Rob Chaney for The Montana Standard
MISSOULA — Photos taken by a Rattlesnake Valley resident may show the first wolf hunting elk on Mount Jumbo in Missoula.
The images Brian Nostrant posted on his Facebook page shows more than 30 elk in a tight bunch with a large, thick-tailed canine running below them.
“I won’t definitively call them wolves, but domestic dogs generally don’t travel off leash, on top of a mountain, in pairs and seem to glide effortlessly through deep powder putting the fear of God into critters five times their size,” Nostrant wrote on his post. “Notice how the big bull keeps himself in the middle of the herd, well protected from all sides. The second ‘dog’ was over the top on the south side before I could take aim. All this excitement right in our little neighborhood.”
Nostrant took the pictures shortly after noon Thursday from his home in the west Rattlesnake, about 1,500 vertical feet below Mount Jumbo. He said he noticed the usually wide-ranging grazers suddenly bunch up and realized something was going on.
“They split in half and ran in a sort of heart-shaped pattern, then regrouped and charged straight up the hill,” Nostrant said in an interview. “I had to run to another room to get the camera, and when I got back, they had just about reached the top. I wasn’t sure there was a dog, but I could see two figures moving with them.”
The stampede probably created the distinct S-curved trail many Missoulians noticed near Jumbo’s summit Friday. While the slope appears smooth from the valley floor, the elk were following a crest of the hillside as they bolted across the open ground.
Nostrant used a Nikon Coolpix digital camera with a 38-power zoom to capture the scene. But it wasn’t until he brought the images up on his desktop computer that he could make out the canine shapes of the pursuers.
“They seemed much bigger than a coyote, but it could be big, husky kind of dog,” he said. “It wasn’t a golden retriever or Lab. The other dog or wolf or whatever, it beat them over the top. Once they crested, they all put the brakes on, and then there was panic again. They had one behind them and one over the hill, and they didn’t know where to go. So they stayed in the middle of the mountain.”
Missoula Parks and Recreation Conservation Lands Coordinator Morgan Valliant has looked at the photos and is also unsure what species of canine was involved. But he said wolves were within the realm of possibility.
“There are some big coyotes on Mount Jumbo,” Valliant said. “From what I can tell from the photo, it’s pretty long way for an off-leash dog to go. And there’s nothing about a human being close by. Usually, if there’s an off-leash dog chasing wildlife, there’s a human chasing that off-leash dog.”
Most of Mount Jumbo is closed to human access from December to April to protect the elk that use its upper slopes for winter grazing range. Hikers are allowed to climb to the concrete “L” monument on Jumbo’s southwest quadrant, but that’s about half a mile and 500 vertical feet from the slopes where the elk typically mingle.
Valliant said an incident about four years ago where a large canine was seen chasing deer in the summer turned out to be a coyote. He and Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks biologists plan to climb the mountain later this week and see if any tracks provide more explanation.
FWP spokeswoman Vivaca Crowser said Region 2 biologists have looked at the images and aren’t certain about the species.
“They’re interested in trying to get up there before we get the next bout of precipitation,” Crowser said. “We don’t think it looks like a coyote, but we can’t be sure.”
Crowser said having wolves tracking elk on Mount Jumbo wouldn’t prompt any changes in management.
“To have wolves moving through an area that’s protected for wildlife, going after prey, wouldn’t make us think there was any threat to human safety,” Crowser said. “If a wolf was doing something abnormal, like hanging around a house, might be different. But this is not like having mountain lions hanging around a trailhead in town. That’s a different story.”