Wolfboy

How I Became The Wolf Boy

I was working the winter of '96/97 at Old Faithful Snowlodge as a room attendant. Our location manager was a wonderful lady by the name of Lisa Bossum. Now. Lisa is very nice, good to work for, but she can be very intimidating, downright scary at times. Lisa doesn't mess around.

Anyway, I had just skied to work that morning and was taking off my snow gear, changing into work shoes, when Lisa comes up to me and points art me and says "you!". My brain immediately starts to scramble to try to figure out what I could have possibly done to get myself into so much trouble when Lisa continues. She said "go get your camera and dress warm, you are going to go feed the wolves." So I did. Real quick like too.

In Yellowstone wolves are held in large pens called wolf enclosures for a while before they are released. The idea is to get them used to their surroundings. The public is not allowed anywhere near them. They don't want the wolves to get used to people. Until this winter only people directly involved with the wolf reintroduction, and a few political people, presidents and stuff, were allowed to visit the wolves in their enclosures. That winter the Park service had announced a lottery so that a lucky few other people could help feed the wolves in their pens. They even let lowly concession employees sign up for the lottery, which I don't think anyone was expecting. I of course signed up along with everyone else at Snowlodge, but weeks and months went by with no word on a drawing. It was getting late in the season so I figured it wasn't really going to happen. Turns out my name was the first one picked for the first group. Must have been good karma from all that clean living.

So I skied home in record time, got the camera and warmer clothes, and got back to Snowlodge. There were two other lucky employees (I forget their names right now) two waiting snowmobiles, and a ranger waiting. We had to promise not to tell anyone how to get to the enclosure, and we were off for a high speed, high adrenaline ride, lots of snow blowing in my face, to somewhere in the Lower Geyser Basin.

When we got to the turnoff it wasn't really a turnoff and I got stuck in the berm of plowed snow along the side of the road, but the ranger rescued me. We went back a way and waited for the scientists to come down from Mammoth with the food. Once the mammoth people got there we went to the pen. We were told to keep quiet.

The pen wasn't as large in area as I had imagined it. It was a very tall (12 ft?) chain link enclosure with some fence buried under ground to keep the wolves from digging out. I think they said five or six feet in was buried chain link. Wolves have gotten out of this very pen though. There were a few trees inside and a sort of "wolf house." Also some wolves running around in it.

There were quite a few wolves in the pen, either 12 or 14. I have read a lot about them since, but still am not sure exactly who was in there that day. I know the 10 "Sawtooth Pups" were. They were some pups from a pack in Northwestern Montana whose parents took to killing some sort of domesticated critters, so the parents were killed and the 10 pups sent to Yellowstone. I think that some (2 or 4) wolves from Yellowstone's own Nez Pierce Pack were also in there at the time. It's like a soap opera trying to keep all the wolves straight, especially this batch of them If you want to read more try Ralph Maughan's wolf report . The Sawtooth pups didn't do very well after their release. Some were shot, some run over, some evidently took off on their own and weren't trackable. Lock a group of teenagers up without parental supervision, let them raise themselves, see what you get.

The wolves were very impressive. Pictures do not do them justice. Neither does seeing little spots on a far hillside that people with good binoculars and telescopes claim are wolves. They were big, even the pups. They were strong looking. They were very agitated, but very quiet. They would mostly hide on the far side of the pen, but some would run back and forth on the far side.

The scientists had brought down a couple of big chunks (either half or quarter carcasses) of road kill elk to feed them. The elk wasn't quite frozen, and kind of smelled bad. We helped get the meat off the sled and got to drag it into the pen. We then watched the wolves for a few minutes while one of the rangers did something with a camera on a pole set up to watch the wolves while no one was there. Took a few pictures and left. The wolves never came close to the elk while we were there.

After I got back some people started calling me things like "Wolf Boy" or saying things like "go away wolf feeder, I hate you." I just went with it and took every opportunity to remind people that I was wolf boy.

A couple of other groups got to feed the wolves. Mary Malley said her group fed them something called carnivore logs, kind of like a big sausage. I heard that there were some rangers with the last group who got really excited and made a lot of noise. Boys will be boys I guess. I heard that the wolf researchers were really upset about it. I don't think any other outsiders got to feed the wolves again. At any rate, no one I talked to from Yellowstone mentioned anything similar from last winter. So I was way lucky.

copyright Chris Johnson