An elk carcass on the National Elk Refuge near Jackson, Wyoming. (Dante Filpula Ankney / KHOL)
Over a million elk roam North America today, from California to North Carolina and up into Canada. They are adaptable and resilient animals with the ability to make due in the high alpine, low deserts and even coastal rainforests.
But that six-figure number is only a fraction of what the population once was pre-European colonization, according to Bruce Smith, a wildlife biologist who managed elk for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Jackson, Wyoming for over two decades.
“The Greater Yellowstone area was really the last stronghold for elk in the early 1900s, when they'd been reduced continent-wide from about 10 million down to 50,000,” Bruce said.
It’s around that time, in 1912, that an act of Congress established the National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole to preserve the dwindling population. And it did, playing its part alongside the work of early conservationists.
Today, Colorado boasts the most elk in the world according to their state game agency and it's thanks to Wyoming. Healthy elk from Jackson Hole were introduced into Colorado. But elk in Jackson Hole today face a new threat: an untreatable, highly transmissible, always fatal brain disease called Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD).
The Disease Expert
I met Amy Girard just outside the refuge on a frosty December morning. A light snowfall had formed a thin crust across the dull yellow grassland. I jumped into her muddied white pickup, and I mean that literally, avoiding a broken running board attached by a single point on the bottom of the vehicle.
It was the last day of the hunting season and the last chance for many hunters in the area to fill any unused tags. Hunting is one of the best tools game managers like Amy use to keep populations healthy, like the thousands of elk in the Jackson Herd.
As we drove the highway alongside the western edge of the refuge, she outlined the day.
“So my role today is to continue to check head barrels,” the wildlife biologist said. “We have five different hunter access areas where they can drop heads, so we’ll run by those and potentially talk to hunters, see if they are seeing any elk, if they have any elk down.it would be great if we could collect samples in the field.”
Head barrels are brown metal bins, like a post office drop box, where hunters who harvest an elk on the refuge are required to dump its disembodied head. There are a couple of barrels at five different spots scattered across the approximately 40-square-mile preserve and we plan to visit each.
An important, though gruesome part of Amy’s daily rounds is collecting these heads during the hunting season.
To my disappointment and Amy’s delight, she didn’t expect many that day. Sparse early-season snow meant there was plenty of green for elk to eat up in the neighboring hills and mountains. Most had yet to come down from the surrounding national forest or Grand Teton National Park. In a matter of weeks, as snow drifts piled up, the refuge filled with thousands of light brown dots, the Jackson Herd’s home for the next five months.
“We didn’t get any new snow so I don’t think there is a lot of elk movement onto the refuge so it might be a little slow today,” Amy said.
We parked on gravel near the first head barrels on the northern edge of the refuge where it borders the national park. The gate rattled open and then she lifted the hatch on both barrels.
“Sounds empty,” she said. “Nothing. Two empty barrels.”
But we still had all day and I still had hope.
The 45-year-old has bounced around jobs in her 18 years in Jackson but she’s never lost sight of this job: a wildlife biologist on the National Elk Refuge.
You can tell she enjoys it. Her frequent laughs throughout the day ended in a bright white smile that sent wrinkles across her otherwise young face. Her steely blue eyes resembled the same hues as the snow-capped Teton Range.
She joined the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service three years ago as one of the newest members of a small team that manages not only elk but nearly 200 other species. From bighorn sheep and gray wolves, to bald eagles and native cutthroat trout, to the porcupines and bees that she’s particularly fond of.
“This is my dream job,” she said. “This is really where I want to be. I mean, obviously, we have the amazing views and it's an awesome location.”
PHOTO OF AMY
Amy doesn’t just work on the refuge, she lives there, in an over century-old homestead. The Miller House at the southern edge of the Refuge is named after the first superintendent of the then-Teton National Forest and Jackson’s first female mayor.
