Methow researchers marvel at WA wolverines’ existence — and elusiveness

HOLDEN VILLAGE, Chelan County — On a dreary March morning thousands of feet above Lake Chelan, wildlife photographer David Moskowitz checked his equipment before venturing into the land of wolverines with fellow backcountry skier Cal Waichler. Their 35-pound packs had saws, tree climbing gear, food, water and extra clothing.

“Beacons?” Moskowitz asked. Waichler’s emergency device came to life with a beep. It had snowed overnight and well into the morning when the outdoor adventurers smoothed synthetic skins over the bottoms of their tour skis. They would need the grippy strips to blaze a vertical trail in the frozen recesses of the North Cascades, where nothing seemingly stirs except a foreboding silence.

For the past seven years, Moskowitz and fellow Methow Valley conservationist Stephanie Williams have led a host of skilled volunteers and staffers like Waichler into the creamy white mountains to collect data about the largest member of the weasel family. They share their research with scientists from universities, government agencies and nonprofit groups to help promote wolverine recovery in Washington state. While grizzly bears and gray wolves are synonymous with Pacific Northwest wildlife conservation, little is known about wolverines because few biologists can reach their rugged, otherworldly homes. 

Williams and Moskowitz can handle the edge-of-the-world expanse and have backgrounds in science to analyze their findings. Williams, 42, is a respected mountain guide and avalanche forecaster; Moskowitz, 47, is a certified animal tracker and author of four wildlife books. In 2018, they launched a low-budget, grassroots scientific venture called the Cascades Wolverine Project to research and promote a mammal dependent on the deep spring snowpack that is diminishing at an accelerated rate.

“They are filling an important void that allows us to manage these populations and understand the changes of distribution. Nobody else is doing it,” says wolverine authority Matthew Scrafford from the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada.

THE RESEARCHERS started on parallel tracks years before meeting.

For Williams, it began in 2003, when she met and married Drew Lovell, then a guide at Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in southeastern Alaska. Lovell, who has a degree in geology, taught his wife how to identify winter wildlife in the treeless Alaskan terrain. 

Seeing the telltale five-toe tracks for the first time piqued Williams’ curiosity about a carnivore that resembles a small bear. “That is a moment, if you’re in the right state of mind, to be respectful of something mind-blowing,” she says in a phone interview. “Here is an animal behaving like us, traveling through the mountains. What are they up to? Where’s the food?”  

Williams returned to school at age 29 to find answers. She attended Wenatchee Valley College while living near Leavenworth in a yurt without electricity or running water. Then Lovell got a job forecasting avalanches for the Idaho Department of Transportation. Williams took a semester off to raft in the Grand Canyon, where she met Moskowitz. Then Williams transferred to Boise State University to earn a degree in biological sciences. After graduating in 2014, she worked three summers on a North Cascades wolverine research crew affiliated with the Woodland Park Zoo.

Around the time the study ended because of a lack of funding, Moskowitz asked Williams to help him track caribou in British Columbia for a photography book. Williams, Moskowitz and another friend got caught in a severe storm during the weeklong misadventure. They spent hours huddled in a tent where Williams vented about how little funding wolverine research received. Coincidentally, Moskowitz previously had volunteered for a Conservation Northwest wolverine field study. 

They hatched a scheme in the sagging shelter: Combine Moskowitz’s photography with Williams’ backcountry fieldwork to elevate wolverines’ profile.

THE TIPPING POINT came that October, when Williams spoke about the paucity of wolverine research at the 2017 Northwest Snow and Avalanche Workshop in Seattle. After the speech, a man named Nick March approached Williams, asking her how much money she needed to start the project. “I blurted out a figure, and he said, ‘You got it. I’m with Patagonia,’ ” Williams says. 

The Southern California outdoor clothier dedicates 1% of its sales to environmental causes. March says Patagonia likes to support small, focused groups that make direct contributions. “They are this wild intersection of sport, community and conservation efforts,” he says of Williams and Moskowitz. “They embody the whole mountain life and conservation ideals.” 

