The Rise of Wolf 8. Rick McIntyre
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college as a forestry major at the University of Massachusetts, I got a job in Alaska at Mount McKinley National Park and was stationed sixty-six miles out on the park road at Eielson Visitor Center. The mountain was eventually renamed Denali, its original Native American name, and the park’s name was changed, as well, but when I arrived there they were both still called McKinley. Eielson was built on the Arctic tundra at a location with a commanding view of the 20,320-foot then-Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America. The interior of the visitor center had displays on mountaineering, geology, wildlife, and tundra vegetation, but the view was the main attraction. My duties included conducting nature walks out on the tundra, leading half-day hikes, and giving evening campfire talks at Wonder Lake Campground. That campground offered a close view of McKinley and was one of the most spectacular viewpoints in the entire national park system.
Visitors to McKinley were always especially taken with the park’s large population of grizzlies, and I felt the same way. That first summer I watched every bear I saw until it went out of sight. I was also fascinated by the other animals in the park: caribou, moose, Dall sheep, and the vast array of migrating birds that nested on the tundra. But from my first day in Alaska, my goal was to see a wolf. At that time in McKinley, they were rarely seen.
One day at Eielson I heard people talk about seeing two wolves stalking a mother moose and her two calves. When my shift was over, I drove out and found the cow and her calves. Then in the nearby willows I spotted two gray wolves, the first wild wolves I had ever seen. They moved back and forth in the brush, trying to get between the cow and her calves. When the wolves gave up on the calves and went out of sight, I headed back to Eielson, elated at having had the experience of seeing those wolves.
The next summer I returned to Alaska, and I kept going back for a total of fifteen summers. In 1975, the Alaska Legislature asked the federal government to officially change the name of the park to Denali, and although that was not to happen until 1980, Denali was the name commonly used in Alaska at that time, and the name I will use for the park and the mountain from now on.
Wolves gradually became more commonly seen, and I spent a lot of time watching and learning about them. I read Adolph Murie’s 1944 groundbreaking book, The Wolves of Mount McKinley, and eventually found a high viewpoint where I could watch the distant den site of the East Fork pack, the pack Murie had studied in the late 1930s and early 1940s. I got to know the pack’s alpha female and her mate, the alpha male, a wolf with a bad limp. I saw the alphas and the subordinate adults in the pack take care of the pups at the den site, and I watched as they hunted caribou and dealt with grizzly bears that came too close to the den. I once witnessed the pups stalk their sleeping father and leap on him like they were attacking a prey animal. He shook them off good-naturedly, walked off, and resumed his nap.
During those years of my life, I was essentially a migrant worker. I was in Denali for those fifteen summers and, in the winters, had jobs in desert national parks such as Death Valley and Joshua Tree in California. I switched to Glacier National Park in 1991 and spent three summers there. My third year, I worked in the Polebridge section of the park, the prime area for seeing wolves. Wolves had been killed off long ago in Montana and other western states, but in the late 1970s a few crossed the border from Alberta and settled in the northwestern part of Glacier, the first wolf recolonization in the American West. The wolves were hard to spot because of the thick forests, but I saw a number of them that summer, including a family playing in a meadow.
Around that time, I was asked to write a book about wolves. I had built up a lot of wolf sightings in Denali and Glacier, and I had read all the books written about wolves and most of the scientific papers on them as well. I knew the biggest current issue was the possible reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone. They were native to the area when Yellowstone was set aside as the world’s first national park in 1872, but the early park rangers, like nearly everyone else in the country at the time, felt wolves were no good. In 1926, they killed the last few wolves in the park.
For my book, I made several trips to Yellowstone to interview the Park Service biologists and managers planning the potential reintroduction. They included John Varley, director of the Yellowstone Center for Resources, and Norm Bishop, a longtime Yellowstone interpretive ranger doing public outreach in communities near the park. After that I spoke with many of the advocates for reintroduction, such as Hank Fischer with Defenders of Wildlife and Renee Askins of the Wolf Fund. I also went to Helena, Montana, to interview Ed Bangs, the US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who was the wolf recovery coordinator for the Northern Rockies. While I was there, I went to a hearing on the reintroduction and testified in favor of it.
By the time my book A Society of Wolves: National Parks and the Battle over the Wolf was published in the fall of 1993, I was well versed on the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction proposal. In addition, I had been around wild wolves in Alaska and Montana for sixteen years. All that led to my going to Yellowstone in the spring of 1994 to start my job as the park’s wolf interpreter.
WHEN I ARRIVED in the park in early May, I met with Tom Tankersley, and we went over the schedule he had created for this brand-new position. I would live in a government trailer at Tower Junction and present wolf programs throughout the two-million-acre park. I had already developed a slide show on wolves and the possibility of bringing them back to Yellowstone. I would give that program weekly at the Madison and Bridge Bay Campgrounds and occasionally at the Mammoth and Fishing Bridge Campgrounds, as well. Those programs would go through the end of the tourist season in early September.
I would also give daytime talks in several of the park visitor centers. For those programs, I would show video footage of wolves in Denali that my friend Bob Landis had taken during the years I worked there. Bob would go on to shoot numerous wildlife documentaries for the National Geographic television channel and the PBS program Nature, including many on the wolves of Yellowstone. The plan that summer was that I would put Bob’s footage up on a monitor, describe the behavior of the wolves, and then talk about the proposed wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone.
Most of my time would be devoted to what the Park Service calls “roving interpretation.” That involves going to where the biggest crowds are and informally talking to as many people as possible. Only a small percentage of park visitors go to scheduled ranger programs, so there is a need to reach the many people who do not attend any of our talks. It is like being a street preacher, rather than a minister giving a sermon in church.
I borrowed a wolf pelt for the summer and tried to figure out how to attract the attention of visitors so I could tell them the reintroduction story. I remember the first time I stopped in the parking lot at Tower Fall. I put on my park ranger hat, checked my uniform, took out the wolf pelt, and started to walk toward a crowd of people. I was immediately surrounded by scores of visitors who all asked about the pelt.
I developed a talk where in a few minutes I explained that wolves were native to Yellowstone but had been killed off by the early rangers. The Park Service later realized what a mistake we had made and now hoped to reintroduce wolves to the park by bringing animals in from Canada. I talked to one cluster of people, then moved on to the next group. I could get my message out to about three hundred people an hour that way. Most of them would never have gone to any of the park’s formal programs. To add variety to my work, I went into gift shops with the pelt and strolled through the aisles. As they had done in the parking lots, people rushed over to see what I was carrying. I then went through my short talk before switching over to the next aisle.
In midsummer we got word that the park’s wolf reintroduction proposal had been approved by Bruce Babbitt, President Clinton’s secretary of the interior. From that point on I revised my talks to say we would be bringing the wolves back during the coming winter. By the end of the season, I estimated that I had talked to over 25,000 park visitors about wolves and the plan to reintroduce them to Yellowstone.
That summer I finished work on my second wolf book, War Against the Wolf: America’s Campaign to Exterminate the Wolf. It was a collection of historical documents going back to colonial days that traced the origins of anti-wolf bias in America and the reasons our country was determined to kill off all the wolves, even in national parks. The book also reprinted some of the early writings that began to portray wolves in a more positive light, such as Ernest Thompson Seton’s