The log home is also where Jackson held its first election. It served as a post office, a museum and the refuge’s headquarters at one point. Now, it’s employee housing, where Amy is raising her two daughters, Astoria and Erolin. She’s seen wolves chase the Jackson Herd from her back door and has mistaken the yips of elk as the barking of her Australian shepherd, Mage.
But there are downsides.
Fly traps hang year-round in each window. Amy and her daughters avoid the creaky basement that “is straight out of a horror movie.” A steady draft seemingly moves straight through the place every day and the pest problem, she said, is likely only suitable for a biologist such as herself.
All in all, living and working on the refuge is still a privilege.
“Every day is like, I don't know what I'm going to find out here. I don't know what I'm going to see,” Amy said. It keeps it really, really interesting. It's just a very engaging place and I don't really want to be anywhere else.”
A large part of Amy’s responsibilities is to monitor, track and prevent what’s often impossible to see until it’s too late.
“What I'm most passionate about is wildlife disease,” Amy said. “This is kind of like where I get to be in my element, dealing with chronic wasting disease and the other diseases that we just are dealing with on a day-to-day occurrence on the refuge. Whether it's elk or pronghorn or bison or bighorn sheep, they all have potential issues.”
What I’m most interested in, and why I spent the day with her looking for fleshy, raw, bloodied elk heads is to learn about chronic wasting disease. The brain disease has been moving through deer, elk and moose across the West for decades. It spreads quickly and with no known treatment, it kills its host 100 percent of the time.
Elk with CWD can become skinny, lethargic, excessively salivating, droopy-eared shells of their prior selves. Humans hunt deer, elk and moose for meat all over the West, some likely having consumed an infected ungulate. But we can’t contract CWD, at least there’s been no documented case and studies have found no evidence humans are at risk. Still, scientists are studying the possibility.
The disease is most prevalent and well-documented in the state’s mule deer herds. I wanted to know how quickly it’s spreading and the impact if the disease takes hold through the area’s six prized elk herds.
Specifically, the Jackson Herd, one of the largest in the world. They’re seen as a keystone species that keeps this ecosystem in balance and a source of tourism that props up Jackson’s economy. Experts predict that if it becomes prevalent in just seven percent of the herd, carcasses will begin turning up as the population falls.
Although a case has never been detected on the refuge, it is in the herd. One case was confirmed in 2020, only it was outside the refuge boundaries where elk roam in summer. Scientists think less than one percent of the herd is infected but it’s a hard number to pin down.
The disease can lie dormant in elk and on the landscape for years and in order to test elk for the disease, they have to be dead. Remember the barrels of heads? That’s one way Amy checks for cases.
While we’re standing on federal land called a “refuge,” experts say what’s happening here and in 21 other spots around the state is likely to make elk much sicker.
In the winter, the refuge is one of the 22 places in Wyoming where elk actually get fed.
(Courtesy / WGFD)
Experts have said this practice of feeding is the big problem. Loads of alfalfa pellets and hay bring elk into too close of contact with each other, where the disease can more easily spread. Just this past winter, the first case was confirmed on a feedground south of Jackson, followed shortly after by cases on three other feedgrounds even closer to the refuge.
It's banging on the gates and rattling its fences, if not already inside the refuge.
“Disease is definitely the biggest threat once chronic wasting disease comes in and really takes hold,” Amy said. “We have very few tools to really manage it and to help increase the resilience of the herd. We can now keep prevalence as low as possible, the best shot we have moving forward.”
Amy and I slid back into our seats in her truck at the first head barrels. We had four more sites and were now on our way to the next.
As we traveled across the flat grassland spattered with sage and over the creek that snaked through the foreground of the world-famous Tetons, it was hard not to imagine how long the refuge could keep its status as exactly that: a refuge for elk.
The Elk Historian
Though they’ve never met, Bruce Smith is familiar with Amy’s work.
Bruce was working on the refuge when wasting disease surveillance began. He’s managed elk here for over two decades and spent three decades as a wildlife biologist. He’s written two books about the Jackson Herd and their management in Western Wyoming.
