sra61
Member
I was scouting last weekend for my moose fairly high up in a creek drainage. It was pretty hot like it has been for a few weeks now. I took my 10 yr. old chocolate lab with me and we were working our way up an overgrown spur logging road. This was about 4 miles behind a gate and I had been seeing wolf tracks for a long way on the road right on top of a lot of fresh elk tracks. I could tell that there had been quite a bit of traffic on this little overgrown rd., but couldn't ever see a track until we got up in there a ways. I wanted to go up about a mile or so to look at a lake that is shown on my topos, although on Google Earth it looks like a big wet grassy meadow, but still likely moose habitat. The trail was so overgrown it was basically just a tunnel through there. As I got closer to the meadow I got into an area where the trail was wet and there were finally tracks I could see. Every track I saw was wolf. They had been in there so much that it was all kind of trampled down, and as I went a little farther there got to be a lot of wolf scat, so much that I could hear the flies on it. I thought for a minute that I might have stumbled onto a kill, but I couldn't see one anywhere. pretty soon I saw something gray colored moving in the old growth next to the trail just about 10 yards ahead of me. I froze and made sure my lab was right with me. I had my Redhawk in .44 drawn and took a couple of steps to see what it was. Then I could see it was a big Gray colored wolf within 10 yards and at that point was unaware of us. I had the hammer cocked and she was aimed, but the season is closed, and I was afraid my dog might spook at that .44 going off next to her, and I was pretty sure I was close to a number of them, so I let the hammer down and he heard it, and turned towards us with his head down low looking at us. After about 10 seconds he just gave a low woof, and turned and left. I looked around for a den, but couldn't see one, but it was obvious that they had been spending a lot of time right in there. If they are denning in there, do they stay with a den for a prolonged time or are they just way more nomadic than that? Needless to say I have no reason to believe any moose would be within a couple miles of that place, but it might be a really good place to get a wolf or two later. I am going to take the trapping certification class and try it this winter. It might be quite a workout getting 4 miles back in there with snow, but I'm pretty sure there won't be any pressure! Does anyone know if these wolves are likely to hang in this general area? Or will they be miles away hell and gone? There was one pretty big track.
