In the timbers above Cle Elum, the wolves are running 'round.
In fairy tales and Grateful Dead songs, wolves are most often symbolic of death, destruction or murder. But irony rules, destruction and murder aren't what they seem, and wolves are symbolic of restoration and are victims, both real and potential.
No one is quite sure how the wolves found Cle Elum, but you can find it pretty easily. It's 90 miles east of Seattle, just off Interstate 90, on the east (dry) side of the Cascade Mountains.
Cle Elum, like much of north central Washington, wasn't settled until the last two decades of the 19th century. There were two basic reasons for settling north central Washington back then: gold and railroads.
The Blewett Pass area, just north of Cle Elum, had a small gold rush, but Cle Elum had three things that every 19th century railroad wanted: location, timber and coal. The way across the Cascades in that part of the state now is through Snoqualmie Pass, but that route was first developed in the early 20th century to serve cars on the "Sunset Highway".
In the 1880s, the route the Northern Pacific took was through Stampede Pass - intially a tortuous set of switchbacks up one side and down the other, but by 1888, a tunnel was completed underneath Stampede Pass. The pass, while south of the current I-90 and Cle Elum, was close to the town.
The area around Cle Elum was forested back then, with plenty of timber for building tunnels or ties for laying tracks. Or timbers for the Blewett mines and lumber to build mills, houses and stores. Cle Elum soon had the largest lumber mill in eastern WA, turning out 40,000 board feet of lumber daily.
Even before the railroad went over Stampede Pass, huge coal deposits were discovered around Cle Elum, and also 4 or 5 miles to the west around the equally new town of Roslyn. Some of you have been to Roslyn, as often as once a week, thinking you were in Alaska instead -- Cicely, Alaska, the setting for the TV series Northern Exposure. Roslyn was the set for the show - not where the set was, but the town itself was the set, along with some nearby forest and streams. The Brick actually exists and is the oldest still-operating tavern in WA State, and has great food and atmosphere.
In the 1920s, when coal mining and railroading were at their peak in the area, population in both towns was more than double what it is today. By 1960, though, timber and coal declined, although estimates are that as much as 80% of the coal deposits remain.
Last week, an article in the Seattle Times confirmed the existence of a wolf pack near Cle Elum:
It's not exactly where the experts thought wolves would show up next.
But state biologists confirmed Tuesday that a new pack of gray wolves has taken up residence in Washington state — this time not far from Cle Elum, about 90 miles east of Seattle.
The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife recently trapped one of the animals near the Teanaway River and took tissue and hair samples. DNA tests confirmed the animal is a female gray wolf and had been lactating, indicating she recently gave birth to pups.
While individual wolves may have been spotted in that area for years, it's the first documented evidence that an entire pack has returned to Kittitas County since wolves were exterminated in the first half of the 20th century.
These aren't introduced wolves, as in Yellowstone. These wolves just showed up around the Teanaway River north of Cle Elum and decided to stay and raise a family. There are a couple of likely sources for these wolves - either from the north from British Columbia or from another WA pack in the Methow Valley, about 100 miles north. Or from back east, around the Yellowstone area. My vote is from the north - there are only two east-west highways (WA 20, which is closed in winter, and US 2) crossing the state in the 125 or so miles between the Canadian border and Cle Elum, and millions of acres of forest and wilderness. From the east, the wolves would have to cross more roads, wheat fields and possibly even desert, with a lot more options for human sightings and contact.
But here's the first irony - these wolves, the symbol of wildness, have settled in a roaded area, frequented by hunters, probably a mix of National Forest and smaller private holdings left over from early settlement, instead of in the thousands of acres of wilderness or National Park within a hundred mile radius of their current location. An area that had been exploited by the twin anathemas of environmentalists - mining and logging. Probably because wolves like to eat.
One of the most beautiful things I've ever seen was on Swauk Prairie, just a few miles north of Cle Elum and a few miles east of the wolves domain. I came down a hill and around a curve on WA 970 on a frosty morning around 7AM and to my right was an open field with a drainage ditch down the middle. Lined up along the ditch, in single file, evenly spaced, were at least 20 bull elk, antlers up and steam issuing from their nostrils. I pulled to the shoulder and watched them for 10 minutes or more - they never moved.
The area is largely unsettled because the extractive industries that supported population growth have moved on. The areas exploited have had years to recover and I know there has been restoration done in some of the area, including thinning, and possibly some logging. One of the things you notice in wilderness areas in WA - the Pasayten or Glacier Peak, for example - is how overgrown and dense they are in a lot of places. Deer and elk like open areas and young, new growth to browse, not dense forest and brush. Wolves like deer and elk.
So of our greatest environmental fears - mining and logging - 80% of the coal is still in the ground around Cle Elum, and the forest grew back. Certainly this happened unintentionally, but as a resource management practice it seems to make sense to not extract 100% of a viable mineral resource, or to design timber harvests so that restoration and regrowth are not only guaranteed, but part of the extraction process. It seems that's "sustainability" and it seems wolves - and the deer and elk they depend on - could co-exist with that. But no major organization is advocating that kind of approach. One side wants to maximize exploitation, the other side to ban it altogether. One wants to murder habitat out of greed, the other via neglect and fear. And the side that most of us think is the "good guys" completely ignores the biggest threat to wolf survival in the Cle Elum area.
Because in addition to the new wolf community above Cle Elum, there's another community springing up between Cle Elum and Roslyn - Suncadia.
When completed, the $1 billion project will feature a mountain lodge with convention center facilities, village center with restaurants and shops, a mountain springs themed spa, a sports center with indoor and outdoor swimming pools, an outdoor venue amphitheater/lake with winter ice skating, trails and recreational areas, 2,000 residential units, and three golf courses. Two of the golf courses have been completed as of 2006.
The land is former Plum Creek Timber forest, sold to the Suncadia developers, but formerly used to provide timber to sawmills and exist as wildlife habitat, but now more valuable as real estate. Plum Creek was the successor to the Northern Pacific's 19th century land grants, provided by the government as incentive to build the railroad. Plum Creek remains that largest land owner in the US, with similar development plans in other areas, as far from the Cle Elum wolf pack as Maine.
Two fucking golf courses - do you know how much water those require, and how dry the east side of the Cascades is? 2,000 residential units, each with its own well. Some are already on the market - as large as over 5000 sq ft with a tag of $3 million. And where do wolves fit in in all of this? Not very well, when someone's poodle ends up as a wolf snack. We need timber for building homes, for furniture and for other uses. Sadly, we still need coal and are doing little to eliminate that need. But we don't need to suburbanize or gentrify more wild areas - something which denies their use for habitat or renewable resource production for generations. It's difficult to generate electricity or build homes from golf courses, even if you can afford the water to keep them green.
Of course they've set aside 1,200 acres - about 2 sq miles - as "open space". The minimum range for a wolf pack is about 14 square miles.
Here's resource depletion, water consumption, timber cutting and habitat destruction on a grand scale, and nobody objects. Murdering the land, maybe murdering the wolves if they stray too close. Wolf packs can range 25-30 miles in a day - much farther than their distance from Suncadia now, although there's a lot of open country in the other directions.
There are now 4 verified wolf packs in WA State, all spontaneous. Or there were. I mentioned the Methow (pronounced MET-how) pack in passing earlier. This pack was near Twisp, WA, also in National Forest/privately held land, but not in wilderness. Unfortunately, wolves were the victims and not the murderers in this case too.
Members of a Methow Valley ranching family have been charged in the killing of several endangered gray wolves and the attempt to illegally mail at least one of the pelts to Canada in a bloody box.
A federal grand jury Tuesday handed up a 12-count indictment that accuses Bill White and his son Tom White, of the Twisp area in Okanogan County, of poaching at least two wolves and then conspiring with Tom's wife, Erin White, to smuggle one of the pelts to an acquaintance in Alberta. The men may have killed another three of the endangered species, according to the indictment.
The Twisp area is farther from Seattle, less populated than the Cle Elum area, and less populated with the kind of people who buy 5000 sq ft homes for $3 million and tend to fear anything wilder than faux ranch decor, and wolves met an evil end there. It's all a game of chance, but the wolves are cutting the deck, showing the queen of spades, and it appears the cards are all the same anywhere.