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Yellowstone wolf tracked to Colorado

Gray wolf in Yellowstone National Park. (Photo by Nathan Hobbs/iStock.com)

I’ve written several times about gray wolves in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, and the battle being waged by conservationists to preserve their protected status. Among these wolves are those painstaking reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park over the last ten years.

Imagine my excitement when I read today that one of the Yellowstone wolves has been tracked, via its GPS radio collar, to Eagle County, Colorado. Excited to hear we have a wolf in Colorado again, yes, but very concerned that a lone wolf, far from its pack in southwestern Montana, is in all kinds of danger.

Reportedly she left her pack in September and has traveled through five states since then. The last confirmed gray wolf found in Colorado was also from Yellowstone. That animal was hit and killed by traffic on I-70 near Idaho Springs, just west of Denver, in 2004. Unfortunately, I-70 also bisects Eagle County over on Colorado’s Western Slope, not good at all if this wolf wants to keep moving south.

Colorado’s indigenous gray wolves were killed off during the 1930s, with the last reported kill in 1943. (Coincidentally, that was the year I was born.) I’m a newcomer here, but happy to see the wolves coming back, if only one at a time. It gives merit to the idea of someday reintroducing wolves to Rocky Mountain National Park.

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