“Working with the elk herd and, more broadly, in Jackson was really a highlight of my career. It's such a special part of the Greater Yellowstone area ecosystem, which is a very special part of the world,” Bruce said. “It just has world-class scenery, recreation and of course, the fisheries and the wildlife [are] just almost unsurpassed in the lower 48 states.”
The National Elk Refuge was established nearly 15 years before Grand Teton National Park and two years before the town of Jackson incorporated. It’s a unique place. It’s one of the first wildlife refuges nationwide — part of a system of 570 today — started by President Theodore Roosevelt in the early 1900’s. To the north and west, it’s bordered by Grand Teton National Park; to the east, the Bridger Teton National Forest; and south, the town of Jackson.
Around the turn of the 20th century, the elk population throughout North America, including here, dwindled to a fraction of what it was before European colonization. That was due to overhunting and the development of towns and fields for livestock. This cut off migration routes that had existed for thousands of years.
So elk starved, struggling to find suitable habitat.
“There were thousands of elk that had traditionally migrated, except maybe in very mild winters out of Jackson Hole,” Bruce said. “Historic migration routes to the Red Desert and the Little Colorado Desert, Green River Basin, sometimes going as much as 150 miles. They would migrate down there because that's windblown country, it gets less snow. The foraging was so much easier for those animals.”
A particularly bad winter was revealed after the earth thawed in the spring of 1909. A journal from a resident, now in the Jackson Hole History Museum, notes that it was possible to walk two miles on the backs of elk carcasses without ever touching the ground. The elk that were still standing wandered into town for scraps and into ranchers’ fields to dine on hay put out for their cattle. Something had to be done.
“That's when the state of Wyoming, in 1909, started pitching hay to the elk,” Bruce said. The reason they did that was twofold: one, to keep them away from all livestock operations, the haystacks and feedlines. Second, it was to save more elk from winter starvation. “That just kept getting repeated and repeated became tradition, and tradition became culture in Jackson Hole,” he said.
That culture is alive today and still strikes at the hearts of many in the valley.
With the first steps of conservation, populations rebounded nationwide, but not quite to the levels of pre-European colonization, since the habitat that cradled those elk no longer existed.
These days, despite some recent rough years, members of the Jackson Herd are still within what the state calls a healthy range, just below 10,000, though state game managers still want a bit more.
But it’s artificial. That 10,000 number is an inflated population, propped up by the elk’s easy dinners. Only in Wyoming are elk fed through a state program like this.
The feeding began in good faith, according to Bruce.
“My impression is they valued the elk because they did provide an economic benefit,” he said. “Many of the ranchers were also outfitters and many of the people that weren't still hunted elk for meat, subsistence sort of thing. And I think people just took pride in having this wonderful elk herd here.”
Feeding has left elk dependent. They are conditioned to sit tight through Jackson Hole’s winters. The valley sits at around 6,000 feet. At least historically, winter brings loads of snow for nearly half the year and weeks that don’t see temperatures warmer than -10 degrees Fahrenheit.
“And as long as they get feed sometime there, they're going to come back,” Bruce said. “These are long-lived animals. They have good memories. They bring their calves with them and teach them that. And until you break a link [where] they come and they don't find anything to eat there in terms of hay, nothing's going to change.”
For Bruce and other game managers, it’s not a matter of if the disease will be detected on the refuge.
“It's going to happen. And I say that because now, CWD has spread from Colorado and Wyoming across 36 states and four Canadian provinces. It's sort of a slow-moving epidemic that is relentless,” Bruce said.
A Day In the Life
Amy and I bounce along rutted roads to our next set of head barrels.
“All right, what do you think? Is head barrel check number three going to pay off for us?” I asked.
“It’s highly unlikely,” Amy said.
We passed long metal domes that looked like a grainery bin laid on its side, used to hold the alfalfa pellets that will feed elk through winter.
As she predicted, we’re coming up empty-headed.
