Cody, Beartooth Lake, and (talk of) Wolves

August 29-30, 2009

The drive from Yellowstone to Cody on Highway 14/16/2 (?) runs along the North Fork Shoshone River through Shoshone National Forest, America’s oldest national forest. I must have passed a half-dozen good looking campgrounds along the way and I thought I might come back that way to camp that night, though they were a bit further from Cody than I'd have liked. Buffalo Bill State Park was closer in but it was way too expensive. It was also empty. I wondered if maybe they lowered the price someone might camp there.

Once in Cody I headed straight to the Buffalo Bill Historic Center, a complex of five museums: Firearms, Plains Indians, Natural History, Western Art, and Buffalo Bill himself. I headed straight for the Whitney Western Art Museum, which was terrific. Good Bierstadt, good Moran, good Miller, George Catlin, W.C Wyeth, much more. Several of the paintings depicted the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and it was a bit disconcerting looking at paintings of the scene I had been experiencing first hand two days earlier. Basically, I was quite happy to have had both.

After a long day at the museum I left Cody to the northwest via the Chief Joseph Scenic Highway through attractive ranch country and then reentered Shoshone National Forest. This section had nowhere near the number of camping opportunities as the highway west into Yellowstone, but eventually I crossed over Dead Indian Pass and camped at Dead Indian Campground. Dead Indian. A tough but exciting Saturday. I was beat.

Chief Joseph Scenic Highway

Beartooth Lake
Sunday morning I relaxed after breakfast for the first time in many days. I hit the road but not very far, to the end of Chief Joseph Scenic Highway and then east on the Beartooth Highway, another candidate for the most scenic highway in America and of course undergoing an enormous road construction project. I stopped briefly at Beartooth Lake and then drove through the construction to Island Lake Campground only to find its water system was out of order. Water was available back on the other side of the construction at Beartooth Lake, and I sure wasn’t going to go back there. I had enough to get by, as I wasn’t going hiking, regrettably. The hike to Beartooth Butte looked pretty damn good.

Beartooth Butte

Island Lake

I saw a couple of rangers talking to a visitor so I wandered over to maybe learn something and instead got to listen to the guy filing a complaint. He and his wife had been out on the trail and they came upon a small party on horses, with dogs running up ahead racing at them, barking. The hiker said he told the horseman that he needed to keep his dogs on leashes, and the horseman asked the hiker if he was threatening him. He told the hiker that his dogs have been around people all their lives and if the hiker is afraid maybe he shouldn’t be out hiking here. The rangers made nice to the hiker but there wasn‘t much to be done. I’m not crazy about dogs out of control, but attempting to lecture dog owners on dog-owning etiquette is a losing proposition, and attempting to lecture a party of horsemen in a Wyoming wilderness is daft, sociologically speaking. And yes, the hiker was driving a Suburu.

I had a great campsite at a fine lake. A pale overcast was giving way to oncoming thunderheads and I hoped a storm would clear things out. It got very gray with light rain, but despite lightning in the distance the storm never hit. It never cleared up either, and the thunder kept rumbling. The mosquitoes drove me back in my tent around dinner. The wind began whipping up. The evening progressed but the weather did not. This was not some thunderstorm moving through. This was a dark and stormy night. The wind let up and finally a steady rain set in. I spent two hours in my tent reading Paul Schullery, who is great.

Up and out early, back toward Yellowstone. I got through the Beartooth Pass construction before it really backed up, but I hit more construction delays down in Cooke City, where I had a nice chat with the flag lady. I was entering Yellowstone from the Northwest entrance this time and the drive down the Soda Butte and Lamer valleys was quite impressive in the cold and the clouds. Over to Mammoth, raw and wet, elk all over the place. I had a sorry-ass garden burger then drove out through Gardner and Livingston and Bozeman into huge winds. Camping would have been unbearable so I continued on  to Helena, where I hid out in a motel and read. I wanted this to be my last motel for a while.

Wolves in the News
The headlines in Helena was wolves. On September 8 (2009), US District Judge Donald Malloy had ruled that wolf hunting would be allowed in Montana. Earlier in the year the federal government had removed the wolf populations of Idaho and Montana from the endangered species list, approving the states’ plans to manage ongoing wolf recovery. Idaho had decided to allow 220 of its 1000 wolves to be hunted. Montana had set a quota of 75 for its 500 wolves. The feds did not approve Wyoming’s management plan, which was to identify the wolf as a predator species and allow it to be shot on site in most places. The wolf remained on the Endangered Species list in Wyoming.

13 groups had sued the US Fish and Wildlife Agency over the wolf’s delisting, arguing that the government can’t delist wolves in two states and not in a third; wolves are either endangered or not. Secondly, they argued that the Rocky Mountain population as a whole would have to be 2,000-5,000 in order to safely delist.

According to the Big Sky Weekly (in a reasonably objective story written by Laura Bell), the minimum recovery goals for wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains had been 30 breeding pairs and 300 individual wolves for at least three consecutive years, well distributed throughout the recovery area. This goal had been achieved in 2002, and the wolf population had increased every year since. Montana argued its quota of 75 wolves was a conservative start given that wolves had been increasing at a rate of 20% per year in the state for several years.

Malloy had ruled on the side of Montana. He concluded that the wolf population could sustain harvest of up to thirty percent of its existing population. The state had sold more than 5000 licenses for the state’s first ever “fair-chase” wolf hunting season, scheduled to begin on September 15. Idaho’s hunt, which apparently had not been challenged in court, was to begin this very day, September 8.

I found the story fascinating. I was and remain a big supporter of wolf reintroduction, but I am not a simple anti-hunting, animal rights partisan. Bringing wolves back was thrilling, and it seems to have been far more successful than I’d realized, or it seems, more than anyone had seriously anticipated. The success of the recovery had made it arguably necessary to start killing them like any other wildlife, an irony that hadn’t occurred to me.

The wolf protection plaintiffs acknowledged the possibility of this but did not believe the numbers were there yet. Too many other factors haunted wolf survival. Government shooters had killed some 100 in Montana in 2008 for livestock depredation, and that death toll would continue. Weather, availability of prey, disease, all could unravel a population quickly. Defenders thought it was too soon to start hunting. The states argued the original population targets had been met several times over, but kept getting revised upward.

It seemed to me to be a difference of how safely ensconced the wolf population should be. Molloy ruled they were safe enough by the provisions of the law, so we were about to begin a test of whether the law was right.