The Bureau of Biological Survey claimed to have killed Colorado\u2019s last wolf in 1935. Scholar Michael Robinson believed the date was 1945 in Conejos County. Either way, it has been decades since Colorado\u2019s mountains have heard the full-throated howls of a wolf pack on a moonlit night, but that may be changing. Single wolves are returning to their former habitat and a breeding pair may meet in the next decade.<\/p>\n
With raw words, sparing no blood, Carhart described the last wolves killed in Colorado. This was nature writing at its best. Carhart made clear the economic losses suffered by ranchers and their visceral animosity toward wolves. Always on the run, harassing livestock because of the depletion in game, the last wolves had names like Old Lefty from Eagle County, the Phantom Wolf near Fruita, the Greenhorn Wolf south of Pueblo, the Unaweep Wolf from Unaweep Canyon, Big Foot at DeBeque, Old Whitey near Trinidad and Rags the Digger at Cathedral Bluffs in Rio Blanco County.<\/p>\n
Wolves harassed livestock because wild game populations had dramatically dropped. Most of Colorado\u2019s elk had been shot and killed by market hunters, who were paid 10 cents a pound for elk, deer and antelope. Today\u2019s elk herds evolved from elk transplanted from Montana and Wyoming. The state\u2019s elk herds are doing fine, but there are rising fears of chronic wasting disease. How to combat the disease? Introduce gray wolves to cull the weak, the young and the sick. Wolves can help restore our Colorado ecosystems. As a deer and elk hunter, I want wolves back.<\/p>\n No one knows how wolves will fit into the Colorado landscape, but many of us are waiting to find out. A survey conducted by Colorado State University found that 73 percent of Coloradans, most living on the Front Range, support wolves in Colorado, and 20 percent do not. Obviously, that 20 percent includes ranchers who have a different perspective, but that\u2019s all the more reason to begin a dialogue on wolves.<\/p>\n So if wolves are coming back to Colorado, coming down from Yellowstone National Park only to be killed along Interstate 70, why not help them out? Why not reintroduce wolves?<\/p>\n Three times, the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission has passed resolutions opposing reintroduction of wolves to the state. They did it in 1982, 1989 and 2016. Perhaps it\u2019s time to revisit that important decision. If wolves arrive on their own, we\u2019ll have to live with where they appear. If wolves are introduced, there can be more flexibility on where they live and certainly more planning.<\/p>\n Wolf reintroduction into Colorado will take time and patience. Folks who would never normally speak to each other \u2013 because they wear different hats, different footwear, drive different vehicles and support different causes \u2013 will have to sit at the same table and share their values, their thoughts, their hopes for their families, as well as their future.<\/p>\n With 5.5 million people, Colorado is essentially an urban state with suburban sprawl on the Front Range and less than 250,000 people on the Western Slope where wolves would be introduced. Why not restore our full complement? We\u2019ll probably never have grizzly bears back in Colorado. They take too much territory and live at elevations that we do, but wolves \u2013 I think we could adjust. I think we could learn to accommodate ourselves to another top-tier predator besides ourselves. But I admit, as a Colorado wildlife biologist told me, \u201cMore hearts have to be won.\u201d<\/p>\n Wolves are part of our Western wildlife heritage. Learning to live again with them in the Rocky Mountains may be one of our most important 21st-century lessons in ecology and humility. We killed wolves with poisons, traps and guns. Arthur Carhart came to realize the pervasive power of industrialized death.<\/p>\n A year after publishing \u201cThe Last Stand of the Pack,\u201d Carhart questioned co-author Stanley P. Young whether exterminating wolves \u201cto please squawking stockmen\u201d could be justified. \u201cIsn\u2019t it a just consideration that the cats and wolves and coyotes have a damn sight better basic right to live in the hills and have use of that part of the world as their own than the domestic livestock of the stockmen?\u201d he asserted. Carhart, father of the wilderness idea, wanted wild creatures in wild places.<\/p>\n What would Carhart think of wolves returning to Colorado? As a wilderness advocate, a \u201cwilderness prophet\u201d in the words of author Tom Wolf, Carhart surely would have seen the connection between wild landscapes and canis lupus. As a hunter and a sportsman interested in healthy big-game populations, he probably could have come to learn what Lewis and Clark understood and what Aldo Leopold tried to teach \u2013 that wolves have their place. I hunt wildlife, and I agree \u2013 wolves belong.<\/p>\n At the Durango Wolf Symposium, guest speakers will include Michael Philips, executive director of the Turner Endangered Species Fund, and Carter Niemeyer, a retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services employee who personally went to Canada to bring wolves to Yellowstone. We\u2019ll host other experts, including local rancher Tom Compton, who believes, \u201cThe development of sound public policy requires careful consideration of all aspects of an issue, paying particular attention to the potential for unintended consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n Northern Rockies rancher Joe Engelhart manages a large cattle operation where there are active predators. He will give a talk called \u201cRanching with Wolves and Other Predators: A True-Life Story.\u201d \u201cThere is nothing to be learned or gained from a dead wolf, but we can learn a great deal about sharing the landscape with them by first being willing to understand them,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n University of Colorado-Denver professor Diana Tomback will speak at the symposia. She argues, \u201cThere are compelling practical reasons for restoring the gray wolf to Colorado. The \u2018balance of nature\u2019 is not just a poetic catch phrase; it refers to a real ecological state.\u201d<\/p>\n I tell my FLC students that wolves are coming home to Colorado. Hopefully, in my lifetime; certainly, in theirs. We need them back. We need to hear their howls on moonlit nights deep in the Weminuche Wilderness or high on the Flattops on Colorado\u2019s Western Slope. Gray shadows should leave paw prints in snow beneath dark trees. Maybe wolves will even return to their old haunts where Carhart wrote about them in Unaweep Canyon, on the Book Cliffs, along Huerfano Creek, beside the Purgatoire.<\/p>\n Wolf recovery in Colorado will be a grand experiment. I wish Arthur Carhart were alive to write about it. He\u2019d love to record the cycle of ecological change and humans foregoing hubris for humility. \u201cThe Last Stand of the Pack\u201d is a valuable historical account. Now in the 21st century, we should turn a new page and allow a top-tier predator to bring balance back to our ecosystems.<\/p>\n