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PITKIN COUNTY
Only a few ranchers were expected to come to the meeting held in Chris Collins’ shop on the McCabe Ranch in Old Snowmass, which smelled of the smoked venison sausages cooking on the grill, horses on jeans, and a mixture of sweat and anxiety.
They’d come on the evening of June 11, after the first day of the monthly Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission meeting in Glenwood Springs, where wolves were not on the agenda. The omission shocked everyone, because of what had recently happened.
Over on the Lost Marbles Ranch, which borders the McCabe Ranch in a wide valley where the price of sprawling, remote ranches reflects their proximity to Aspen, the first wolf pack to form following the start of Colorado’s reintroduction program in December 2023 had established a new den. The adult female, released in the area in January, had given birth to her second litter of pups after breeding with a wolf introduced during Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s second release, in January.
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SUBSCRIBEThat half of these wolves were from the first Copper Creek pack — celebrated or reviled, depending on your perspective — wasn’t what mattered. It was their history, starting after the adult female was released in Grand County, with four other wolves from Oregon, in front of a handpicked crowd including Gov. Jared Polis, his husband, Marlon Reis, several CPW employees and, notably, no leaders from Grand County or ranchers. The next week, five more Oregon wolves were released in Summit County.
Colorado voters by a narrow margin directed CPW in 2020 to reintroduce wolves to the state. Two years of meetings followed, during which stakeholder groups worked to develop a plan they believed could lead to the successful development of a viable, self-sustaining wolf population while minimizing wolf-related conflicts with domestic animals and people. But from the start, there was trouble.
Some of the wolves brought from Oregon were known to have preyed on livestock, and releasing known attackers went against Colorado’s wolf management plan. Two of those wolves were released in Grand County. Not long after a reporter made the discovery about the livestock-eating wolves, a wolf released in Grand County and one in Summit County — neither known to have killed livestock in Oregon — paired up and started preying on nearly two dozen cattle and sheep on Grand County ranches.
A long, tense standoff between the ranchers and CPW leadership began. The ranchers wanted the male wolf killed, as is allowed under the state’s 10(j) permit that designates Colorado’s wolves, though on the federal endangered species list, an experimental population.
But CPW declined because the female was pregnant and the agency had yet to define the number of times a wolf could harass or kill livestock before wildlife officials could kill the wolf.
Instead of killing any wolves, CPW trapped the adults and four of five puppies, by then known as the Copper Creek pack, and moved them to a wildlife sanctuary. Wildlife officials then relocated the pack again, to private property in Old Snowmass, when CPW translocated 15 wolves from British Columbia to Eagle and Pitkin counties.
By February, ranchers say, local livestock started disappearing. On March 3 and 13, wolves killed two yearling heifers. Then, two months later, the reason the Old Snowmass ranchers were gathered happened. Over Memorial Day weekend, wolves from the pack killed two calves and severely injured one on a ranch in the Crystal Valley, near Carbondale, and the McCabe and Lost Marbles ranches in the Capitol Creek Valley. Range riders hired by CPW to keep watch over local herds responded, but they were sent to the wrong location and in not nearly enough time.
Wildlife officials ended up killing one of the wolves — a yearling Copper Creek male. But as had happened in Grand County the previous spring, Copper Creek wolves continued targeting cattle, and ranchers across Pitkin and Garfield counties feared the attacks would spread.
So they’d come together to try to figure out how to take their fate with the pack into their own hands. Note: It wasn’t the fate of the wolves.
At the June 11 meeting, killing the wolves wasn’t on the table. Instead, the ranchers were trying to get creative. The plan they came up with sounded preposterous: Ask someone — a wildlife group, a nongovernmental organization, a big celebrity or private individual worth millions — to pay them to accept and live with the wolves.
But given the situation at hand, every possible solution was on the table.
Ranchers meet in the shop of McCabe Ranch in Old Snowmass on June 11. (Kelsey Brunner, Special to the Colorado Sun)A wolf contingency plan
Inside the shop, the ranchers stood wide-legged, cowboy hats tilted. They wore dust-smeared shirts and dirty jeans, the wardrobe of outdoor workers. Most were men, some with wads of chew the size of pingpong balls in their lips. Sun-scorched faces. Leathery necks.
