count, Smith has participated in more than 1,000 news interviews in his career, but had never done a backpacking trip with any journalists.
Many news interviews with government officials in leadership positions or prominent roles are coordinated or overseen by a government public affairs or public information officer.
But because Smith is now retired, he was able to bring his son, Sawyer, and some fly rods on the trip – not a public affairs officer who might get squeamish about sensitive questions and controversial topics.
As journalists, we knew the amount of time and access the backpacking trip afforded us to Smith was priceless.
We carried everything we needed in heavy backpacks – camp stoves, tents, sleeping bags, water filters, bear spray, first aid, bags of dehydrated food, layers of clothing, whiskey. On top of the normal backcountry essentials, we carried one set each of recording equipment like microphones, cables, headphones, recorders, wind screens and a seemingly endless supply of batteries, so that we could record our interviews and field notes.
We packed two of every piece of equipment we needed in case something broke, got wet or got lost.
Over the course of two days on (and off) the trail, Smith told us about wolves being brought back to Yellowstone.
He told us the return of wolves, as well as other predators like cougars and bears, have had a big overall ecological impact on Yellowstone.
Smith talked about how when apex predators at the top of the food chain eat their prey, that can have an effect down the line on the food the prey eats, as well.
Smith told us that without wolves and other predators, the Yellowstone elk population boomed and elk would destroy stands of Aspen trees and other vegetation by grazing.
With wolves and other predators back on the landscape, elk needed to keep moving and couldn’t risk staying in one place, grazing until the local vegetation was depleted.
As we hiked, Smith stopped to point out small young Aspen trees that were starting to grow back after wolves were reintroduced.
Smith told us about the history of wolves in Yellowstone, and about capturing wolves to place radio collars on them to make them easier to track and study.
He also told us about the controversy that surrounds wolves and some of the poaching and torture of wolves that he has seen.
We included information Smith shared with us in the first, third and fifth installments of both the Howl podcast and written series.
How the Nez Perce Tribe stepped up to lead wolf management in Idaho
One of the most appealing aspects of Howl was also one of the aspects we knew the least about going into the project.
Both of us have lived in Idaho for about 20 years, but were kids living in other parts of the country when wolves were reintroduced in the 1990s.
As journalists we knew that the Idaho Legislature didn’t want anything to do with wolf reintroduction.
But we didn’t really know much about how the Nez Perce Tribe stepped up to lead wolf management in Idaho for more than decade.
We also realized that if we didn’t know that story after years of reporting news that many people in Idaho outside of the Tribe might not know the story either.
We decided to learn as much of the history as we could, which led us to Lapwai, Idaho, and the Nez Perce Reservation in July 2024.
We met with Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee Chairman Shannon Wheeler, who told us about some of the Tribe’s traditions, stories and connections to wolves.
During that trip, we met with Aaron Miles Sr., who has worked as the natural resources manager for the Nez Perce Tribe since 1999.
Separately, Druzin interviewed biologist Marcie Carter, who served on the Nez Perce Tribe’s wolf project beginning in 1997 and now serves as the watershed coordinator for the Tribe.
Druzin also interviewed Allen Pinkham, a Nez Perce elder who was born in 1938.
“To us, we are given the opportunity by the Creator to occupy this land that we’re at right now, and then we’re supposed to take care of the land and all the species that we utilize because it’s a life source,” Pinkham told Druzin. “It’s an opportunity to believe and have faith in your Creator. That’s what we do, and we’re supposed to take care of everything else, because it provides and sustains life for ourselves.”
We used the second episode of the Howl podcast and written series to share what we learned from members of the Nez Perce Tribe.
Another extremely valuable source for Howl was Suzanne Asha Stone, the co-founder of the International Wildlife Coexistence Network and the Wood River Wolf Project. After originally starting as an intern, Stone was a member of the wolf reintroduction team that brought wolves back 30 years ago.
Stone shared a first hand account of the day wolves were reintroduced to Idaho, described the controversy and politics surrounding wolves and shared her research into nonlethal tools to help ranchers and herders protect their livestock from wolves.
We cited information Stone shared in four episodes of Howl.
Spotting wolves in the wild in Yellowstone
We did see wild wolves in the course of reporting Howl.
One morning last summer we woke up at a campground just outside of Yellowstone before 4 a.m. to meet Rick McIntyre, the man who has seen more wolves in the wild than anyone in the world.
McIntyre is a veteran wolf watcher, author and former Yellowstone National Park ranger who agreed for us to meet him near Slough Creek in the northern section of Yellowstone National Park.
Each morning before dawn, McIntyre and dozens of wolf watchers gather in and around Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley for a chance to see wolves in the wild. With decades worth of near daily wolf sightings under his belt, McIntyre knows the location of the park’s wolf packs and many of the details of the lives of individual wolves.
Because wolves are afraid of people, McIntyre and other wolf watchers use high powered wildlife spotting scopes that look like telescopes to watch wolves safely from a distance.
(Yellowstone National Park requires visitors to stay at least 100 yards away from predators like wolves and bears).
That July morning, McIntyre extended his arm and offered us a peek through his spotting scope, just as he has to thousands of Yellowstone visitors over the past 30 years.
Through McIntyre’s lens we saw wolf 907F, the long reigning alpha female leader of the Junction Butte Pack, playing with her 10th and final litter of pups.
Last summer, 907 was the oldest known wolf in Yellowstone, and had given birth to more litters of pups than any wolf ever studied in Yellowstone.
McIntyre and veteran wolf watcher Laurie Lyman shared 907’s story with us, which resonated particularly with Corbin.
The day we left Yellowstone after interviewing McIntyre and Lyman, Corbin knew he wanted to write 907’s story.
It took five drafts that were completed between December and April, but 907s life story became part three of the written series of Howl, Fixing Yellowstone.
Through ups and downs, reporting Howl was a great assignment
The morning we met McIntyre we got up so early that we beat him and all the other wolf watchers to Slough Creek, which inadvertently led to one of the most bizarre things we witnessed during the entire course of reporting and writing Howl.
As we were leaving our campground at 4 a.m., there was only one other camper up and moving around.
He appeared to be still up, as opposed to just waking up like we were, and he was standing next to his car a short distance away from our vehicle.
As we sat in our vehicle Druzin turned on his recorder and began narrating.
“OK, It’s one minute until 4 in the morning,” Druzin said.
Just then the man turned around, bent over and began fidgeting with something in his car.
Corbin instantly burst into uncontrollable laughter, ruining Druzin’s audio and breaking one of the major rules of audio journalism – shut up when you’re recording.
We couldn’t help it though.
The man’s entire, extremely large backside was entirely exposed as he bent over.
A complete and total stranger appeared to be mooning us.
Luckily, the audio recording of our reaction survives, beginning with sustained giggling.
“Well the guy’s ass is hanging out as he’s loading up his car at the campground,” Corbin said.
“We saw a full moon,” Druzin interrupted.
“And it’s not just like a little bit,” Corbin said.
“No,” Druzin agreed.
“It’s like he did it on purpose,” Corbin said. “…. It was all visible.”
“I would say that there was very little that wasn’t visible,” Druzin said. “Left nothing to the imagination.”
The, ahem, full moon at the crack of dawn story sums up reporting Howl as well as any other moment.
Even when getting mooned, we kept a sunny disposition every minute of working on Howl.
This article was written by Clark Corbin of the Idaho Capital Sun.