21 February 1998 - Saturday

We had a great trip. We got out to Lamar Valley Saturday afternoon and slowly made our way towards Soda Butte. The roads were clear and dry except for icy patches in the shadows. There was about a foot of snow on the ground with few of the pull offs plowed out. When you had to stop, you had to just pull over as far as you could and stop. That wasn’t too much of a problem since there wasn’t much traffic on the road. We saw a lot of elk and a few coyotes while driving through the valley. There were surprisingly few buffaloes. We found about five cars and trucks pulled off the road about .25 mile west of Soda Butte. We pulled over and asked the people what was going on. They said there was an elk kill up on a high ridge that the Druid Peak Pack had been feeding on. About ten minutes after we arrived the wolves showed up and started feeding on the kill.

The kill was about .25 mile off the road on the north side on the top of a ridge. You could clearly see the carcass and the wolves feeding on it. We had great views of them with my 80 mm scope and my new eight inch scope. You could see them tearing big pieces of meat from the carcass. You could also see the social order with the dominant wolves feeding first while driving off the other wolves. You could see the poor omega wolf sitting on his haunches about ten feet back from the kill. We watched the wolves feeding for about 45 minutes. I shot a whole roll of film through my new scope and let everyone who was along side the road look through the scopes.

One couple that was looking through the scopes thought they saw the white wolf #39 but Joanell and I didn’t think so. They thought the omega wolf was #107. He was the last one to get to feed. Then they wandered back over the ridge and we lost sight of them. There was a total of seven wolves and we watched them from approximately 4:15 pm to 5:00 pm. It was almost dark by then so we started making our way back to town. We stopped and took some great pictures of some big horn sheep grazing on the side of a hill about 200 yards east of the confluence of Lamar and Soda Butte. We had dinner at Helen’s Saturday night.

22 February 1998 - Sunday

Sunday we slept in to catch up on our sleep. We had a great breakfast at the café next to the Sinclair gas station. Biscuits and gravy with eggs for $3.95. Both of us could have eaten one order and been satisfied.

We drove up into the park around noon on Sunday and didn’t see much except elk all over the place. If you thought brown rocks looked like animals in the summer you should see the thousands of black rocks standing out against the snow in the winter. Many of them look like animals in the distance. We finally ended up in Cooke City for lunch. There were snowmobiles all over the place up there. They’re having their El Nino winter so they hadn’t gotten as much snow as in the past. We talked to a snowmobiler in the café who had his arm in a sling.

He thought he had broken his elbow in a crash. He told us there was another guy who managed to crash into a creek. The guy landed face down in the creek with his snowmobile on top of him. He was under water for about four minutes and was barely alive. Just as we were getting ready to leave town, they closed the street so an evacuation helicopter could land and take the guy back to Billings.

We drove back to the area where we had seen the wolves the night before. The carcass was still there but it didn’t look like there were many tracks in the fresh snow indicating that they may have moved on. Joanell spotted a blood trail on the snow off to the left of the carcass. The trail lead to an injured bull elks standing under a tree. Joanell could swear that the elk only had three legs. Nothing showed up so we drove back to Gardiner and had dinner again at Helen’s that night.

23 February 1998 - Monday

Monday we were up with the sun and off to the valley. It was clear, sunny and warm, only about 5 degrees. We stopped and took some videos of a bunch of bull elk grazing in the fields about a mile west of the switch backs up Black Tail Plateau. We drove to the valley and stopped on the high hill about a mile west of the ranger station. They didn’t have either of those two big pull offs plowed out so I just pulled over to the side of the road and set up my scopes on the road. We made an interesting discovery. We saw coyotes with radio collars. The collars had little antennas about six inches high sticking up in the back. We watched two coyotes playing for about 20 minutes then drove back to the spot where we had seen the wolves on Saturday night. There was another group of cars pulled over. One guy had a tracking radio he was swinging around.

We asked about the wolves and were told they had moved on up the valley and that they were a group studying coyotes. They said the coyotes were feeding on a carcass up on the side of a mountain. When we looked we could see about 3 or 4 coyotes feeding on the elk we had seen the night before. We don’t know if the elk died or was killed by the coyotes. We asked the one of the guys there about the tracking collars we saw on the coyotes down the valley and he said he was part of a study to determine the effects of the wolves on the coyote population. He said there were 11 coyote packs in Lamar Valley with some of the packs containing up to eight members. He said the one effect the wolves have had on the coyotes is to make them more wary. He said they spend a lot more time looking around while feeding than they did before. We noticed the coyotes feeding on the kill were also wearing collars. You could see the pecking order as some of the coyotes would arch their back and bare their teeth to drive some of the other coyotes off. They would also chase off the ubiquitous ravens every once in a while.

I had seen on the web before our trip that the valley was full of coyotes and that the wolves were up higher. Because of the mild winter, the elk are still up in the mountains. They should start coming down as they get ready for spring. We had a great trip and can't wait for spring to head back to the park.