EDITOR’S NOTE: The Mountain Journal Book Club offers an opportunity to expand your knowledge of the wildness around us. MoJo covers water, wildfire, wildlife health and connectivity, as well as public lands and climate change. We report on the intersection of humans and nature, and document how scientific data, from ecology to wildlife biology, are impacting the natural world. Our Book Club selections are curated from the writers who influence us and inform the stories we cover.
Rick McIntyre is a fascinating man. Just have a conversation with him. He’s been studying wolves for 50 years in Denali, Glacier and Yellowstone national parks. To this day, McIntyre visits Yellowstone every. single. day. He watches and documents the wolves here but has been writing and talking about them since he saw his first wolf in 1976 in Alaska. He witnessed his first Yellowstone wolf in 1995 as part of the effort to reintroduce wolves to the nation’s first national park. He’s since logged more than 100,000 wolf sightings.
Yet My Life With Wolves, McIntyre’s eighth book on the canids, breathes and expands beyond national parks and delves into his childhood, from his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, to his background in wrestling, to his early work as a bouncer in Amherst, Massachusetts. It brings to life the lessons he’s learned along the way: courage, teamwork, perseverance, redemption.
Rick McIntyre began working for the National Park Service in 1975. He’s dedicated his life to the outdoors and the creatures that call it home. In the following excerpt from his new book for the MoJo Book Club, we get a glimpse into McIntyre’s life, his pathway to Yellowstone National Park, and his journey through the eyes of a true naturalist and the Kings of the Wild. – Joseph T. O’Connor, Managing Editor
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My years watching wolves in Alaska had enabled me to start studying their lives and behavior. But I was only there for five months per year because the park road in Denali was not plowed in winter. There were times when I wondered if I might someday get in a situation where I could watch and study wolves year round.
I first visited Yellowstone in late summer 1974, 21 years before the 1995 wolf reintroduction. I found plenty of elk, but bears, the animals I especially wanted to spot, were not commonly seen back then. After I got my summer job in Denali in 1976, I usually spent a week in Yellowstone on my way south from Alaska to winter jobs in desert parks.
In 1988, I left Alaska earlier than usual so I could get to Yellowstone to see the fires that were burning through large sections of the park. It had been an especially dry summer, and the fires had been set off by lightning strikes. The first fire started on June 14 and things got progressively worse through early September. Rain and snow fell on September 11, which allowed crews to control the burns.
Dean Clark, the crew leader from my 1975 firefighting job at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, was a fire boss on one of the bigger blazes in Yellowstone. I linked up with him and he got me on a plane flight over the fires. Later, Dean took me along when he did a helicopter flight to monitor some of the more remote fires.
After that, I drove around the park to see what the fires had done. Many forests were totally burned, but lodgepole pine, the most common tree in the park, is well adapted to fires, and the seeds from those trees were soon sprouting. Burned-over meadows had new grass shoots coming up by late September, and herds of elk were flocking to those areas to feed on the grass.
Although I was visiting Yellowstone every fall, I had never considered working there. Then everything changed when, in the early 1990s, park staff began planning a wolf reintroduction program to restore that lost species to Yellowstone.
I had done a lot of research on the history of wolves in Yellowstone for my book, A Society of Wolves. Wolves were native to the area for thousands of years before the establishment of the world’s first national park there in 1872. Most of the early Yellowstone rangers were former soldiers who were hired to control poaching in the park. Like most people in the country back then, they did not like wolves, partly because wolves preyed on the park’s elk population. The park rangers mounted a wolf extermination program, and the last two Yellowstone wolves were killed near Lamar Valley in 1926.
During my 1993–1994 winter season in Big Bend, I contacted the Yellowstone staff and arranged to get a summer job as the wolf interpreter in the park’s Naturalist Division. All my talks and programs would be on the proposed wolf reintroduction. A week later, I got a call. The funding for my position had not come through and the park had to rescind the job offer. I had gotten a call from Rocky Mountain National Park, offering me a job, so I had that to fall back on. But I really wanted to be involved in the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction.
