Vardaman told them that she had heard howls in the area a few days earlier, so they all camped nearby, staying close together and hoping to hear them again. Vardaman had crossed paths with Skiba and Barnes before, however the “wolf world” is a small place, as Skiba likes to say. Wildlife scientists tend to be lone wolves themselves, with a strong protective streak they often keep their findings and the locations of their cameras private, obscuring details, such as pack movements, so the wolves they’re tracking can’t be easily targeted. “We were able to put together the pieces of the puzzle about how these wolves were using the landscape - where they were hunting, where their rendezvous spots were,” Vardaman told me by phone in May.Īt the same time, Gary Skiba, a wildlife biologist who had worked for Colorado Parks and Wildlife for more than two decades, and Matt Barnes, a scientist for the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative, were searching for the pack along the Green River. Vardaman, who had been tracking the pack, was a key part of those efforts. Throughout that summer, wildlife biologists conducted howl surveys of the area to see if any of the others had survived. But within a few months, after they crossed the nearby border into Wyoming, three of them had been shot and killed, their deaths confirmed. That winter, a wolf pair and as many as four others were spotted in Moffat County, Colorado - the first pack of wolves documented in the state in more than 80 years. Karin Vardaman, who is widely recognized as one of the nation’s experts on wolves, was collecting data for the Working Circle, a nonprofit she founded that works to reduce conflicts between predators and livestock producers. Three prominent conservationists camped near the weathered land marker that identified the junction of Utah, Colorado and Wyoming, hoping to hear something that had long been absent from this landscape: the howling of a pack of wolves. In the early days of October 2020, a soft breeze blew across Cold Spring Mountain, rustling the sagebrush and aspen groves.
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