In the Woods...At Night

Remember what mystery the woods held when you were a kid?  Remember what it was like, the first time you walked in the woods at night with a flashlight...and then turned it off?  The darkness, the closeness of the tress, the damp of the night air closing around you.  Only to be able to get back to that feeling. Luckily, living and playing in northern Minnesota I have had the chance to do that many times over the years.

Eight or nine years ago, my wife and I did an adventure race that started near Tofte, Minnesota.  Adventure races generally include mountain biking, orienteering, paddling and often some sort of climbing or rappelling, and require competitors to navigate the entirety of the course using a map and compass.  This particular race started at 11:00 pm and would continue until we finished sometime in the late afternoon of the next day.

Almost immediately upon leaving the lights of the starting area and the glow of the large fire that was burning, we realized the northern lights were in full effect.  They shimmered and danced for two hours or so as we pedaled our bikes on back roads and trails into the night.  Soon after they stopped we saw the Perseid meteor showers and caught glimpses of those throughout the night.  We felt so fortunate to be seeing these things, which we surely would have missed were it not for this great excuse to be out overnight.  The wonders of that race didn't end with daylight though.  Just as the sun was coming up, we got back on our bikes, shivering from a paddle and required swim in a chilly lake.  As we turned a corner we were greeted by a large moose cow and two calves.  Though we were racing, we stopped for a few minutes to enjoy the spectacle.  They disappeared into the deep brush and we continued.

Since that race I have spent many times in the woods in the dark, but another race, brought the true joy of the experience back once again.  A good friend of mine chose to enter the Superior 100, a trail running race on the Superior Hiking Trail in northern Minnesota.  I have done a few long trail races--a marathon, a 50 kilometer and a 50 mile on the same trail--and when I did it the support I got from my family was invaluable.  So when he told me he planned to run it, I offered to run with him through the night-time hours.

This is not a race report, but it is important to say that my friend was extremely impressive.  I met him about 14 hours into the race (10:30 p.m.) and in the next 10 or so hours we spent together hiking the trail, he was off his feet for no more than 30 minutes.

If you have spent time moving through the deep woods in the dark you know your immediate visual world is only as large as your headlamp or flashlight is bright.  With the ruggedness of the trail, and him leading the way, his eyes were on the roots and rocks immediately in front of him, and I spent almost the entire time looking at his lower calves, his shoes, and the ground over which he had just trod.  As the saying goes, "The view only changes for the lead dog."

But what was amazing were the details we caught as we moved along.  Late in the night we both confessed that there were multiple times we cursed the runners in front of us for dropping wrappers or toilet paper on the ground, only to discover it was birch bark reflecting back at us.  (May have been a little sleep deprivation there, too.) He would point out interesting rock formations or gnarly tress and we would pause slightly to take them in.  These details seemed to stand out in particular in the glow of the flashlight.  I wonder if we would have enjoyed them in the same way in the daytime.

Then there were the vistas. The Superior Hiking Trail provides some stunning views from tall ridges during the day, but experiencing the wide open sky at night is something special as well.  The stars were brilliant and the moon, in its last quarter, was in close proximity to Jupiter and Venus.  After a couple long climbs we turned our headlamps off and took a few minutes to enjoy the view.

Sometimes, I end up out at night because I have no other choice.  If you live in northern regions and work traditional hours, it's plenty dark when you leave work.  The other night I went for a ski on our local trails after work.  It was a beautiful night and really dark with no moon visible through the clouds.  I could actually hear the wolves howling here at the Center as I began to cross a marsh.  Then I caught two eyes in my headlamp.  They were brilliant and I couldn't take my eyes off them.  Suddenly, I heard a noise and caught one more eye bounding off into the woods.  Deer.  I spent the next few minutes in a stare-down with the one that didn't move.  I snorted at it, stomped my skis and did my awful impersonation of a deer wheeze.  It wouldn't move.  Finally, I decided it won the contest and moved on with my ski.  I finished my ski and once again felt fortunate to have had the chance encounter in the woods at night.

As we strive to learn more about the natural world and wolves' connection to it, I believe it is important to experience it in as many ways as possible.  Moving through the woods at night I can't help but think about the wolves that are moving through them too.

