| Two
Wolves and a Road
The Moose Lake area of Mount Robson Provincial Park is a
great area to see wildlife in, but it isn't so great when you
want to actually stop and photograph because it has very heavy
traffic on it, including a lot of transport trucks.
In the spring of 2001, I was driving Highway 16 west of
Jasper towards Moose Lake when a black wolf ran across the road
in front of me and narrowly missed being hit by a big
semi. I pulled off immediately and stepped out with my big
lens and captured several shots of the wolf after it slowed down
and looked back at the road.
Then the strangest thing happened. The wolf actually
started to walk back towards me and then lay down in the deep
grass and howled. To my amazement, the howl was answered
by at least one wolf on the other side of me (the other side of
the road).
Afraid that I might be stressing out the wolf trying to cross
the road behind me, I jumped back into my car and pulled back a
few hundred metres, then set up my lens on my car window sill
and got ready for more wolves.
After a few minutes of waiting, a lone grey wolf sauntered
out into a field beside the road, then proceeded to walk right
up to the road ever so casually and crossed it right in front of
me. Not once the whole time did it even glance at me or
appear nervous.
The two wolves then joined together behind some shrubbery and
walked off towards the Moose River, leaving me with a few
'decent' photos and some fantastic memories!
Ever wonder how most 'great'
wolf shots are taken, the ones you see on calendars
and in books? The truth is that 99.9% of
published wolf images are zoo-kept game farm animals
that have been trained to 'run across that stream' or
'howl in the snowstorm'.
Wild wolves are actually extremely
difficult to photograph. This was my 32nd
encounter with wolves in the Rockies, yet just the
first time I got pictures to prove it!
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Black Wolf
Black Wolf Again
Grey Wolf
Crossing Highway 16
Two months after this encounter, I had the
extraordinary luck of coming across a pure white wolf
along the Icefields Parkway at Mosquito Creek and followed it
in my car for almost two kilometres as it walked along the
side of the road at 5 am in the morning.
I actually tried to take some pictures, but
the light was so low that I got fuzzy white-ish blurs instead
of wolf pictures!
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