An Idaho rancher lost zero cattle to wolves in a decade. Can he help Colorado ranchers do the same?

GLENWOOD SPRINGS — A room full of ranchers stared at Glenn Elzinga as he told them one of the things he knows about living wolves at the Glenwood Springs library Jan. 27.

“I don’t really hope to provide any answers because I don’t have any. We’re still trying to figure that out. But guys, these wolves are a change agent. They’re gonna change your lives forever.” 

Elzinga owns a ranch in central Idaho. A group of wolf advocates had invited him to Colorado. 

He and his family — wife and seven daughters — run around 500 cattle on 46,000 acres over a 70-section range permit about 5 miles from the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness. It’s huge, empty country. A lot of sagebrush, scrub oak and willow. 

Elzinga said he didn’t see many wolves in his area before 2005. But in 1987, he said the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had determined Idaho had to have wolves “because we had a few remnant populations running around, some up in the northern Panhandle crawling in from British Columbia and Alberta.” 

“I had loggers working for me at the time. I used to be a timber guy, and they would come in and say, ‘I saw a wolf today.’” Elzinga said. “And I’d heard some of my neighbors up and down these ranges were having problems. Some were having big problems because these packs were located where they were in 2005.”

Elzinga has a warm delivery — talking about how his daughter, Melanie, who’d was there with him, looks so much better than he does on a horse. Or how the interns he hires — room and board only — to help on the range in the summer have serious body odor. That seemed to help some of the ranchers in the library room stretch their legs, lean back in their chairs. Which seemed important, because some of them have been going through hell. 

Most recently — just days earlier — a reporter had written a story saying some of the new wolves Colorado Parks and Wildlife trapped in British Columbia had been released on a ranch near Aspen. Armed guys in camo trespassed onto the property. The owners escorted them off and the reporter corrected the story. But things were still tense. A new sign had gone up: CATTLE RANCH. NO WOLVES. NO TRESPASSING.

And Elzinga’s message — aside from “now you’re in it” — was one CPW, which many ranchers distrusted, and wolf advocates, whom many despised, had been espousing. 

He said for a while, he and his family had managed to keep most of their mama cows and calves out of trouble. But then one day, “like a light switch” the wolves were onto them. The Elzingas lost around 35 animals over about eight years, Glenn said. “That was $6,600 in 2005, in today’s money, quite a bit more.” And the wolves had come into his valley “in the smack dab of winter,” because they follow game but fill in their diets with newborn calves when they’re available.   

“So Fish and Game and the other agencies put their heads together,” he said. “The state came up with a reimbursement plan. And it worked for the people who had cattle on their ranches, because they basically witnessed (wolves killing their livestock).”

But the Elzingas never got the money, “because we never had hope that we could get it.” 

They’d already moved their calving date to April into May. Then they shifted it to May into June. “It was partly because of these wolves and that was one of our decision points. We said, ‘Hey, we got to get these calves out of here, because these wolves are coming down our valley in the winter.’” 

And then he gave the ranchers the information they had come for, about how range riding — keeping people on horses with cattle while they’re grazing — had made it so he and his family haven’t lost a single cow or calf in a decade, which, of course, is the kind of outcome ranchers want. 

But the work it has taken the Elzingas to get there is a whole other part of their story. 

One of their problems was the country itself: 70 square miles, “and not a flat 70 square miles,” Glenn said.  “There’s 2,000-foot-deep canyons in the middle of the sucker” and the land climbs all the way up to alpine tundra. “But we had to do something that was going to enable us to stay out on that range and be proactive about continuing up there.” 

Up until then when they were out, they’d been “pushing their cows” instead of letting them graze. 

“Look at them,” he said, pointing to a photo in his presentation. “Almost every one of them has got their head up or just pointed outwards.They’re on a walking mission. We’re just pushing them across the hillside.” And because they were always walking, they weren’t eating well, so they weren’t gaining weight, which is what makes a rancher money. 

The Elzingas’ primary source of income is ranching. They need their cattle to generate dollars. So Glenn called his friend at The Nature Conservancy and they made up “a new thing called in-herding.”  

“You can use it or not. I don’t care,” Glenn told the ranchers. “It just coincided — these two ideas of intensive, because it’s super intensive, and intentional” targeted grazing. But the catch was “you’re living with the cattle 24/7.”

That’s right. Living with them. As in, for days at a time, putting up camps, corralling them within hot wire fencing, taking turns sleeping with one eye open, repeat.

The good news? It only takes an hour or so on each end of the day to set up a cook shack, two tents, “night ground” (where the cows stay) and two strands of hot wire, he said. 

The challenges? It’s hard to water cattle when you’re moving them like that. So the Elzingas use collapsible troughs — saying they aren’t that hard to set up. 

It’s hard physical labor. Glenn said if you’re over 50, forget it. But last summer, 700 kids applied to be interns. 

“They become this band of brothers and sisters up there. They come from all over the country, some from other countries. And you know what? They just want to learn,” he said. 

Some might get more than they bargained for. They’re on horseback 16 to 18 hours a day. 

“But we haven’t lost anything to wolves for 10 years now, not because of these kids’ body odor or anything like that,” he said, laughing. “We’re out there all the time, and that human presence on land gets wolves’ respect.”

The story continues with the benefits of grazing cattle like the Elzingas. How the changes they made led to changes on the land. How the riparian zones the cattle once pulverized bounced back. How cattle aren’t quite as picky anymore. They’ll eat woody plants, aspen and willow. And how they gain weight rather than lose it, which makes it hard to call what the Elzingas have done anything but a winner. 

But some of the ranchers at the Glenwood library said Colorado — even the Western Slope — isn’t as wild as central Idaho. And there were other things.

Josh Wamboldt, who runs an outfitting operation in Redstone said, “I think some of the info was helpful to ranchers but it also isn’t exactly feasible in this country. One of the biggest differences is the Elzingas don’t run cow-calf pairs and most ranchers here run nothing but pairs on the mountain. And Mr. Elzinga said even he wasn’t sure if it would work.”

Suzanne Asha Stone, co-founder of the Wood River Wolf Project in Idaho, said there are much more crowded places in the world, Italy being one of them, where wolves and humans coexist together peacefully. Other wolf advocates say Colorado’s public lands are plenty big for wolves.

Elzinga said he might try calving on the range this year. What he is sure of is that he no longer resents the wolves that forced him into making changes. 

“The coolest thing, I think, is that the interns, just like Melanie has, just like I have, realize that we’re part of a highly functioning ecosystem out there, and before, we were an agent acting against it,” he said. 

“I don’t know if the wolves respect us, but we respect them, and we have elk and deer grazing with our cattle. It’s turned  from this negative thing into a very positive thing. So a lot of people say, ‘Are you glad the wolves came?’ And you know what? I’m not. They really screwed things up. But I tell you what, they forced an issue and created a new paradigm for us.”