We Saw Wolves!

A few Saturdays ago, I took six adventurous souls out into the Superior National Forest for the day to learn about field biology. We began our day at 7:00 a.m. with copious amounts of coffee and apple Danish in hand as we got to know each other and went over the day’s plans.

We spent the morning engaged in the fine details of using radio telemetry equipment. However, no matter how adept you are at using the equipment, if the wolves aren’t around, it does no good. We spent two hours trying to locate one, just one, wild wolf fitted with a radio collar with no luck. But, hey, that’s part of the deal when trying to locate animals on the ground in the winter with 6 to 10 inches of snow in a national forest with few roads.

Thankfully, our pilot, Rick, was ready at the Ely airport to take us up in his small-engine Cessna 172 outfitted with telemetry antennae on each strut. We charted a course to seek out the Slate and Mitawan Lake packs south and east of the airport.

The first flight was a bust. While two participants eagerly scanned the ground 1,000 feet below us for signs of wildlife, I was manning the receiver. I was only picking up faint signals that seemed to go in and out. I was frustrated and confused. Upon landing, Rick and I realized that the coaxial cable connecting the receiver to the antennae was loose and worn – the likely cause for the faint and intermittent signals. I had even checked the receiver with a dummy collar positioned on the fence at the airport before we left. Blasted!

After fixing the cable issue, we took the second group of participants up and chose a different route toward Fernberg Road (referred to as “the Fernberg”) east of Ely towards Moose Lake pack territory. On the way as we flew over a part of the Kawishiwi River someone spotted something.

“Two wolves! Two wolves running up the river!”

The participants in the backseat had zoned in on two moving dots on the river and recognized them as canids rather than deer. While I had my nose buried in the map trying to make sure I had the correct wolf collar frequency for the location we were flying over, my participants were searching for any sign of movement.


The two wolves, both gray in color, were trotting toward a wooded edge of the river periodically stopping to look back. About 300 yards behind them was a group of Wintergreen dogsledders about to cross a portage onto the wolves’ section of the river. Based on their body language, the wolves were not comfortable with the three dog teams heading their way. With tucked tails the two wolves disappeared into the forest.



It’s not often that I take a group up in the air and we find wolves without the aid of radio collars. I took this as a reminder that wolf research is not just about looking where the wolf should be; it’s also about looking where the wolf might be.

Check back next week for what happened later that day when we hiked in to a lake where we had observed a collared wolf later during that same flight.

UGH!

This is the second part of a three-part series, which details the efforts to retrieve a radio-collared wolf that died in the fall of 2010.  The first attempt is covered in the most recent blog post.

Humbled after our unsuccessful attempt to retrieve wolf 989 (See previous blog post.) my wife, Molly, and I decided to try it again a week later.  This time we would be prepared with backcountry skis with proper bindings, a real pulk (sled) and we would give ourselves more time to find the wolf.

The night before our next attempt six inches of snow fell.  It was beautiful, but not great for an ambitious schedule that still required us to pick our kids up by 5:30 pm.  The new snow would mean we had to break trail the entire way instead of relying on the dog teams who use the trail to do the hard work.  It would slow us down tremendously.

Where bitterly cold temperatures and slush had foiled us the week before, this week’s culprits would be the slush and the new snow.  The temperature was in the teens and only a slight breeze was blowing.

Molly broke trail most of the way while I skied behind her with the loaded pulk.  It was absolutely beautiful out and we enjoyed the time in the wilderness.  Unfortunately, it was slow going.  Along with the snow, we repeatedly had to stop and scrape the ice off our skis when we hit slush.  We left the truck at about 8:45 in the morning and didn’t reach the edge of the lake—where we would actually start looking for the wolf—until 12:30.

With our limited time, and the GPS coordinates for the wolf appearing to be right on the edge of a steep drop off, we had to decide if we were going to look on the high ground or the low lying area.  The vegetation in the cut between the cliffs was extremely thick, so I chose the high ground.  Molly stayed with the skis and gear so she could bring any equipment we needed when I located the wolf.