March eventually joined the effort as a volunteer in charge of the North Fork Nooksack Watershed monitoring station below the flank of Mount Baker. 

The first wolverine Williams and Moskowitz captured on camera highlighted the possibilities. Lovell, who often serves as a field assistant, attached a game camera and a deer leg collected from roadkill to his backpack while heading out on a guiding job near Holden Village, a Lutheran-run retreat tucked below the Glacier Peak Wilderness. He recalls hastily mounting the camera to a tree and “somewhat sloppily” hanging the leg. It lured a wolverine to the area.

THE PARTNERS HAVE not registered their group as a charitable organization. Williams and Moskowitz instead rely on the nonprofit Conservation Northwest of Seattle and Home Range Wildlife Research of Winthrop to handle donations and grants. While Patagonia is the largest contributor, the bulk of funding comes from individual donations.

“None of us work full-time,” says Williams, who now lives in Twisp. “We have many things we’re juggling. No one is salaried. We’re not making money. We just care about this.” 

Lovell, 50, sees the future of field science in their work. “More nimble and less encumbered by red tape and rules and parameters of risk management,” he says. “We all realized pretty early on that with a government agency, it would be hard to do what we’re doing.”

Moskowitz and Williams have brought attention to wolverines’ plight through the 2021 short documentary, “Finding Gulo,” and by giving public presentations across the state about the value of their research.

Their database has a quarter-million images, including 1,833 photos of wolverines, from 10,000 sampling days. Put another way: They get a wolverine image fewer than 1% of the time the remote trail cameras operate.

MOSKOWITZ SAYS THE the photos have confirmed a minimum of six individual wolverines since starting the project. The statistics help explain why he has never seen a wolverine in the wild despite spending so much time monitoring them. Williams has seen two, but none in the North Cascades.

The work has inspired the public to send in more than 300 observation reports, usually animal tracks. The group vets each submission for accuracy. Its website also has a guide to teach people how to identify tracks. Wolverines have five toes, whereas lynx and wolves have four. Wolverines also have sharp, semi-retractable claws that effectively dig into snow and serve as microspikes to ascend icy ridges. 

Moskowitz says fostering public involvement is vital to advancing wolverine restoration. Those who help collect data tend to accept land management decisions that affect them, he says.

Some people have become skeptical of complex modalities, such as using genetic sampling to study wolverines. Scientific reports are a “black box for the public” trying to judge their reliability, says Moskowitz, who earned a degree in Environmental Studies and Outdoor Education from Prescott (Ariz.) College.

The Cascades Wolverine Project has simplified how to read its data. “This is a picture of a wolverine,” Moskowitz says. “It was taken by a hiker just like you. 

“Any questions?”

JUST ONE: Why are wolverines called gulo gulo? Moskowitz says science got it wrong with the Latin name that translates to the gluttonous glutton. “This is a classic example of humans projecting things onto another creature,” he says. “Here we have a species that lives in the remote, desolate landscape, surviving on animals killed in avalanches and gut piles left behind by hunters and scraps left over by other animals. Can survive with almost no footprint on the landscape. And we’re calling them the glutton?”

Wolverines, called skunk bears by some and mountain devils by others, are long-distance scavengers who search for carrion of deer, elk and mountain goats. In the right snowy conditions, they can take down caribou and even moose, despite weighing no more than 40 pounds. Reports abound of wolverines chasing bears and cougars off fallen prey, fueling their outsized reputations.

The mammal never produced great numbers in North America but once populated more of the Cascades and the Rockies. Fur trapping and poison baiting targeting wolves and other carnivores decimated their ranks by the early 1900s. About 300 animals remain in the Lower 48 states, mostly in northern Idaho and Montana. The Cascades represent the southernmost extent of viable habitat, with an estimated 30 to 40 wolverines living in Washington state.