She was looking not only inside the barrels, but also for elk that had died naturally. Occasionally, she’d park the truck, pull her binoculars from the backseat and stick her head out the window to scan for signs of a carcass. Elk will often wander to the warmth of a gulley, as they feel themselves dying.
“A big portion of my job in the winter is documenting all mortalities that happen across the refuge,” Amy said, “I try to key on what's happening with scavengers and birds in particular. The ravens are like my go-to clues for what's really happening on the ground. I'm always looking for signs of bird activity, either if they're grouped in larger numbers in trees or even on the ground. I try to key in on those spots and then a lot of times they're trying to tell me. That's what I'm looking for so that I know that something's dead.”
Here, birds are friends, she said.
“Do you think they're aware of this working relationship?” I asked.
“That's a really good question,” Amy said. “Ravens are so smart, I assume that they eventually do learn my vehicle. I do try to provide some benefit to them. I'm hoping that we can work more closely. If I have an animal that's dead, I will try to open it up further to provide greater access to the carcass for them. So I am hoping that they tell me and then I provide a benefit to them by making access to food more available.”
Again, the disease has been detected in elk across northwest Wyoming and once in the Jackson herd off the refuge, but it’s never been confirmed on the refuge. Though that doesn’t mean it’s not there, incubating in elk or lying dormant on the landscape. CWD is passed through the bodily fluids, feces, urine, blood and saliva of elk which can seep into the soil.
The sooner a case is confirmed, the sooner Amy and her colleagues can take action. It makes her job that much more important. If a case is confirmed, chances are, Amy is going to be the one who finds it.
“I have definitely thought about the day,” she said. “There's been a couple of circumstances on the refuge that have been abnormal where the elk definitely seems weird, it's highly suspicious. I'm like, ‘Oh boy, this really might be the one,’ or finding it in a weird situation. There's all kinds of these different things that come up where I'm like, ‘Okay, I am really worried that this is going to be the one.’ Then just dealing with the aftermath of those first positives. But yeah, it's something that I think about all the time. Every time that I'm at a dead elk, it's always on my mind.
The Debate
The aftermath Amy expects after a first detection on the refuge is not hard to imagine.
The future of feeding, given the spread of the brain disease, has spurred fiery disputes for decades.
From a 30,000-foot view, there are two outspoken camps, miles apart. There are those who would like to see feeding stop and those who would like to see it continued.
BJ Hill fell in the latter camp. He has been an outfitter in Jackson Hole for four decades. He owns Swift Creek Outfitters and Teton Horseback Adventures.
“I've been tied to this elk herd my whole life,” BJ said.
He touted himself as the largest general license elk outfitter in Western Wyoming where he holds five permits to hunt elk, offer trail rides and guide pack trips.
He was adamant, the elk need to be fed: his livelihood, his neighbors’ and that of his friends depend on it.
“It’s several families that have put their whole soul into being in the West and having this lifestyle and love the animal itself. That’s another thing, we have a love for these elk that is beyond anything that anybody can even imagine that hasn't lived around them at the level we have,” BJ said. “Granted, they’re not my elk. I get it, they’re on federal land, they’re managed by the people’s agencies. But we have a different look at it and it's in our heart and our soul and our legacy.”
If feeding stops, he predicts Jackson Herd’s population will starve and plummet.
“The winter range habitat is not there,” he said. “It never has been. As long as that snow keeps coming to that country at that level, it will stay like that.”
In short, the same human conflicts that led to feeding a century ago will start again. Elk will wander into town and neighboring ranches as they search for food, threatening to spread a different disease to cattle. This one is called Brucellosis. It’s a whole different can of worms but a big reason ranchers don’t want elk anywhere near their livestock. Across Wyoming, the state found just 14 cases in elk last year off feedgrounds. Experts consider the disease to be more prevalent within feedgrounds.
“They're not going to migrate out of Jackson Hole. They’re not. There's nowhere for them to go,” BJ said.