I was greeted by thigh-deep snow and thick vegetation.  The vegetation made snowshoes impractical, so I went without. 

More Slow Going

Twenty-five minutes after leaving the lake, I was within about 50 feet of the wolf, according to the GPS.  I switched on the radio telemetry unit, and the signal was strong and clear.  I was close.  The signal brought me right to the edge of the cliff.  I looked around in the deep snow, but saw nothing that would indicate a dead wolf was lying nearby.  Forty-five minutes had gone by since I left the lake.  We were out of time.  (Just wait until you read where the wolf was finally found.)

I would like to say I reacted to another failed attempt with grace and aplomb.  That would not be honest.  More than a couple inappropriate words were let fly into the quiet wilderness air.  My frustration was extreme, but we had to get moving back.

We had a long, hard and nearly silent ski back to the truck.  We had pushed our time limit and had to move as fast as we could.  When we got back to the truck, we were once again spent.  Besides the fact we didn’t find the wolf, it had been a wonderful excursion into the woods.  I noted in a log later that night that maybe someone else would have to get Wolf 989.

Maybe Dog Teams are the Answer

Then, I spoke with someone at Voyageur Outward Bound (OB).  We wanted to get out into the BWCA, they had dog teams that could get us there faster.  Sweet.  That’s how we found ourselves two weeks later loaded up and moving towards the wolf’s location.

It was another cold day, -29 degrees, but with a brilliant blue sky.  As we were walking to the dog yard, a staff person at OB who had been feeding the dogs walked past us with frostbite on his nose.  Not a great start.

This was my first real experience with sled dogs, and I was extremely excited.  I have wanted to try dog sledding for years, and this would be my chance.  Besides myself there were three Outward Bound staff and Camdilla Wirth, an educator at the Center, on this trip.  It was a good group to travel with.

We got off to a bit of a slow start, and once again pushed out into new snow.  A couple of dog teams had come through since the last significant snow, but the trails were still slow going for the dogs and the slush problem had not gone away.

We made steady progress from our drop off point until we reached Gabbro Lake.  As we dropped onto the lake the teams were faced with drifted snow and deep, narrow channels that had been cut by the few teams who had gone through.  The dogs were skittish and acted somewhat stressed by the situation.

An Outward Bound staff person asked Camdilla and I to widen the trail by walking in snowshoes ahead of the teams.  This seemed to work, but the dogs were still edgy and a couple of scraps broke out inside the teams.  Progress came nearly to a halt.  Then, a significant fight broke out and two dogs were slightly injured.

Though we looked at every option, the decision to turn around and get the dogs back to be treated was an easy one.  Outward Bound safety procedures prevented any of their staff continuing on without specific equipment, of which we had only one set, so we all headed back together, one more unsuccessful trip.  We had only made it about three miles towards our destination.

Outward Bound offered one more time to use a dog team to help in the effort.  A week later Camdilla joined students who were in the middle of a course in a last-ditch effort to find Wolf 989.  They made it to the site, searched for two hours, both on the high ground and the low area below the cliff and had no luck.  They came to the conclusion that it was in a large crack in the rock or below the cliff face buried in ice.  (Would they be correct when the wolf was actually found?)

At this point I truly expected that to be our last trip.  I spoke with the USGS staff who had asked us to get the wolf and was told to leave it be. But now the challenge had hold of me, and I wanted to find the wolf and bring it back.

In the next entry, the final trips and the successful conclusion to this retrieval effort.

It seemed so straightforward...

It all started with an e-mail from Lori Schmidt, our wolf curator.  There were three collared wolves that died in late fall last year, and the USGS wolf and deer study staff wanted to examine them for their research.  They did not have the personnel to retrieve them.  “Does anyone want to help?”

Sure.  One was down a minimum maintenance road, one was near a small lake easily accessible by road, and one was near the portage between Bald Eagle Lake and Turtle Lake in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. (BWCA) (See Map). 

I offered to get the one in the BWCA.  It turned out to be Wolf 989, an eleven year-old male from the Pike Pack and whose mortality signal was first picked up on December 13, 2010. (More information on 989)

I figured my wife, Molly, and I could ski out to it, locate it using the GPS coordinates I received from the USGS staff and use the radio telemetry unit to find the dead wolf.  We would then haul it back on a ski pulk and bring it to the Kawishiwi  Field Lab.  Simple.

