“A deep chesty bawl echoes from rimrock to rimrock, rolls down the mountain, and fades into the far blackness of the night. It is an outburst of wild defiant sorrow…. Every living thing (and perhaps many a dead one as well) pays heed to that call. To the deer it is a reminder of the way of all flesh, to the pine a forecast of midnight scuffles and of blood upon the snow, to the coyote a promise of gleanings to come, to the cowman a threat of red ink at the bank…. Yet behind these obvious and immediate hopes and fears there lies a deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself. Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.”
Aldo Leopold, Thinking Like A Mountain
In January three wolves were killed by the US Department of Agriculture and Food in Cache Valley, near Avon. The wolves wandered into a corner of northern Utah (more or less north of I-80 and east of I-84) where wolves are exempt from protection.
These were not the first wolves in northern Utah in modern times. I came across tracks in the Bear River Range a dozen years ago. There have been at least 21 documented sitings of wolves in Utah since 2004.
In the winter of 2002, on the last day of a four-day, fifty-five mile ski tour, deep in Idaho’s River of No Return Wilderness, a friend and I were setting a skin-track (a backcountry skiing term for breaking a trail) from the Salmon River up to the canyon rim.
We traveled through spaced-out ponderosa pines through light snowflakes until we topped out on flat ground, 5,000 feet above the river. The forest abruptly transitioned to thick lodge pole pines. At our feet, all the snow was packed down with fresh wolf tracks. There was no new snow in the tracks, yet snow continued to fall from above. A pack of wolves had coalesced where we stood moments before our arrival.
Though I had seen wolf tracks before, I was still taken aback by the sheer size.
There are only two known cases of wolves killing people in the last century in North America. Statistically, you are more likely to be killed by a dear, an elk, a moose, a snake, a falling tree, an insect sting, lightening, or just about anything else than you are to be attacked by a wolf. Even with that knowledge, we could not escape a feeling of vulnerability. We looked around cautiously.
Five sets of evenly-spaced wolf tracks, parallel to one another, lead down the trail—the trail we had to follow. After about one hundred meters of skiing, one set of tracks peeled off to the left, disappearing into the lodgepole pine forest. A hundred meters later, a second set of wolf tracks turned off, this time to the right. A hundred meters more, and another set peeled off to the left. Consistent with pattern, a fourth set veered off to the right one hundred meters later, once again.
The wolf pack undoubtably watched us from all points of the compass. On high alert, we scanned the woods constantly for flashes of movement, for golden eyes peering from behind the timber, but saw nothing.
The middle set of tracks—the fifth wolf’s tracks—continued for another mile down the snow-covered trail before they too, turned off into the forest and vanished. We never caught a glimpse of any of them.
I think about those elusive wolves frequently. A wolf encounter is an zenith wilderness experience.
In Thinking Like a Mountain, Aldo Leopold described his younger self shooting a wolf and coming upon it in time to watch it die:
“I was young then,” he wrote, “and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die [in the wolf’s eyes], I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
I’m not suggesting wolves shouldn’t be managed, but I would like to see wildlife biologists making those decisions and that they are applied with consistency.
Leopold concluded,
“…Too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: ‘In wildness is the salvation of the world.’ Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.”
I am Eric Newell and I am wild about Utah.
Credits:
Images: Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, Photographer
Featured Audio: Courtesy & Copyright © Hugh Jones (Rubber Rodeo-Before I Go Away) and to J. Chase and K.W. Baldwin
Text: Eric Newell, Edith Bowen Laboratory School, Utah State University
Additional Reading: Eric Newell
Additional Reading
Wild About Utah Pieces by Eric Newell
Moilanen, Samantha, State officials killed three wolves in northern Utah. Here’s why., The Salt Lake Tribune, Jan. 27, 2026, 4:09 p.m., Updated: Jan. 28, 2026, https://www.sltrib.com/news/2026/01/27/utah-officials-kill-three-wolves/
Lofton, Shelby, 3 wolves killed in Cache County; picture prompts concern over ‘lethal removal’, KSL.com, KSL Broadcasting Salt Lake City UT, Deseret Digital Media, Jan. 28, 2026, https://www.ksl.com/article/51439305
Allen, Corbin, USU ecologists weigh in on wolves killed near Avon The Herald Journal a.k.a. HJNews, Jan 30, 2026, https://www.hjnews.com/news/local/usu-ecologists-weigh-in-on-wolves-killed-near-avon/article_8132fca5-2ca1-4d69-9ae7-3107b4008f52.html
Gilbert, Lael, USU Ecologists Offer Expert Perspective About Gray Wolves Found in Cache Valley, Land & Environment, USU Today, Utah State University, January 29, 2026, https://www.usu.edu/today/story/usu-ecologists-offer-expert-perspective-about-gray-wolves-found-in-cache-valley/
Leopold, Aldo, Thinking Like a Mountain,, Ecotone, Inc, https://www.ecotoneinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/aldo-leopold-tlam.pdf
See also this copy on the Sierra Club website: https://www.sierraclub.org/sites/www.sierraclub.org/files/sce/rocky-mountain-chapter/Wolves-Resources/Thinking%20Like%20a%20Mountain%20-%20Aldo%20Leopold.pdf
The Yellowstone Wolf Reintroduction: A Timeline, The Greater Yellowstone Coalition, https://greateryellowstone.org/yellowstone-wolf-reintroduction
Wolves in Utah, Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, Utah Department of Natural Resources, Last Updated: Tuesday, September 9, 2025, https://wildlife.utah.gov/wolves.html
History of Wolf Management, Yellowstone National Park, National Park Service, US Department of the Interior, https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/historyculture/wolf-management.htm