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Home > Featured Stories > Community of Scholars > January 2008 > Welcome to the Pack - LiterallyWelcome to the Pack - Literally
It's something not everyone gets to see - and that I'll never forget.
NC State junior Michel Simon
By Tracey Peake, News Services
On Jan. 2, a group of 11 NC State University Honors Village residents arrived in Yellowstone National Park with a singular mission — to learn exactly what being a member of the pack is all about. If you're a real wolf, that is.
The students spent five days learning about wolves, their habits and their habitat as participants in a field seminar given by the Yellowstone Association. Juniors Michel Simon and Tim Trickel, along with freshman Alex Belt, were among the 11 students who flew into Bozeman, Mont., to brave freezing temperatures and several feet of snow for a chance to see their university's namesake in the wild.
The Yellowstone trip was offered as part of the Honors Village's effort to provide residents with unique experiential learning opportunities, and has proven to be extremely popular with NC State students.
"I had talked to my friends who went last year, so I was really excited to go," said Simon, a biochemistry and chemistry major. "Since I study biosciences, I wanted to experience a pristine environment and of course, I was excited about the wolves."
Nuclear engineering major Trickel and Belt, an aerospace and mechanical engineering major, were also intrigued by the environmental angle and hoped to see wolves - which, given the size of the valley where several of the wolf packs spend the winter — isn't always a guarantee.
"Last year, I think they only got to see one or two wolves," Trickel said. "We got to see three packs and another pack that's still forming and observe how the wolves interacted with one another."
The students participated in "wolf-spotting," scanning the surrounding hills for tiny moving dots that might be wolves, and then setting up telescopes to get a closer view. They quickly became adept at telling the difference between coyotes, "granite" wolves (wolf-shaped boulders that showed through the snow), and the real thing.
"We left every day at about 6:45 a.m., and stayed out until three or four in the afternoon," Belt said. "The closest we got to a pack was about 100 yards."
A tour guide accompanied the group through wolf territory, teaching them about wolf behavior and giving the wolf-watchers a history lesson about how wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park. From an initial group of about 30 wolves, the population has grown to around 150 over the last 10 years, which seems to be a number that the habitat can comfortably sustain.
Along the way, the group got to go ice skating outside, learned that snowshoes can only help so much when there are more than two feet of snow on the ground and discovered that bison prefer that you pass them instead of follow them when they travel on roads running through the park. The students also saw the den that belonged to the female ancestor of many of the wolves that were reintroduced to Yellowstone.
"One of the coolest parts of the trip was looking at a wolf through the scope, and seeing it howl, and then hearing the howl several seconds later," said Simon. "It's something not everyone gets to see — and that I'll never forget.
