In early November, a female Mexican wolf was found dead near Williams. The wolf, tagged F2979 but known as Hope, was under observation by preservationists, including volunteers from the Grand Canyon Wolf Recovery Project.
Sophie Norris, a junior at Northern Arizona University and one of the few people who saw Hope in the wild, spoke with The Show about Hope for the latest in our series on those who died in 2024.
SOPHIE NORRIS: Started a little over a year ago was when I got involved with the Grand Canyon Wolf Recovery Project, and then there were no wolves outside of Flagstaff that we knew about, and I was mostly doing online work with the trail cameras.
Then when this new semester started back in August, there finally were wolves outside of Flagstaff, and it became really, really important to be able to have people out on the ground, monitoring trail cameras, maintaining them and just having an eye on the landscape.
We spent a lot of time out there, lots of like evenings through sunset and into the, you know, dark, watching for wolves, looking for wolves and tracking them. And a couple times we got really lucky and we were actually able to see them, which that privilege is not something I take for granted ever.
I know that they're so, they're so rare. And it's, even people who study wolves their whole lives rarely ever actually see wolves, so it was pretty awesome that we had the chance to see Hope a couple of times.
It was one thing to see her in the evening when it was getting dark and we're like kind of like straining to see, but in her full glory and light like that, it was almost golden hour. It was just, she's such a beautiful that dusty color and she's got these, she had these adorable round ears. That's my favorite part of those photos I've taken every time I see them, I'm just like her ears. It's almost like bear ears, which I think are so sweet, and it was just beautiful, so wild and free and stunning.
She had a really, really large collar on her, a GPS and radio tracking collar, so we were able to tell her apart as an individual. The first time it was right about when the sun was going down, we got super lucky, decided to turn off onto the right forest road at the right time, and her and her partner, Mystery. I was like, stop the car. And they were walking, you know, about 75 yards in front of the car and we were able to just be like, whoa, what is happening?
And we just got real quiet and I took some pictures and they kind of went on their way. And we were like, well, we could try to track him, but it's too dark and you wanna really just let them be, kind of enjoy that moment and take it for what it was without, you know, pushing our luck.
The next time, we, it was actually during the day and we had just seen Hope and we again super lucky, right place, right time out doing some tracking and trail camera stuff and we knew that they'd been in the area, we'd seen their tracks all around for a couple of days in a row, so we were pretty confident they were around. And she made her way out across this big open meadow in front of us and it was like late afternoon sunshine and beautiful, beautiful lighting. And we all were just in shock, we were like there's no way she's we were like she's gonna see us and she's gonna take off, but she just made her way in front of us. It was really, really amazing.
I got a text from Claire, who's the executive director of the Wolf Recovery Project, and, and, then that press release was sent out pretty shortly after, so it was just the middle of a typical school day.
We were planning on going out to do some camera stuff that evening as well, and then that kind of just turned into us spending time together and reflecting on what Hope had meant to us and what our future plans were gonna look like.
It was shocking. We were really surprised and also just early in our careers, you know, this is something that can happen, but we hadn't quite felt it yet, it was a new kind of grief that I felt.
It was really, really interesting to try and kind of think about that and work through that and understand what it meant. It's hard, it felt really discouraging at first.
But these wolves, they have a voice and they're showing us what they want through their actions, through their they're choosing to disperse north of Interstate 40 and into this area, and it's important for us to help elevate that voice and make that voice even louder by sharing their stories, documenting their stories, and helping to protect them.
