When hunter Kari Hirschberger came across two gray wolves, her survival instincts kicked in
By Ann McCreary
During a solo trip into mountains near the Methow Valley to hunt deer this fall, Kari Hirschberger found herself up-close-and-personal with two gray wolves.
Hirschberger said the wolves followed her at a distance for about an hour and a half, occasionally coming as close as 55 yards as she retreated from the area.
The wolves encountered by Hirschberger are likely part of the Lookout Mountain pack, said Scott Fitkin, a Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist, who has been monitoring the wolves for the past three years.
On Sept. 12, Hirschberger headed into the Lake Chelan National Recreation area on a trail from the upper Twisp River four days before the high hunt began. “I went in early to scout and find a buck to sit on top of” until the hunt began, she said in a recent phone interview.
Hirschberger, 24, is a research forester who worked for the Pacific Northwest Research Station in Twisp last summer. She has hunted since she was 7 years old, and feels comfortable alone in the mountains.
“All my hobbies and outdoor activities put me in the woods. I’ve put a lot of miles on my boots,” she said.
Hirschberger hiked through rugged terrain on an unmaintained trail that is lightly traveled. Her destination was a ridgeline in the Lake Chelan National Recreation Area where she could perch above two drainages to scout for deer prior to the hunt. She camped the first night above one of the drainages, and hiked early the next morning to a nearby ridge where she set up camp.
Using a spotting scope, she scanned the area and was surprised to see no deer.
“I spent all morning without seeing a single deer,” she said. “Every other area I’d gone to with similar aspect and elevation and vegetation was crawling with deer.”
Early in the afternoon Hirschberger spotted a deer carcass lying in the bottom of a draw, and decided to check it out later in the day.
“About 4 p.m. I hadn’t found a single animal. I hiked through large timber down to where this carcass should have been, but it was gone. I thought, ‘that’s funny,’” Hirschberger said.
As she walked around the area, she came upon a spot where a shallow hole had been dug in the dirt, and pieces of deer hide were in and around the hole. It occurred to her that this might be an animal den and she first thought of a cougar.
“I realized I should not be there,” she said. As she began to walk away, she became aware of movement on a hillside nearby.
“At 45 to 50 yards away from me were two adult gray wolves … approaching me at a rapid pace,” Hirschberger said. “I was trying to back up, but when I saw them I recognized that I shouldn’t try to retreat but should try to appear big and scare them. I put my hands in the air and started screaming and shouting.”
“They stopped (and) allowed me to get back up the ridgeline where the spotting scope was. I thought, no one’s going to believe me if I don’t take pictures,” Hirschberger said. So she put the lens of her point-and-shoot camera to the spotting scope and snapped photos of the wolves below her.
“I knew I’m not safe to stay there that evening, and was figuring out what’s next,” she said. “I was watching the wolves. They answered my question when they started trotting up through the trees” toward Hirschberger. She hurried over to her camp and began packing. As she was kneeling down, the wolves appeared on the ridge about 60-70 yards away.
Again, she threw her hands in the air and started yelling and took a couple steps toward the wolves.
“We had a standoff there for a while. I realized that this could go on all night, and I can’t do this in the dark,” Hirschberger said. “I started shoving everything into my backpack with one hand with my rifle in the other.”
Hirschberger said the wolves would make “false charges” toward her. “After one would do a little charge he’d circle back to the other one,” she said.
This happened four or five times as she continued to pack her gear. “It was unnerving to bend down,” she said.
After she had her things packed, she realized she’d left the spotting scope about 100 yards away, in the direction of the wolves. It was her boyfriend’s scope, and she didn’t want to leave it behind. So she began moving toward the wolves, waving her arms, yelling and throwing rocks. They held their ground as she walked about 15 yards in their direction, then moved up the slope as she recovered the spotting scope.
Hirschberger began hiking out toward the trail and the wolves continued to follow on the hillside above her. “They were keeping a good clip above me through sparse timber. They weren’t doing as many charges,” she said. But when it appeared that they were getting closer she would begin yelling and throwing rocks again.