If only things were ever that simple.  What follows, broken into three entries, is the story of our attempts (yes, attempts) and what I learned about the nature of field work that many of us who are not biologists may believe to be glamorous and alluring.

Two by Ski

Both my wife and I are good skiers and quite comfortable in winter conditions.  It’s one of the reasons I volunteered to get the wolf in the BWCA.  The wolf was about 6 miles from the nearest access point, and we thought we could make it there and back in a day.  Our first incorrect assumption.

It’s important to remember that vehicles with motors are not allowed in this part of the BWCA, so taking a snow machine across the frozen lakes was not an option.

We started off just after dropping the kids at school and daycare, about 9:00 AM.  We packed all of our gear into two backpacks, brought a sled to haul the wolf once we found it and drove down Spruce Road to the winter trailhead. We had not taken the time to get backcountry skis with Berwin bindings, thinking our regular cross country ski equipment would work fine for this short ski.  This was a bad decision and had a major impact later in the day.

Wind Chills -40

It was a cold, but seemingly manageable -1 degree Fahrenheit when we left the truck. However, wind chills were predicted to be nearly -40° F.  As we skied through the woods it felt quite comfortable with no hint of the predicted wind.  We followed trails used mainly by dog teams in the winter making slow but steady progress.

Then we hit Gabbro Lake.   Skiing out into the wind on the lake it became obvious the predicted wind chills would be reached. No matter, we were dressed properly, had plenty of water and food, and appropriate first aid and survival gear.  Success still seemed possible.

The wind was at our back much of the trip out and although we hit slushy spots on the lake several times, we were able to scrape off the ice and keep going.

A note about lake slush:  If you are not from a northern area, you may not be familiar with it.  The slush does not mean the ice isn’t safe.  It is created by the weight of snow pressing down on newly formed ice and pressing water out of cracks in the ice.  The water is then insulated by the snow and stays liquid.  Once it is disturbed and exposed it freezes very quickly to whatever it touches. It can make winter lake travel difficult or impossible in bad slush seasons no matter what form of transportation one is using.

By just before noon, we were within about a mile of the wolf’s location and were looking for an obscure winter trail when the trouble started.  We skied into a bay and knew the trail was somewhere on the other side.  While stopping to look around I realized I was standing in a slushy mess.  Molly figured it out quickly and skied to the edge of the bay and escaped the slush.  I was stuck.  I removed my ski to try and scrape it, lost my balance and stepped into the slush. I now had ice on my ski and boot.

I had had enough

Normally, that’s not a huge deal.  Unfortunately for me, ice got into the binding and kept if from locking onto my ski boot.  I messed with it for quite some time with no success.  Molly was yelling to me from across the bay—a distance of about 50 yards—I couldn’t hear what she was saying due to the wind.  Finally after what I thought was about ten minutes, I had had enough.  I gave up and decided to keep one ski on and hobble over to Molly.  When I stepped onto the snow again, my foot went all the way through the snow and the slush went over the top of my boot, soaking my foot.  Definitely not good.

When I made it to Molly, I asked, “What were you yelling?”

“I wanted to know what you were doing.  You were stuck there almost 20 minutes,” she replied.

In my effort to fix the binding I had not realized that I had been standing out in the full brunt of the wind in my light ski clothes for that long. Between that and the wet foot, I suddenly realized just how cold I was.  This was still not a life threatening situation, but it was time to start making good decisions or we might find ourselves in real trouble.

We decided to seek shelter behind the only thing available, a large boulder on the other side of the bay.  Molly skied and I hobbled over to it, avoiding the slush in the bay.  When we got there we realized it didn’t offer as much shelter from the wind as we had hoped.  As we sat there considering our options we realized the possibility of retrieving the wolf was diminishing by the second.