And he’s not wrong. Game managers agree with all those points. Where the disagreement lies is just how deadly CWD will be. BJ knows it’s a threat but he doesn’t think it’s as deadly as experts make it out to be.
“The CWD is not going to take out the elk at the level that the non-feeding will. Not even close,” BJ said.
The United States Geological Survey put out a study on the disease in 2023. In it, there are five alternatives for the health of the Jackson Herd over the next 20 years that range from stopping feeding cold turkey to continuing with the status quo. Elk die no matter what, but the most deadly option, it predicts, is that status quo: continued feeding.
BJ doesn’t like any of the options.
The feds have a plan in the works right now and are likely to choose an option within the range of the study. It’s behind schedule, but a draft is expected soon. One of Amy’s coworkers is writing it right now for the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service. It will dictate the future of feeding. They’ve indicated they will likely end up somewhere in the middle. They will continue feeding for some time to wean elk off feeding over years, before ending the practice completely.
BJ predicts that’s what the national wildlife agency will choose. If so, he said he’ll sue, likely with the support of the national hunting and outfitter advocacy group, Safari Club International.
“We've built a war chest to fight this and we will fight it,” BJ said. “They can put that in the bank.”
On the opposite side of the issue are environmental groups. BJ thinks the groups and the feds are out of touch with the will of Wyomingites, Wyoming Game and Fish and other ranchers who have built lives around elk. The power of these groups frustrates Hill.
“They have beat this thing with a stick,” BJ said. “What do they do? They take it to court and they throw money at it and they beat it to death.”
“‘They’” means groups like The Sierra Club, which has sued to stop elk feeding in the past. It’s the nation’s largest and most powerful environmental advocacy group, with over 64 chapters across the nation.
Kelsey Yarzab works for the Wyoming Chapter and has lived in Jackson about five years.
“It really feels like we're approaching a tipping point where we will no longer have control over how chronic wasting disease manifests itself in our ecosystem. That is really scary to me, especially as someone who really enjoys going out to the National Elk Refuge and seeing the hundreds of elk just hanging out,” Kelsey said.
The Sierra Club and other advocates have been entangled in several lawsuits with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, most recently in 2020, when they sued over what the agency calls its ‘step-down plan.’ It aimed to wean elk off of feeding, step-by-step, but it didn’t work.
“The thrust of our legal argument was that the service had not designed a plan to do anything to address the concentration of elk on feed grounds. So what we really wanted was a plan with teeth, right? A plan that was actionable, measurable, and was going to have a real impact on how elk congregate on feedgrounds. That was not the case,” Kelsey said.
Since starting the step-down plan, the refuge is still feeding elk at the same rate, arguably more.
Kelsey and the Sierra Club want a clear path that brings an end to feeding.
“We do not want to see feeding stopped immediately. We understand the starvation threat, but we also recognize that there are actions we could be taking right now to reduce the spread and that includes stepping down feeding, phasing out feeding,” Kelsey said.
She feels that private landowners, Wyoming lawmakers and the state’s Game and Fish department have pressured the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service into non-plans.
In 2024, the state decided to continue feeding elk in the 21 state-run feedgrounds throughout Northwest Wyoming with “sideboards” to prevent congregation — meaning strategies to prevent elk from getting too close.
“So the Fish and Wildlife Service wants to do one thing and the Wyoming Game and Fish Department wants to do another,” Kelsey said. “It feels as though the efforts that the Fish and Wildlife Service have made to reduce the spread of chronic wasting disease have been hampered by the Game and Fish department’s very outsized concern for private property owners.”
Kelsey saw the end of feeding as the lesser of two evils.
“I think if you look at the data, if you look at the studies, ultimately, our elk population is going to decline no matter what,” she said. “It is a question of whether we are left with a healthy, but smaller elk herd, or an unhealthy and smaller elk herd.”
She stops short of saying there will be more lawsuits. Instead, she said the Sierra Club is optimistic that the feds will “follow the science” and look at ways to rid the refuge of feeding.
