YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK – For six months every two years, Kirsty Peake and her husband move from the United Kingdom to Montana for one reason: to spend the winter watching wolves.
“We never come in the summer; there are too many people,” she said while standing next to her spotting scope near Tower Junction on a relatively warm morning – about 28 degrees.
Peake said after seeing the wolves for the first time in 1999, she and her husband were so enthralled that they organized tours to help pay for their return to Yellowstone again and again until 2005 – just to see the park’s wolves, and on some days they don’t.
But on Monday, the 20th anniversary of the wolves’ reintroduction to Yellowstone, the wild canines seemed to have showed up to celebrate, even howling. The visibility gave 5-year-old Orion Stone a chance to see his first wild wolf. After Peake set up her spotting scope low to the ground, Stone squinted through the magnifying lens and smiled.
“I really like it,” he said, when asked what he thought.
via 20 years after reintroduction, Yellowstone wolves find balance.