Tom Harrington, president of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association, called the meeting to order. Wolves had hit the Crystal River Ranch, which he manages for wealthy philanthropist and conservationist Sue Anschutz‐Rodgers, “but I joke with people that we’re kind of in the club as a junior member,” he said, “because we only had one calf killed and one injured that we haven’t confirmed yet.”
Harrington then thanked Tai Jacober, a fellow rancher and Colorado Parks and Wildlife commissioner, for “doing a fantastic job” at a meeting earlier in the day “putting those guys on the map” and telling CPW officials, “what you did was absolutely wrong, contrary to the plan. You created a shitstorm, and what are you gonna do to fix it?”
“Those guys” were Brad Day and Mike Cerveny, who both lost calves during the Memorial Day attacks. They said 20 calves and cows had disappeared from their ranches the weeks before, and Day described near-nightly events where he witnessed wolves harassing his herds. Both also had found evidence, they said, of wolves killing their livestock in half-eaten carcasses, hair in wolf scat and the spinal column of a calf with tracks around it.
And a couple days before the meeting, a calf had disappeared from Day’s herd and his employee, Jeff Montabone, had found, and photographed, what he believed was its spinal column on the ground. “If you guys want to see the pictures, I have them,” he said. “Lars (Skoric, another employee) found wolf tracks all around it.”
According to CPW, a rancher can shoot a wolf if they catch it in the act of attacking their livestock. CPW officials can also kill a wolf if its actions meet the criteria of “chronic depredation.” And the agency can issue a lethal take permit retroactively to a landowner who kills a gray wolf caught in the act on their private land or state or federal grazing allotment, if the landowner can provide evidence of the attack “within 24 hours, unless impractical, but no later than 72 hours” after.
At the meeting, Day, Cerveny and other ranchers were growing increasingly worried about their livelihoods and futures of their ranches because they didn’t know if the Copper Creek pack was going to stay and produce more wolves, leave of their own accord or be removed. (CPW has set a special meeting for July 7 at 2:30 p.m. to discuss the fate of the wolves.)
According to state statute, livestock owners can be reimbursed the fair market value of an animal proved to have been killed by a wolf up to $15,000. They can receive reimbursement of up to $15,000 for veterinary costs. And compensation is available for missing calves or sheep in open range settings as well as “indirect losses” such as decreased weaning weights and decreased conception rates on a case-by-case basis.
But to prove a suspected kill, “you have to have the hide and show scratches, bites, contusions, things like that,” Day said later. “And the calf Jeff found was all gone. It was just a backbone.”
The recent deaths and their impact on Day were why Lowell Cerise, a friend of Day’s who grew up on a ranch in the Roaring Fork Valley, had driven 12 hours from Idaho to meet the ranchers. Cerise encouraged Day to call the meeting because Cerise had experience with wolf reintroductions, having lived through the northern Rockies version in the 1990s.
“With the current trajectory you’re on, it looks to me like a potential outcome is there will be no benefits of having these wolves here to you guys,” he said. “I mean, Brad’s life the last month or two I don’t think is the life that he wants to continue. You know, it’s kind of taking the joy out of ranching.”
Cattle carcasses and bones decay in a pit on the Crystal River Ranch in Carbondale. (Kelsey Brunner, Special to the Colorado Sun)“I think this Copper Creek pack is what’s responsible for all the problems,” said Bill Fales, who started ranching near Carbondale in the 1980s and helped start the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust in 1995. “They killed in North Park. Then (CPW) captured them against their will and brought them here. I’m not hearing of other wolves killing around the state,” Fales added. “And I think that’s why we gotta hammer on CPW, get on them to capture this pack. Put them away for life or euthanize them like they should have done last week.”
“How’s that working out so far?” asked Ted Nieslanik, a third-generation rancher in the Roaring Fork Valley.
“It’s totally against the plan,” Cerveny said. “They talked about it at today’s (commissioners) meeting. And why aren’t they following the plan? That’s what we got to hammer them on.”
Cerise listened and nodded, but he was focusing on a solution.