“So many things have changed in Wyoming and around our country in the last century. I think it's time that we start talking about alternatives for feeding,” she said.
Despite opinions on opposite sides of future management, both BJ and Kelsey agree on some points.
“I think we feel further apart than we really are,” Kelsey said.
For one, both want a healthy elk herd. They are a keystone species here and if their numbers dwindle, so too would the number of wolves, bears and other wildlife. It’s a ripple effect.
Two, they said relationships are past repair.
“I've been mad for 25 years over this,” BJ said. “I have, and a lot of it's been the fact that no one wants to talk to us. No one wants to negotiate. So we get hardened.”
And last, neither are backing down.
“I won’t stop. I will sue this thing to the death,” BJ said.
Kelsey said her organization has been involved in the issue for more than a decade and will “stay engaged” on the path it determines is most likely to bring us to a “healthy, wild population of elk.”
It’s Amy’s job to find the refuge’s first case of CWD. If a decision is held up in court, it further delays action that both sides feel is overdue.
The Third Way
Bruce Smith, the wildlife biologist who spent decades on the refuge agrees change is overdue.
“I've watched this since 1982, and it's many years after that and nothing has really changed,” he said.“It's somewhat painful to see what is going on and that the appropriate changes in policy are not occurring to prevent what I and many others believe will happen over time. It's not going to happen right away, it's not gonna happen maybe even five years, maybe not in 10, but from everything we know about this disease, CWD just totally changes the landscape.”
In the face of the disease he said the issue is less with feeding and more with the lack of a suitable habitat.
“Feeding is not the problem. It's a symptom of the problem. The problem is overstocking the range with too many elk,” he said.
So Bruce belongs in a third camp. He believes there is a middle ground.
“The reality is if we want to deal with all of the surface problems, the only way we can effectively do that for the long term, whether it’s disease or habitat damage or whatever it may be, is to do what so many have been advocating for for years now,” Bruce said. “The idea is to reduce the population to the carrying capacity of the winter range that's available.”
Bruce said the reason this middle ground hasn’t happened is political. The feds and state have to agree. Notoriously, in Wyoming, that doesn’t happen much. The state manages nearly every feedground and all wildlife in the state. They play a huge role.
“It's always been a situation where, at least with the elk refuge, they have bowed to the wishes of the state,” Bruce said. “To some degree, their hands are tied because the refuge does not have the capability to reduce the elk herd down to the carrying capacity of the winter range. Only the state can do that in the way that they design the hunting seasons, permit levels, and all that sort of thing. Yeah, there's a hunting program on the refuge, but it harvests a pitiful few number of elk, compared to what would need to be done.
“As long as they get fed for some time there, they are going to come back. You know, it's like an alcoholic. ‘Oh, I won't drink as much, and I'll be OK,’” Bruce said.
One way to help: put meat in freezers, with a larger hunting program.
“And the only other way to reduce the animals, humanely, besides hunting, is to have a direct reduction, which would mean trapping and euthanizing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of elk. And I don't think anybody's got a belly for that,” Bruce said.
In that federal study looking 20 years ahead, this route cuts the population nearly in half, but elk were healthier with less disease. It’s the way forward for Bruce, who believes it will only happen if state and federal agencies have a dramatic change of mindset or a future lawsuit mandates it.
“The change in mindset really has to come from within the people of Wyoming,” he said. “The resource belongs to the people, the elk. The state has primary responsibility. When they're on the refuge, they’re shared responsibility. But it’s the people who own the wildlife.”
A Possible Solution
The government isn’t the only one dictating the future of elk in the valley.
Teddy Collins works for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, one of a handful of environmental nonprofits using a new tool to expand winter elk habitat. If we take a look back at the three camps that stop feeding, continue feeding and somewhere in between, Teddy belongs somewhere in between.
