Saturday, February 6, 2016

It was a good wolf morning.

It didn't start out that way. It was very windy today. Not very cold, it made it to just above freezing, but windy all day.

The first hour or so of the morning saw nothing, but around 8:00 am, we started to see wolves moving through the trees south of the Lamar River west of the bridge. 3 of them moved out of the trees into the open and immediately began chasing a cow elk. The elk was running as hard as she could and the wolves were not really catching up. Then, the elk stumbled and the wolves made up some ground. The chase continued with the elk stumbling every 10 seconds or so and the wolves making up ground each time. After about ¾ a mile, the lead wolf, a young female in the Junction Butte pack, caught the elk. Just as she did so, they went behind some rocks and we didn't see much else. Once we saw the elk's head popped up, but she was quickly dragged back down.

The next half hour was spent trying to find a vantage point where we could see what was happening. We tried climbing the hill behind us, but it wasn't high enough. We finally drove way up the valley and found a spot, but it was about 3 miles away. We could see the wolves feeding on the carcass and others coming and going. Later, we found a closer vantage point, but all the wolf activity had ended by then.

Later, I was parked near where I had watched the chase and got this picture of the some of the wolves coming down to feed: