kaynine35's Identifications

Was lucky enough to have an encounter I'll never forget while leaving AWR just after sunset. While slowly driving past a road that was gated off, I noticed some slight movement about 100 yards past the gate. I pulled out my binoculars and was delighted to see the bright orange radio collar I had been searching for for the past three days. Desperate to snap a picture, I got out of my car and attempted to balance my binoculars on the hood of my car as a makeshift scope/distance lens for my camera. After about two minutes of struggling and over 100 blurry photos of nothing, I managed to snap the first slide seen here. During this balancing act, it was lost on me that I had to keep zooming my camera out, not in, as the wolf moved closer and closer. I started hearing a high-pitched yapping noise I didn't initially attribute to the wolf and finally looked up to see how close the wolf had gotten. There were about 20 yards, a gate, and my car between me and the wolf, and it was still approaching. The sun had fully set about 20 minutes prior and it was getting dark quickly so I was heavily relying on the night vision functionality of my outdated, point-and-shoot camera. I caught the gleam of the wolf's eyes as it stared me down from about 10 yards away and can safely say I've never felt a feeling quite like that. I heard more high-pitched yapping to my left and saw a second set of eyes staring me down from about 15 yards out on an adjacent perpendicular road. I didn't notice at the time due to the darkness, but my camera caught another wolf even further off in the distance, probably about 30 yards out. It was at this point I heard even more yapping from even further left and turned to see (what I thought to be) a third wolf 10 yards away, on the same road as me, with no barriers between us. And in that instant, my camera died. In a testament to the night vision mode on my camera, the pictures I captured don't do it justice just how dark things were. The car was off and I had left my phone and flashlight in the car in my haste to snap a picture so once my camera went out, I couldn't even make out the silhouette of the wolf right in front of me. This was pretty chilling as you can imagine, so I quickly got back into my car and flicked the headlights on just in time to catch the wolf on my road jogging off to join the others. Surreal experience.

Summary: four total wolves seen and heard calling, at least two of which wearing radio collars