“So our agreements aim to allow elk to naturally disperse on winter range, and with the intention being that there will be less disease transmission if elk roam free-ranging on winter range as opposed to congested on feed grounds,” he said.
These “Elk Occupancy Agreements” are kind of like a traditional conservation easement, where private landowners work to meet conservation goals.
For ranchers near feedgrounds, like the National Elk Refuge, they’re a chance to share the cost of shipping their cattle to land elsewhere, often out of state, and that land, without cattle, becomes a place elk can eat their fill, and keep their distance, come winter.
Teddy said it also allows ranchers to eliminate the risk of elk spreading the disease brucellosis, to their cattle and move them to a milder climate outside the area’s famously harsh winters.
“So it's a win-win for both the livestock producer and the conservation goal of increasing winter range and reducing reliance on the feedgrounds,” Teddy said.
There are only three agreements in the state through the nonprofit, funded entirely by private philanthropy: two in Teton County, in close proximity to the refuge and one in Lincoln County. So in order to scale up, the group would need a lot more willingness from ranchers and a lot more money.
Willingness is hard to influence. Teddy did not share the names of landowners with agreements out of concern for their privacy and potential blowback. But as far as money, Teddy knows where it could come from. Wyoming Game and Fish spends around $3 million a year on feeding elk. He hopes to prove the agreements work so, in the future, Wyoming Game and Fish could stop feeding and instead use that money on these agreements.
“If some of that money was reduced, if feed grounds were reduced, then theoretically, those funds could go towards these types of agreements that utilize winter range on private lands,” he said. “It's still speculative at this point, but we have been clear that this project may not exist with private funding forever and that it is our intention to prove a concept and have the Wyoming Game and Fish Department adopt this practice.”
It’s still largely up to Amy and other state and federal game managers to keep elk healthy.
The Last Head Barrel
Later in the day on the refuge, Amy and I climbed out of the truck, still on the hunt for elk heads.
“All right, last one,” I said.
“Crossing my fingers,” Amy said.
As if the dead could talk, she checked to see if anyone was home, knocking on each head barrel.
“Hmmm… zero,” she said.
And on the second?
“Zero,” she said.
“Gosh, I almost felt like it deserved a drum roll too,” I said.
“To really amp up that zero?” Amy said.
“Yeah, the zero, the nothing in there,” I said, “shoot,”
“Well, I think that just kind of tells you how the hunt is rolling out towards its end,” she said.
“They’re not harvesting a lot of animals at this point and the head barrels are just reflective of how the hunt is ending. I could still show you some heads?” Amy said.
“Great, yeah, let’s do it.”
We headed to an old wood building next to her home that she and the refuge staff call the blacksmith shop, she said, “where the magic happens.” The magic is cutting out lymph nodes from elk, the only way wildlife officials can test for CWD and the gold standard for post-mortem tracking of all diseases. Lymph nodes are the pathogen filters we have near our jaw. When a doctor runs their hands along the side of your neck, they’re feeling for swollen lymph nodes.
Inside, the blacksmith shop smelled like a slaughterhouse, with decaying flesh on all of the days-old elk heads thawing from their overnight stays in the head barrels.
She’d finished with these, but she told me what the procedure was. She placed them on a stainless steel table and pulled out her scalpel to cut a “V” shape into the side of their neck just behind the jaw, shrouded by muscle. Then, she gently removed something about twice the size of a kidney bean, the same shape, too, but a tad firmer. She placed it in a clear container labeled with the species, sex, age and location and date it was found dead. Later, it would be sent to Wyoming Game and Fish’s wildlife laboratory in Laramie for testing.
Today, the stainless steel table had patches of leftover dried blood.
“Usually, I clean it right after,” Amy said, “I've been doing a couple of these, so it's always been pushed to the next day.”
She loaded about a dozen heads onto a black sled which she pulled over to her truck and lifted into the truck bed with a remote platform.
We slid into her truck a final time and took a short drive to what looks like a small refinery, with a two-story smokestack and semi-trailer-sized blue container. It’s where all of the elk remains — including Amy’s samples — ended up, smack in the center of the refuge.
