The Wolverine Way
After a two-week vacation, I returned to find that the snow had decided to offer a sweet welcome home. So much so that my neighbor called, concerned about which direction we left our snowblower facing. A concern that only comes with experience, one could surmise. Snow flew over the front of our Eagle on the flight home, plowing it’s way into the driveway that night. We woke up to 8 more inches and another foot has dumped since then. And it’s still snowing. Yes! Winter seems here to stay.
I love reading about Larry’s childhood experiences of winter in the North Fork. Such a different way and day of doing things. It’s like time just moved at a different pace, yet, one small but critical detail of winter is true to this day: cooperative weather conditions make life easier.
And, although I have no childhood memories of the North Fork, a more recent historical account of life and weather I can offer is from the earlier part of the last decade when a handful of hardy volunteers from the Flathead participated in a wolverine research project in the Park. By participated, I mean they would trek into the backcountry of Glacier sledding in a bloody, road killed deer leg or two, beaver musk, (a gooey concoction of beaver glands and unknowns that wreaked of death and juicy skunks guts that drove members of the weasel family wild), and enough supplies to survive for a couple of nights in a patrol cabin. Regardless of the conditions. At the Quartz patrol cabin, one of the volunteers hung their half and half over the wood stove to thaw from the frigid trip in. It hung just 8 inches above the stove all night and never liquefied. Predictable, I suppose, since you could see daylight between the logs of the walls and it was 20 below zero outside.
Timely backcountry travel was necessary, though, whether it was rainy, sticky and slushy or well below zero. There was only a certain window of time we had to collect hair samples because the methodology for the project required a wide-open space, ideally a frozen lake. On it, a pole over 6 feet tall was augured into the ice, the deer leg (smothered in Beaver Musk) drilled perpendicularly to the top of it and barbed wire strung from top to bottom like a barbershop pole. It needed to be tall enough so wolves and mountain lions couldn’t reach the fast food delivery and just perfect for a wolverine to climb up it and chomp, snagging a hair sample on the way. On Quartz Lake, where wolverine hair was positively collected, volunteers would bring a new leg every two weeks, occasionally finding the previous deer leg crushed into shrapnel, no meat or marrow to spare. Chomp, chomp, chomp.
All sorts of critters participated in the project, too. Wolves were often found lounging on Bowman Lake if it was a sunny, 20-degree day. Ideal travel conditions. Once, after canoeing across the North Fork River on a rainy, wet day, we slowly slogged into the Logging Lake patrol cabin and were greeted by a frisky pine marten. He was shivering with excitement, nostrils filled with a stream of scent from that warm, bloody deer leg. We couldn’t open the door of the cabin at night without a broom in hand to effectively shoo it away. I dreamed of cuddling up with that sweet, little cat-like creature in my sleeping bag. So cute.
When that project wrapped up, 42 individual wolverines were identified in the Park. It was followed by a year or two of searching for fishers. No fishers were found. It’s been a while since funding has allowed anymore research to happen in the Park. Only a few studies continue in North America. One is called Wolverine Watch. They are studying wolverine populations in southeastern B.C. and southwestern Alberta. If you have any interest in these small, but capable critters, check it out! What do you think?
Flannery Coats writes about adventures in the North Fork for the Hungry Horse News.