In late November, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced it had designated wolverines in the Lower 48 states as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The ruling highlighted a decades-old conflict over managing a carnivore with no history of threatening people or livestock. Some Idahoans and Montanans express concern about losing access to backcountry recreation trails to protect the animals’ dens. More broadly, the ruling has become a symbol for fiercely independent states distrustful of federal policy. 

Former Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, now a Republican congressman from Montana, said last year in a statement, “Once again, the Biden administration is trying to control Montana, and I won’t stand for it.” In January, Montana’s Fish, Wildlife & Parks department filed a notice of intention to sue the federal government over the policy change.

The Washington State Snowmobile Association has taken a different approach. Hans Brubaker of Bellingham, co-chair of the land use committee, says the group wants to have a say in trail access policy decisions. However, he considers a healthy wolverine population integral to the wilderness snowmobilers hope to preserve.

Dave Werntz, Science and Conservation director at Conservation Northwest, says the Cascades Wolverine Project brings awareness of how backcountry recreation might impact wolverines. “They give them clear steps” on how to avoid disturbing the animals, he says. “It’s more effective than policy or regulation. It is speaking directly to people.” 

OVER 2½ DAYS last month, Moskowitz and Waichler, 26, completed the final field inspection of winter near Holden Village. Williams could not join them; she was in Norway on a guiding trip.

After a two-hour ferry ride up Lake Chelan and another 45 minutes on a yellow school bus nicknamed “Honey,” we reached the icy village, where employees greeted us by waving flags. We dropped off our bags, ate soup and then headed to a monitoring site over an undulating hillside drizzled with light snow. 

The project currently has 20 research stations with remote trail cameras mostly in the Chelan and Methow watersheds of the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest. The crew spends about 20 days each winter trekking through deep snowbeds on Nordic skis or in snowmobiles to reach the stations.

On the way to check the first monitoring site, Moskowitz and Waichler identified Pacific marten tracks that inspired hopes of seeing signs of wolverines.

We reached the rudimentary forest studio, where two Bushnell trail cameras, in plastic bark camouflage housings, had been lashed to adjacent pines. A deer’s head dangled from metal cables suspended above the snow. The meat comes from roadkill in the Methow Valley. Moskowitz loosened the cables so Waichler could secure a new piece to the line. She dabbed the chunk with Craven’s Gusto, a rank trappers’ brew of skunk, castor and muskrat musk. “Stinky,” she announces. They lifted the lure beyond the reach of practiced scavengers who can smell a good meal buried 20 feet in the snow. 

A wooden platform with eight gun brush hair snags — cylindrical, wire-bristled tools used to clean gun chambers — hung from a pine facing the motion cameras. The wolverines deftly climb up, often standing on their hind legs, to try to reach the morsel. 

It makes for good theater most of the time. Moskowitz recalls once having a deer head in the center of consecutive frames before it suddenly disappeared. “Even if it just floated away, it should have triggered the camera, right?” he says. “It’s just gone. Something came in and took it, and no photos were taken.” Meanwhile, snowflakes triggered the camera to click.

THEIR METHOD DOCUMENTS wolverine activity without disturbing them. The crew purposely avoids invasive techniques such as radio-tracking and live traps. They also extract DNA samples animals leave when rubbing against the gun brushes. The National Genomics Center for Wildlife and Fish Conservation in Montana analyzes the specimens.  

Waichler, who joined the project in 2021 while a senior at Colby College in Maine, examined the cameras for the latest data. The Winthrop printmaker and environmental scientist found nothing. Waichler and Moskowitz still had a station to check 1,500 feet higher in the mountains. Just maybe …

The next morning, the trail cams revealed photos of snow hares, martens and other winter inhabitants. But gulo remained as elusive as ever. Not a whiff of a wolverine after carving a steep trail through milkshakelike snow. 

Later, at our Holden Village chalet, Moskowitz signaled me to his laptop on the kitchen table. He pointed to the screen, where the eyes of wolverines glowed at me. The photos, taken at the end of January, were from the station they just visited.

They’re still out there somewhere. Really they are.