He had a promising one, he thought, because news of the Copper Creek female having a new litter of puppies was reaching the public, and people were riled up about CPW killing the Copper Creek yearling, and word was getting out about other Copper Creek wolves harassing Day’s livestock. “So the conservation world, that extreme-wolf world, is terrified Brad is going to go find one of the wolves killing a calf tonight and shoot it,” he said.
All those elements, he believed, put both the wolves and the ranchers at “peak emotional value” for “a voter base that probably didn’t understand the ramifications of what they were voting for,” which potentially made those voters sympathetic to the wolves and ranchers.
Why? It had become clear that proving a wolf kill was incredibly hard. And even if some ranchers hadn’t been impacted yet, space in the region around their ranches was “tight.” And when 20 head of cattle lost without compensation “turned into 40, 50, 60, 80 head. … I don’t care how much you want to stay in ranching and how proud you are of your history, you cannot afford to do it,” Nieslanik said. Not everyone at the meeting was in the same boat: As Anschutz-Rogers’ ranch manager, Harrington could realistically lose some cattle and stay in business. Same with the Collins family, who own the McCabe Ranch, valued not long ago at $50 million. The McBride family, owners of the Lost Marbles Ranch, had diversified, putting their ranch in a conservation easement in exchange for the ability to sell their development rights for millions of dollars.
LEFT: Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commissioner and rancher Tai Jacober discusses the wolf issue in the Roaring Fork Valley with other ranchers. RIGHT: Mike Cerveny, manager at Lost Marbles Ranch, talks to fellow ranchers about his experience with wolves since they were reintroduced. (Kelsey Brunner, Special to the Colorado Sun)
But if Day, who landed at the McCabe Ranch 30 years ago, who is “the scrappiest, hardest-working person” Cerise says he has ever known, and who raises cattle with the Collins’ herds, “runs into a situation where the Copper Creek pack keeps expanding,” he doesn’t know where he’d go.
Cerveny leases his land from the McBride family and is in a similar situation. Nieslanik isn’t exactly getting rich on his ranch — he doesn’t take vacations and says he can’t afford to send his kids to college. And, this was important, even if the state continues to compensate ranchers for livestock kills fairly, how will it keep up when just two Grand County ranchers received $580,000 for livestock claims in January?
But Cerise thought if they could somehow make themselves sympathetic to the right people, who understood, or romanticized, the value of ranching and what it brought Pitkin County, maybe they’d consider a deal that paid ranchers a yearly sum.
Then the ranchers could afford to keep ranching despite their cattle being lost, and the wolves could keep wolfing, in “a wolf-friendly zone, in the eastern half of Garfield County and in Pitkin County, maybe, where if you find a wolf kill, you don’t call CPW. You just live with it,” Cerise said.
Who cares about a few lost cattle?
Cerise’s plan may sound crazy, but it’s not without precedent.
In 2019, The National Wildlife Federation paid fair market value for a 33,000-acre Upper Crystal River Valley grazing allotment held by Joe Sperry to protect native bighorn sheep from pathogens that could have been carried by Sperry’s domestic sheep. “That was a couple million bucks,” Jacober said.
In 2023, the federation paid a family of sheepherders an undisclosed amount to waive their grazing permits on 10 large, high-elevation allotments spanning 101,676 acres in the San Juan mountains near Silverton for the same reason.
And in 2022 in Montana, the federation partnered with a conservation-minded rancher besieged by grizzly bears on his grazing allotment along the Madison River near Yellowstone National Park. The federation says “what started as an attempt to retire grazing from a portion of the allotment transformed into a new model in addressing conflicts” when they negotiated a 12-year deal with the rancher in the form of a forgivable loan of $300,000 if the rancher used nonlethal management strategies (paid for by the wildlife federation) to mitigate conflicts.
But some think ranchers should be doing more to advance coexistence without any special benefits.
Rainer Gerbatsch, an Arvada resident and vocal wolf supporter affiliated with the advocacy group ColoradoWild, thinks the plight of ranchers suffering under wolf reintroduction gets too much play in the media.
“What about the rest of the world? What about the rapidly changing climate in the West, in Colorado, the water scarcity, the riparian destruction?” he asked The Colorado Sun in an email.
And why the hyperbole over a few ranchers losing a few cattle, when, according to the USDA’s 2024 Colorado Agricultural Overview, Colorado’s cattle inventory in early 2025 was approximately 2.55 million head, while confirmed wolf-related cattle losses for 2024/25 so far are less than 30.