It was time to move

We put on our heavy coats and dry hats and tried to figure out how to fix the binding.  First, we tried cleaning it out with a knife.  Then, we tried knocking it against the rock to break the ice loose.  Finally, we tried melting the ice with the flame from a candle in our pack, but we couldn’t keep the flame lit, even with the protection of the boulder.  We spent about twenty minutes working on the binding and even with our warmer clothes on, we continued to get colder.  It was time to move, and unfortunately the direction had to be back to the truck, not towards the wolf.

We made the decision that continued work on the binding made no sense.  I took off my ski boots (The other boot had frozen into the binding and remained attached to the ski.) put on dry socks and slipped my feet into my Steger Camuks for a long, slow walk home.

What had been a pretty slow pace on the way out ebbed to almost a crawl.  It had taken about two and a half hours to ski to the bay before being foiled by the slush.  The return trip, mostly into the wind, took more than three grueling hours.  It was an extremely challenging effort for both Molly and I, and we consider ourselves to be in fairly good shape.  We had to rest and swap the load numerous times on the trip back, but after our fingers and toes warmed up from the extended stop, we could once again focus solely on the effort.  When we made it off the lake, we stopped to rest and snack in the relative warmth of the woods. (See pictures.)

We made it safely back to the truck and enjoyed some warm coffee we had left in a thermos before speeding off to pick up our kids.  Although it was frustrating not to get the wolf we had set out for, both Molly and I felt strongly then and still do that turning around was the right choice.  This trip was a good reminder that although we were only about five miles from our vehicle, in harsh winter conditions that can be a really long way.

Next installment:  One more trip by ski and two with dog teams…

Welcome to Wild Bytes

Welcome to Wild Bytes!  The International Wolf Center education department is excited to launch our new blog. Adding to our other electronic education and social media offerings feels great and we couldn’t be more excited about the possibilities.  We hope to engage readers from our unique position as educators, residents of Minnesota’s Northwoods and as people who care deeply about wolves and the wildlands that serve as their home.

This blog will be many things.  We will write about wolves for sure, but this space will cover much more.  From interesting scientific topics, to experiential pedagogy, to our own observations and experiences in the natural world; we hope you join us on our educational journey and become an integral part of a dialogue that will allow us all to learn.  We will feature written word, pictures and video and hope it moves you to comment and engage with us.

The primary contributors will be the permanent education staff at the International Wolf Center interpretive center in Ely, Minnesota.  Tara Johnson, program specialist, is a licensed elementary educator.  She has worked at the Center for three and a half years and is finishing up on her Master’s degree this winter.  She has a wealth of knowledge and keen interest in learning.  She is currently working on Minnesota WolfLink, a project funded by the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, which allows us to connect with Minnesota students through outdoor education and videoconferencing.

Jess Edberg, information services director, is our go-to wolf person.  She knows the biology, she knows the wolf management issues and she knows how to communicate with people of all ages.  She particularly enjoys working with high school and college age students and adults.  Jess is an avid outdoorswoman and spent time working as a field tech with the USGS wolf and deer study, experience that informs her work every day.

Lori Schmidt, wolf curator, has a broad range of knowledge and interests.  Along with being widely respected for her knowledge of the care and management of captive animals, she has an intricate knowledge of wolves in the wild.  People from around the globe seek out her expertise on not only wolves, but many subjects concerning wildlife management and forestry.   In addition to her work at the Center, she is the Program Coordinator of the Natural Resources Department at Vermillion Community College in Ely.

As the Director of Education, I will also be contributing regularly to Wild Bytes.  I have been with the Center for nearly two years.  I have almost twenty years of experience in experiential and environmental education.  I have Master’s in Education and was teaching in the classroom for nine years before accepting the chance to move up to Ely to join the Center.   One of our first entries will be about my unsuccessful efforts to retrieve a collared wolf that died last winter inside the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

We will also have guest contributors, from biologists to educators to wildlife artists and more.  We truly hope this will be an engaging and enjoyable endeavor for readers and contributors alike.  We hope to post weekly, but sometimes it may be a little more.  We plan for this to be a useful space for classroom teachers, wolf enthusiasts, hunters, people who care about our natural resources in general and many others as well.  We will gladly accept any suggestions on content, ideas for improvement and suggestions to make this a true resource.

Thanks for your interest and we look forward to learning with you.