When someone puts a barrier in front of me, I like to take a good look to see if I can find a way around it. After thinking about the situation for a day, I called them back. I asked if I could raise the money for the job and was told that could work. The donations to fund my position could be made to the Yellowstone Association, the park’s nonprofit partner, which would later be renamed Yellowstone Forever. Earlier in my life, I had done fundraising for a nonprofit, so I had experience in that area. It was a challenge, but I did raise the funding I needed.
In the spring of 1994, I packed up my belongings at Big Bend and drove 1,566 miles north to Yellowstone, where I started doing programs for park visitors on the planned wolf reintroduction. I was the wolf interpreter in the Naturalist Division for four summers; then, in 1998, I switched to working for the Wolf Project, the staff that studies the wolves.
My official job title was biological technician. That meant I worked in the field rather than in an office. After that first summer, my position with the Wolf Project became year-round. I stayed in that job through early 2018, when I retired to write books. I raised my own funding for the 24 years I worked in the park (1994 to 2018). I think I was the only federal employee that did that.
I arrived back in Yellowstone in early May 1995 and on my first full day out in Lamar Valley I saw all six Crystal Creek wolves.
For the first five years that I was employed in Yellowstone, I continued to work in Big Bend in the winter, so I was not in Yellowstone on January 12, 1995, when the first two packs arrived from Alberta, Canada. Each family was placed in its own acclimation pen for two months to give the wolves time to get used to their new home. Then they were set free.
One group became known as the Crystal Creek pack and the other was called the Rose Creek pack. The Crystal family had an adult pair (male 4 and female 5) and four male pups (wolves 2, 3, 6 and 8). Rose Creek consisted of a mother wolf, wolf 9 and her female pup, wolf 7. To make the small group a functioning breeding pack, a big unrelated male, wolf 10, was also placed in the pen. Both packs were released into the park in late March.
I arrived back in Yellowstone in early May 1995 and on my first full day out in Lamar Valley I saw all six Crystal Creek wolves. We had not expected the wolves to be very visible, so seeing them was tremendously exciting. Here are my field notes on that first wolf sighting.
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May 13, 1995
At 0720, I spot the six Crystal Creek wolves (four blacks and two grays) across the Lamar River, about 250 yards to the south. They are moving east. The pack is led by the alpha female, wolf 5, to an old elk carcass near the south bank of the river. She feeds on it along with two of the four yearlings. The other three pack members, including the alpha male, wolf 4, do not eat but walk around the site and look at us on the road.
As a park naturalist, I devoted many hours to what the Park Service calls roving interpretation. That means you put on your ranger uniform, go to where park visitors are, and talk to them informally. I would drive out to Lamar Valley about an hour before sunrise, use a spotting scope to find the Crystal wolves, then invite visitors over to see them through the scope. As they took turns watching the wolves, I would tell the visitors the story of the reintroduction.
In the evenings, I did slideshows on the wolves in several of the park campgrounds. Before the show, I would walk around the campground, go to every site, and invite people to my talk. One evening at the Tower Fall Campground, I noticed several law enforcement rangers acting like something was up. They told me a license plate at one site matched that of a wanted felon, and he was known to have guns in the camper unit on the back of his pickup. The man was in that camper, and they needed to arrest him.
The rangers were discussing what to do if the man had a gun in his hand when he opened the camper door. His history indicated he might shoot any officers who pulled guns and tried to arrest him. I offered to help because as a park naturalist, I was not armed. I went to the site, knocked on the camper door, then stepped back a few paces. I made sure the man could see that my hands were empty and there was no gun on my belt.
When he appeared at the door, he was not holding a gun. I told him I would be doing a wolf talk in a few minutes if he wanted to come. He thanked me and closed the door. I went back to the other rangers and told them what had happened. They went to the site, knocked on the door, and arrested him. Not many people know that Yellowstone has its own judge and courtroom, as well as holding cells. We now get five million visitors per year, and some of those people cause trouble.