Extreme focus on the so-called negative impacts of wolves upsets Gerbatsch because he’s a grandfather worried about his grandchildren’s future, and wolves “are ecological regulators,” he wrote. “Their presence initiates trophic cascades that restore riparian vegetation, reduce elk and deer overbrowsing, limit mesopredator populations (such as coyotes) and indirectly enhances carbon storage through increased vegetative cover…when Colorado is entering a new era of climate stress.”
Gerbatsch thinks killing “a whole wolf family” or locking it up in a sanctuary is not a solution. “Once done and the next predation occurs the same people will be screaming again to kill the next family for the noble cause of saving the wolf reintroduction program!” he wrote. “Coexistence is not a checkbox. It is a dynamic, adaptive practice requiring commitment, communication, ecological knowledge and trust.”
A ranch hand drives a four wheeler through a pasture on the Crystal River Ranch in Carbondale on June 11. (Kelsey Brunner, Special to the Colorado Sun)Joanna Lambert, a scientist and professor of wildlife ecology and conservation biology at the University of Colorado, who has studied the interactions of endangered species and humans in Nepal, India and Africa, has a different take.
Her opinions come from experience working in “really, really remote parts of the world, where — I’ll just be frank — human-wildlife conflict is real,” she said. “Where, literally, one to two people a week get killed by tigers, or somebody’s auntie got gored by an elephant and their uncle just lost all their crops to that same elephant.”
So while witnessing the conflicts arising from wolf reintroduction in Colorado, Lambert said she’s “been like, man, knock it off. If we cannot solve these problems in the richest country in the world, in the most fabulous landscapes remaining in the Northern Hemisphere, with untold numbers of resources and access to support in a way that most people on the planet will never know, then where can we solve them?”
Yet she says she gets frustrated when people “aren’t engaging with the empathy of, wait a minute, this is new. For several generations, folks making a living in rural working landscapes have not had to live and contend with wolves. It takes time to become accustomed to this new reality, and it takes time to learn how to use non-lethal coexistence tools. All of us working towards a world where both wildlife and humans coexist need to be more empathetic and compassionate towards this.” To be clear, wolf advocacy groups including Defenders of Wildlife, The Colorado Wolf and Wildlife Center and Rocky Mountain Wolf Project are trying to help ranchers with a suite of nonlethal tools to prevent wolf conflicts.
Between April 1, 2024, and March 31, 2025, they gave $900,000 in funding to support CPW’s ongoing deployment of 34 miles of fladry and 404 scare devices like motion activated alarms, propane cannons and airhorns. At the same time, the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service made $2.5 million available to producers for installing exclusion fencing (electric fence/fladry), carcass management (disposing of dead animals properly so wolves aren’t attracted by their scent), range riders (who watch over herds and look out for wolves at night), and livestock monitoring (keeping track of what you’ve got).
A CPW wolf conflict coordinator installs fladry, a flagging used on fences around ranches to deter wolves from harassing or attacking livestock. (Rachael Gonzales, Colorado Parks and Wildlife)Support is also abundant: During the same period, CPW officials completed 215 assessments across 16 counties, to determine what kind of nonlethal tools ranchers needed, upon their request, and deployed those tools in nine counties.
And some livestock may have been saved: In seven locations across three counties where 11.55 miles of fladry was installed, CPW’s 2025 annual report says an average 200 cow/calf pairs were protected for a duration of 45 to 73 days. And in five locations where fladry was installed during the 2024 calving season, no livestock were lost to wolf depredation while the fladry was deployed, they said.
But ranchers also report CPW waiting until a wolf is in their cattle to get them materials, instead of proactively. Range riders showed up miles from where they should have been after a wolf was spotted. They say carcass and attractant management has been unclear or inadequate. And in early June, a powerful consortium of wolf advocacy groups petitioned the CPW commission to tighten the reins on wolf compensation claims after the Grand County ranchers were awarded $580,000 for direct and indirect livestock losses. The petition asks for amendments to the gray wolf compensation program that would make claims eligible only if wolves are proven to be the “ultimate and direct” cause of a livestock loss, and that compensation for any wolf-related losses is contingent on ranchers proactively using nonlethal coexistence methods.
