All they need is wolves: wilderness abounds in the rugged San Juans, but what's missing is the call of the wild

Sierra, May-June, 2003 by Gregory McNamee

AN ALPINIST'S DREAM AND AN ACROPHOBE'S NIGHTmare, the serrated ridgelines and bald granite peaks of southwestern Colorado s San Juan Mountains are spectacular even by the high standards of this mountainous state. From where I stand, on the shoulder of 13,000-foot pyramid-shaped Engineer Mountain, the panorama takes in 50 miles. I see reddish-walled glacial valleys, lakes, and tall canyons below me, and, everywhere, off on the horizon and close at hand, more mountains--hundreds of peaks in all, a baker's dozen of which rise above the 14,000-foot mark. This little-explored country, nearly 90 miles long by 50 miles wide, includes some 1.3 million acres of designated wilderness and roadless areas--one of the largest tracts of wild land in the United States. "I've lived around here for 26 years," says Durango-based fishing guide and author Steven Meyers, "and there are big parts that even I haven't gotten into yet."

I move higher up Engineer Mountain, picking my way across a field of weather-broken stone to find a view of country even farther off: the towering mass of Mesa Verde, laced with the cliff dwellings left behind by its prehistoric inhabitants; the volcanic pinnacles of northern New Mexico, holy mountains of the Navajo. Lightning plays among the peaks, drawing closer to where I stand, offering just one of the many ways to find trouble at these high altitudes. I look around for the fastest path to lower ground, one that will skirt the sheer drop-offs that, from time to time, claim incautious skiers from the nearby Durango Mountain Resort. Only the day before, a friend of mine, exploring a neighboring summit, found trouble another way: He climbed a ridge as far up as he could along a path that grew ever narrower until, in time, he discovered himself on a knife-edge of rock with nothing but thin air on all sides. An experienced climber, he lay on his back and waited for the ensuing dizziness to pass, swore he'd consult the topographic maps more closely before going into unfamiliar terrain next time, and inched his way back down to less precipitous ground.

I take no such risks today. As the lightning draws closer, heralding the arrival of a black-walled rainstorm, I trundle down Engineer Mountain to the comparative safety of Electra Lake, one of the many crystalline bodies of water that dot the San Juans. On this side of the peak, for the moment at least, it's a gorgeous late-summer weekday. The mountain's roof-of-the-world vastness has yielded to a more intimate scale: streams full of caddis flies, flowing with good trout water, the air alive with hummingbirds and magpies. Although the nearby highway to Silverton, Ouray, and points north is crowded with traffic, I have the lakeshore pretty much to myself. It is almost always so.

Yet despite these mountains' seeming wildness, the San Juans are incomplete. Over the years, game species, such as moose and bighorn sheep, and other creatures, such as badgers and river otters, were killed in appalling numbers. Crucial predators, including lynx, wolverine, grizzly, and--perhaps the most misunderstood icon of wilderness--the gray wolf are long gone. With the arrival of ranchers and bounty hunters here in the 19th century came a protracted campaign against grizzly bears, mountain lions, and lynx.

The fortunes of wild species began to change in recent decades, when restoration programs returned moose and bighorn sheep to the San Juans. Other animals are slowly coming back, too. A colony of otters flourishes on the Piedra River near Pagosa Springs. Fox and black bear numbers are on the rise, partly because of better management of hunting. There are so many bears, in fact, that they are spilling out of the mountains and visiting the human-populated low-lands in search of easy food.

That leaves the top predators. Concern over restrictions on habitat use and human-bear conflicts makes grizzly reintroduction seem particularly out of reach for now. The wolf, however, could return to its hallowed, howling place in the San Juans, if a hardy band of activists calling itself the Southern Rockies Wolf Restoration Project has its way.

Of all the San Juans' residents, no creature was pursued more vigorously than the wolf. Canis lupus was targeted by hunters for its prized fur and for preying on elk and deer, but mainly by ranchers for its habit of besetting flocks and herds that were left to wander unprotected. The ranchers' war on wildlife, augmented by a federal predator-control program that enlisted bounty hunters and even the U.S. Army, took its toll. In the 19th century, by some estimates, between 1,000 and 2,000 wolves inhabited the southern Rockies. By the 1920s, almost every wolf pack in the region had been annihilated, leaving a few isolated individuals to struggle for survival. The last of the San Juan lobos--the last wild wolf in Colorado--was killed in 1945, felled by a government wildlife officer within sight of a herd of cattle.

The effort to return the wolves was launched in 1992, when Colorado representative David Skaggs sponsored legislation directing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to study the feasibility of wolf reintroduction in the western part of the state. Staff biologists dutifully gathered information on potential release sites throughout the region, but the agency itself was unenthusiastic. The Colorado effort was set aside when the agency turned its attention to a joint federal-state project to return the Mexican gray wolf to the Mogollon Rim of Arizona. (The fate of that population remains uncertain, plagued by illegal killings and, most recently, a government plan to trap a family of seven wolves that had strayed out of the reintroduction area.) In the five years following, the Fish and Wildlife Service did little to move wolf reintroduction in Colorado forward, arguing that the return of the animal to Arizona and also to the Yellowstone area is sufficient to ensure the species' survival. This March, the agency downgraded the gray wolf from "endangered" to "threatened" in most states, a step toward dropping all federal protections; for now, wolves in the Southwest (including southern Colorado) retain strict protections.