As mentioned earlier, in 1998 I switched from my seasonal position in the park’s Naturalist Division to a position as a biological technician with the park’s Wolf Project. I would still be wearing a park ranger uniform with a badge, but in addition to helping people see wolves, I would now be involved in one of the most detailed studies of a large carnivore in the world. It also meant that starting in the spring of 1999, I would no longer be traveling to desert parks for the winter. I would be working in Yellowstone year-round.
One consequence of working for the Park Service all year was that our uniform rules required me to wear a tie in the winter. I was given a clip-on tie with a National Park Service gold pin to hold it in place. I was probably the only wolf researcher in the world who wore a tie in the field. I still have that tie in case I am invited to speak at a formal affair.
Although my job was technically five days a week, I would go out on my days off (not dressed in my park ranger uniform) so I could continue to study wolves and keep track of what the packs were doing. My habit was to get up before dawn, summer or winter, rain or shine, search for the wolf packs, and record their behavior. I would also help park visitors see the wolves and tell them about the park’s reintroduction project. I would then go home for a nap and return in the evening. This was a pattern I had gotten into during my college days, and it served me well in Yellowstone because wolves are most active in the early morning and evening.
Those of us involved in Yellowstone’s Wolf Reintroduction Project did not expect that the wolves would be very visible after they were released. But it turned out that we see wolves nearly every day. Being able to see wild wolves and observe pack interactions resulted in a huge increase in tourism to the park. The visitors who repeatedly returned to the park to see wolves became known as wolf watchers.
Most wolf researchers work in remote areas with only one or two other people as coworkers. When I studied the East Fork wolves in Denali, I hiked off the road and only occasionally had someone with me. But today in Yellowstone I am often with dozens of other people when I watch wolves. That would be a mixture of wolf watchers, local wildlife guides with their clients, and park visitors. The wolf watchers come from every possible political, religious and financial background.
Usually, showing people wolves is a simple process. I look for wolves from one of the parking lots along the park road. If I find them, I let people see them through my high-powered spotting scope. Sometimes I need to walk uphill to find wolves that are not visible from lower levels. In those cases, people along the road come up and join me. One day a man in a wheelchair was in one of the parking lots when I arrived. He told me that his dream was to see wild wolves.
We could not find any wolves from that site, so I hiked up the slope to the north and soon found a pack. The problem was that the man would have to come up to my location on the hill to see them. I went back to the road and asked several of the longtime wolf watchers to help me out. We pushed the wheelchair uphill, and as the man locked it in place, I set up my scope in front of him. The wolves were still there, and he got to see them.
In addition to being helpful and friendly, new and veteran wolf watchers assist me in my research. They spot wolves for me and pass on details of significant wolf behavior they see when I am not around. They also model proper behavior when wolves are visible from the road, keeping their distance and not approaching the wolves to take photos.
Of all the wolf watchers, the one that most stands out is a woman named Carla Rae. She and her husband, Matt, started coming to the park to watch wolves in 2021. Carla Rae later had a serious accident that injured her brain and affected her memory. She courageously fought through a long and difficult recovery. During that period, she memorized sections from my wolf books. Her doctor was impressed by how the stories of the main wolf characters inspired and motivated her to get well. Carla Rae did get better, and she and Matt continued to come to the park every spring to watch 907, the longtime alpha of the Junction Butte pack, and her family at their Slough Creek den.
My strongest memories of Carla Rae are about how much she loved to laugh. I think her delight in living and her focus on the funny side of things were big factors in how well she dealt with her health issues.
A few days before I wrote this section, Matt contacted me to say his wife had died. He added that the Yellowstone wolves had brought so much joy to her during her health challenges. I will always equate Carla Rae with our great alpha females, and most importantly with 907. All of them went through difficult times but somehow retained a positive spirit. Carla Rae took their stories and applied them to her life, and it helped her heal.