The intention of the petition is “to ensure the long-term sustainability of the gray wolf compensation program and to strengthen the commission’s ability to comply with its statutory requirement to resolve conflicts and establish and maintain a self-supporting population of gray wolves,” Delia Malone, one of the petition’s sponsors, said in an email.
But to Cerise, it feels like one more strike against ranchers already stressed to their limits.
That includes Day, who’d have more wolves at his place after the June 11 meeting, and decide to do something about it.
Clear and convincing evidence?
The video Day’s employee took through his spotting scope on June 22 shows several wolves harassing Day’s livestock.
They work together to separate a cow and calf from the herd until the mother cow charges, her calf close behind her. She averts attack as the herd thunders across the screen in her direction. The wolves eventually scatter.
Now armed with proof, Day wrote a message that he sent to the Cervenys, the Nieslaniks and a few others along with the video. Cara Nieslanik later posted it on Facebook.
(Courtesy Cara Nieslanik via Facebook)Caption goes here.
This video captures the Copper Creek pack attacking cattle. This has become a nightly occurrence, creating significant stress for the livestock.
Ranchers are growing increasingly concerned, and have requested CPW respond to this attack by June 26, 2025. If no action is taken, local ranchers may have no choice but to take matters into their own hands to protect their herds.
This is not an anti-wolf message, but this particular pack has a history of livestock kills and should not have been located to Pitkin County. The ongoing situation is putting unnecessary pressure on livestock, ranchers and neighbors throughout the valley.
Urge CPW to take immediate steps to address the growing impact of this pack.
— Brad Day’s message on Cara Nieslanik’s Facebook page
“Ranchers taking matters into their own hands” sounded like Day and others were ready to kill the harassing wolves. But when Day spoke with The Sun on June 24, he said he wasn’t so sure because of language in CPW’s ‘Wolf-Livestock Conflict Minimization Program’ Producer Guide, which describes a Gray Wolf In the Act Permit, which CPW can issue retroactively to any rancher who takes a wolf in the act of attacking their livestock. So he asked a lawyer to look at the video and the definition, and the lawyer told Day if he shot a wolf and killed it, it could become “a major court case.”
“Because any normal individual could see that the intent of the wolves was to peel that calf off and eat it,” Day said. “Yet one person might look at that wolf and say it’s ‘in the act’ of attacking, and someone else might look at it and say it wasn’t.”
So he decided not to shoot any of the wolves in the video. Wolves are an endangered species and Day couldn’t be sure shooting one wouldn’t land him in federal prison. Even though “you watch that video and all the other footage we have on a regular-size screen for too long, and you don’t care about going to prison. These are our cows. They work for us. And they’re fighting for their calves’ lives all night,” he said.
A different perspective and video
Pete McBride is a Pitkin County resident, world-renowned outdoor photographer and member of the McBride family who owns Lost Marbles Ranch.
On July 2, on his Instagram account, he posted his own photo of a wolf.
Pete McBride placed multiple game cameras around the Lost Marbles Ranch and captured images of this wolf and several other animals over a few weeks. (Pete McBride, Special to The Colorado Sun)It’s an incredible shot, if you like the animals. The wolf appears to be trotting through willows. Sun glints off its thick, gray-brown coat. And its eyes are focused on something to the left of one of several cameras McBride had placed around the property.
The title of his post is “Wildlife and Wolves — Fact and Science vs. Fear and Fable.” And the wolf is just one animal he captured over a series of nights he said he spent on the ranch “with our producer’s herd.”
He found a lot more than wolves. Over five weeks a single camera captured a menagerie of animals including two wolves (possibly the same one), an elk, a coyote, the biggest black bear he’d ever seen, a moose that tried to eat the camera, a mountain lion and a bobcat. And what that showed, he says, is that wolves aren’t the only predators in the valley. Nor are they the only animals that prey on livestock.
Pete McBride, who nabbed this video of a bear doing bear things on his family ranch in Pitkin County, said the bear is just one of several species of wild animals that traverse the property, including bobcat, mountain lion, elk, moose, wolves and coyotes. (Pete McBride, Special to The Colorado Sun)Caption goes here.