The crematory incinerates elk heads and carcasses found on the refuge at up to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s necessary to kill prions, microscopic proteins that hold CWD.
“Prions are very hardy and they're really hard to break down and they just kind of last for a long time in the environment,” Amy explained. “One way that we can deal with this is by using a really high heat and so the crematory once we load animals in it we can dispose of the remains properly without worrying about contamination.”
When we arrived, Amy was on a mission.
“All right, Amy, where are we walking?” I asked.
“We are walking to this little storage container. It’s where we keep the skid steer we have on that’s specifically only used for loading heads and carcasses,” Amy said.
She opened the shipping container and climbs into the skid steer. It started with a struggle.
“Everything is a process when it’s cold,” she said. “We’ll let that warm up for a second and then we’ll turn on the next machine.”
She headed from the container to the nearby crematory. There, she opened a panel that revealed dozens of multicolored dots. She tapped a few.
“Seems fancy, but I’m really just a button pusher,” Amy said.
She was just going through the motions today for this eager reporter. Not burning bones, flesh and fur. From the crematory, she drove the skid steer to her truck and tossed the heads into its bucket making a hollow thunk as they landed. She later dumped them into the crematory, reversed her process, shutting everything down, and called it a day.
“It’s weird,” Amy said. “Not a normal thing people experience in their 9 to 5.”
Several times Amy mentioned that she worries about showing people her work. It's gruesome dealing with death and the job, to an untrained eye, may look cruel.
Despite the background noise, staunch opinions of what’s best for the health of elk on the refuge, Amy’s there, day in and out.
“Do I feel like I'm helping? I think that's always the goal,” Amy said. “I think people get into this line of work because they care, they want to have a net positive impact on the species that they work with.”
The death and destruction of it all is grim but important. It gives us an idea of the health of the animals and what resilience looks like.
“So our objectives with the step down plan, trying to reduce the feed season, has not had the outcome that we were hoping for, that the plan was hoping for. We're not feeding fewer elk on the refuge. We're feeding the same or even slightly more,” she said.
Amy didn’t weigh in on what should be done but she understands it’s not an easy decision to make, with points on both sides. She’s likely in camp three with Bruce and Teddy.
“While feeding does have some benefits, it has some negative parts of it for every elk that is on the feed ground as well,” she said.
She felt the pressure but said it doesn’t affect her day-to-day, on the refuge.
“I think it's motivating, and I do have hope for this herd,” Amy said. “I think at the time, they're doing okay. They're fairly robust. There is hope for the future. I think there's a lot of people who care and who are invested in them, in their well-being. There's a lot of really interesting research around CWD. There is hope for the future. That's what helps us all battle through the uncertainty of what CWD will look like in this part of the state.”
Most agree the six prized elk herds in Northwest Wyoming, including the Jackson Herd, are hurtling toward a dramatic die-off. Still, Amy and her coworkers are doing their best to prevent the inevitable.
“There's always elk dying,” Amy said, “and so we're always doing our best to manage them and keep tabs on everything that's happening on the refuge. But these animals live a hard life.”
The hard lives of elk became harder when humans built their lives right on top, so we intervened in a good faith effort to keep them around. Now, a century later, many are going to die, no matter what. They could be seen as the victims of an unnatural intervention or beneficiaries of man’s goodwill. Either way, we’re still in the driver's seat but the time to steer elk in a new direction — versus letting disease takeover — is coming to a close.
MUSIC ATTRIBUTION
“Night Rider” by Lobo Loco found on Free Music Archive is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA License.
“One Person Listening Now” by Doctor Turtle found on Free Music Archive is licensed under a CC BY License.
Campfire Interlude by <a href="https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/325315">Blue Dot Sessions</a>
“Verona – Intro (ID 1407)” byLobo Loco found onFree Music Archive is licensed under aCC BY-NC-SA License.