Ertz, the executive director of a nonprofit group called Wildlands Defense , was hoping to catch a glimpse of an animal that has been notoriously elusive here in recent days. Seen at least a dozen times by tourists and park rangers, the animal was assigned various possible identities: a Mexican gray wolf, a coyote-wolf hybrid, a wolf-dog hybrid, or a gray wolf from the northern Rockies.
Wolf biologists were tantalized—and stunned—by that last possibility. If it was a gray wolf, the animal had undertaken a spectacular journey, walking hundreds of miles across Utah or Colorado onto the Kaibab Plateau, which is just north of the Grand Canyon.
Mystery Grand Canyon Animal Is a Gray Wolf—Can It Survive?.