He doesn’t have proof that the coyote, lion or bear killed calves; he just knows there’s been a lot of movement in the area. He wants to help both his neighbors and the wolves, so he calls CPW and lets them know when a wolf shows up on his camera. Some of the data uploads to his phone, some he has to collect in the field.
McBride said he hasn’t seen any wolf footage in the past two weeks. But “contrary to information that they only depredate on cattle, and, quote, ‘are all bad,'” he said, he has pictures of deer and elk kills. “Can I confirm it was a wolf? No,” he said. “But the same question goes back to the rancher. How do we confirm it’s a wolf? Because I’m doing everything to support them and accuracy.”
Within hours of posting his carousel of photos, 3,000 of McBride’s 808,000 followers had interacted with his post. That makes him happy, because he knows commissioner Jacober made a motion at the meeting June 11 for CPW to get rid of the Copper Creek pack, just as he knows how much distress and heartache the wolves have caused the ranchers, just as he wants the wolves to have a fair shake even though their existence has caused even him and his family distress.
Which is sort of how Day described the feeling, on June 28, he had after CPW’s DeWalt and Davis paid him and Cerveny a visit.
CPW comes calling
They’d come to discuss the challenges the Copper Creek pack had brought the ranchers. They “sat in the yard,” Day said, “and it was very cordial.”
But the main reason DeWalt and Davis came, he felt, was to remind them “of the 10(j) rule and how they can’t get rid of all the wolves,” Day said. “Mike and I appreciated their time, but after they left, we just sat there feeling like, is there ever going to be a solution?”
For a few days there was. On June 24, CPW dispatched two range riders to patrol Day’s and Cerveny’s ranches for 30 days. When the wolves came near the herd, they were hazed. The wolves responded by keeping their distance. And it was as Davis explained during a hearing about wolf reintroduction for Colorado legislature’s Water Resources and Agriculture Review Committee on July 2: The help was giving the ranchers and their employees a break from the 24/7 watch over the livestock they’d been keeping. They’d actually been able to sleep.
But on July 3, Day said his area wildlife manager called to tell him they were going to send the hazers and the range riders home. And on July 4, Day’s buddy, who lives on the Forest Service allotment where his cows spend their summer, called to ask if he was moving them “because we’ve got something going on here,” he said.
“Wolves ran a set of cows that was down in the bottom of a valley up a road, along a trail to Josh’s house,” Day said. “They ran them over a cattle guard and now one cow is crippled as hell. And there were a couple of calves who were laying on the side of the road that looked like they’d been shot dead, but they were just flat out exhausted.” He called his wildlife manager to tell him about the carnage, but on Saturday afternoon, he hadn’t heard back. He was planning to ride into the area where the wolves started chasing his cows and try to figure out what happened.
Idaho rancher Lowell Cerise talks to Pitkin and Garfield County ranchers in the shop of McCabe Ranch in Old Snowmass on June 11. (Kelsey Brunner, Special to the Colorado Sun)Meanwhile, up in Idaho, Cerise is thinking hard about taking on the buyout idea for the ranchers.
“It was talked about on the Diamond Moose allotment west of Salmon in about ’02,” he wrote in a text. “But this would be a new model allowing people to target donations to a specific region/issue instead of blindly sending yearly donations to some group and maybe not seeing direct results.”
The idea could have legs, Malone, the wolf advocate and sponsor of the new petition to tighten the reins on compensation requirements, said in an email. “BUT, the point of a public lands grazing lease buyout is to return the land and native wildlife to the land, not continue the grazing of an invasive species (cows and sheep) that has severely degraded land health and has simultaneously been instrumental in causing the decline of native wildlife.” Suzanne Asha Stone, another highly regarded wolf advocate who has seen several successful examples of ranchers and wolves coexisting, also likes that ranchers are putting their heads together to come up with an idea that doesn’t involve killing. But, she says, she’s heard them tossing around “half a billion dollars or more,”and “there are cheaper ways to address the problem, through range riders, livestock guardian dogs and innovative ways of raising cattle.”In Cerise’s vision, ranchers would offer a new kind of beef branded “wolf friendly,” he said.
“If the wolves eat half, it costs twice as much,” he added.
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