She traversed around a basin to a saddle where she could pick up the trail descending toward Twisp River. It took her about 45 minutes to hike about a mile and a quarter, periodically stopping to throw rocks and yell at the wolves.
“That mile and a quarter was the longest time because I was trying not to turn my back on them,” Hirschberger said. “The last time I saw them was at the top of the …drainage.” It was about 5:30 p.m.
Throughout the encounter, the wolves “were very silent and their heads were kind of low to the ground,” Hirschberger said. “They did not bare their teeth. They would just make little charges at me, their heads low. They never both came at me at the same time.”
Hirschberger remains puzzled by the wolves’ behavior. At first she assumed they were defending what appeared to her to be a den, or perhaps the deer carcass she had seen there.
“At the time I felt like they were chasing me out of the area,” she said. “But if they were defending their kill I would expect their hackles to be raised … and would not expect them to follow me a mile and a quarter.”
She has since wondered if they might have been viewing her as potential prey. “I’m size 6, around 125 pounds. It’s a possibility that I was seen as a curious prey item … that they were testing me to see if I was an easy prey,” Hirschberger said. She said her instinct to fight back and act aggressively probably helped her in the situation.
Hirschberger said she has seen wolves before, near Carlton. “I’ve taken photos of them. They were very elusive,” she said.
She speculated that because of the remoteness of the area she had chosen to hunt in, “I’m not sure if those wolves have had much interaction with humans.”
“That’s an area where those animals rarely, if ever, encounter people” said WDFW biologist Fitkin. “They were probably as surprised as she was to see her there.”
The wolves are likely “the remnants of the Lookout Pack,” Fitkin said. “She saw them in a spot that is within the known territory of the Lookout Pack.”
After learning of Hirschberger’s encounter, two members of the wolf monitoring team hiked to the area and installed motion sensor cameras. The cameras produced 18 photos, each with a single wolf, Fitkin said.
Fitkin said it’s not possible to know why the wolves behaved the way they did toward Hirschberger. He said the wolves would not be denning in September, but they may have been defensive about the deer kill that Hirschberger discovered.
“Without being there and seeing the actual behavior I’m reluctant to say anything definitive. It’s not fair of me,” Fitkin said. “While the prey testing idea is possible, it would be very unusual with respect to humans.”
Fitkin said that during more than three years of studying and monitoring the Lookout Pack closer to the valley floor, the wolves have periodically come into contact with humans. One of the wolf team members inadvertently came upon a rendezvous site, where adult wolves watch over pups while the other pack members are hunting. Even then, the wolves didn’t show any aggressive behavior, Fitkin said.
“They’ve had the opportunity to be aggressive, and never were to those of us monitoring them,” he said.
The Lookout Mountain pack, the first pack of gray wolves confirmed in Washington State in 70 years, had has many as 10 animals in July 2008. Wildlife officials believe illegal poaching has decimated the pack, leaving only two or possibly three survivors. Gray wolves in the Methow Valley are protected as an endangered species under both federal and state law.
Hirschberger said she kept her rifle in hand during the encounter. “I definitely was thinking, ‘What is the point that is too close?’” However, she said, she was very conscious that gray wolves are a protected species, and that wolf management is a controversial issue.
Hirschberger described her experience and shared her photos with U.S. Forest Service biologists, and posted a description on a hunting blog. But because of the heated debate around wolf management, she said she has been reluctant to discuss the incident.
“I’ve been fairly private about this. I don’t want to be used as propaganda for either side,” she said. “This interesting behavior will be read in two very different ways, depending on what you think about wolf management in the state.”
“I’m a graduate of the University of Washington forestry school,” she added. “I understand a healthy ecosystem doesn’t have missing parts. You can’t manage for one thing, you have to manage for all. I am a hunter, and I strongly believe we should have a wolf management plan in place … but I don’t believe ‘no wolves’ is a management plan.”
Hirschberger said she didn’t have time to feel frightened during the encounter with the wolves, but when she reached her car at the trailhead after hiking out of the mountains, she got inside “and had a nice little cry before I headed down the road.”
Before the high hunt ended, though, she headed back into the mountains, this time accompanied by her boyfriend, and bagged her buck.