A visit to Yellowstone National Park is a multi-sensory experience of sight, smell, and sound. The iconic sounds heard throughout the park include the gloppy bubbling of mud pots, the bugling of elk, the roar of thunderous waterfalls, and the audible gasps of tourists as they experience all these things.
One sound that always thrills and chills in Yellowstone is the distant howling of wolves. But while anyone can find and listen to a mud pot or a waterfall, there isn’t a venue or a set schedule that will lead visitors to a guaranteed chorus of wolves.
What’s the best way to hear wolves in Yellowstone? It depends on the time, the season, and the reason.
“You can hear wolf vocalization year-round, but it increases and decreases depending on what’s going on,” said Robert Crabtree, chief scientist of the Yellowstone Ecological Research Center. “They will vocalize, and you can hear it, but it’ll be for different purposes at different times.”
Where There Be Wolves
Why do wolves howl? Because they can, according to retired wildlife ecologist Franz Camenzind.
“Wolves are very social,” he said. “Howling is a means of communicating within their social group and between other groups. It has an important function and plays a big role in their lifestyle.”
Wolves communicate via vocalization, scent, touch, taste, and body posture. Howling is used for many purposes, including rallying cries, dinner bells, and territorial posturing.
“The standard group howl announces the occupants of their territory,” Crabtree said. “It announces, ‘We are the occupants of this territory- stay away. We're trying to defend our home and provide food for our pups.”
Howling is also used to locate missing members of the pack when they become separated. Camenzind said howling brings packs together and reinforces their bond.
“If you watch wolves when they howl, they will often come closer together,” he said. “Sometimes, they'll even form a circle around the dominant pair. It reinforces that social bond within the pack while announcing to other packs a few miles away to keep their distance.”
Because howling is such an essential part of wolf biology, they can be heard howling throughout the year. However, that doesn’t mean catching them in concert is easy.
Crepuscular Chorus
When wolves howl, they have a purpose. Understanding the whens and whys makes it more likely that howling will be heard during a Yellowstone visit.
Crabtree said wolves are crepuscular, which means they’re most active at dawn and dusk. Higher activity means a higher chance of howling.
“When they’re active at dawn and dusk, there’s an increase in howling,” he said. “During the day, when it's warm, they're sleeping and aren’t going to vocalize.”
There are also seasonal factors. Howling as communication occurs year-round, but it’s more common in the cold months of winter when wolves are establishing or reestablishing territory.
“Wolves tend to vocalize more in December, January, February, and March when they're setting up their territory,” Crabtree said. “They tend not to vocalize as much in summer so as not to give up the game.”
“The game” Crabtree referenced is the locations of the dens where wolves keep their pups. Wolf pups are usually born in April and spend several weeks in their dens before joining the rest of the pack.
Anyone hoping to hear wolves howling at noon on a hot July day will most likely be disappointed. However, anyone waiting for wolves at sunrise in early February has a much better chance if they can endure the cold.
“For the most part, wolves will howl just about any time they feel like it, but when they’re raising and moving pups around, there’s less howling,” Camenzind said.
Who’s Howling At The Moon?
Someone familiar with fairy tales or horror films might think their best chance of hearing a wolf howl is to step outside at midnight under a full moon. That might be a good time for a Yellowstone wolf concert, but it’s far from the best time to try.
“There's a little too much put into the idea of howling at the moon,” Camenzind said. “It's a good thought, but it’s romanticized.”
Wolves tend to sleep for four to 10 hours a day. They can be active at night, especially for hunting or traveling, but their crepuscular lifestyle means they’re just as likely to be sleeping overnight.
The idea of wolves howling at the moon is more cinematic than scientific. But, as Camenzind pointed out, there might also be some confirmation bias.
“If it’s a beautiful night with a full moon, that's when people are going to be outside,” he said. “They heard wolves howling and assumed they were howling because of the full moon, but if they’d been out three weeks earlier, the wolves would’ve been howling in the pitch dark. I don’t think there’s any connection to the lunar cycle.”
Howling Venues
Anyone who wants to hear wolves howling in Yellowstone will want to be where the wolves are. Both Camenzind and Crabtree had the same recommendation for a concert venue: the Lamar Valley.
“The Lamar Valley has the highest concentration of wolves in the park,” Camenzind said. “It's pretty wide open, and the sound travels well. If you spend 24 hours in the Lamar area, there’s a good chance you’ll hear wolves howling.”
The entirety of the Northeast Entrance Road from Mammoth Hot Springs to Cooke City, Montana, has higher chances for wolf howling. According to the National Park Service, there were at least eight different wolf packs with territory along the road in 2023.
Of course, that’s not the only place where wolves reside in Yellowstone. Some packs have territories that extend as far south as Old Faithful and Hayden Valley, and they’ll howl to make their presence known.
But to get the best chance to hear howling, Crabtree recommends stopping and listening anywhere in the northern section of Yellowstone around sunrise and sunset. If you can get there during the winter, all the better.
“There’s wolf pack activity along the whole Northern Range,” Crabtree said. “Your best bet for wolf howling would be anywhere on the road between Gardiner and Cooke City.”
A Religious Experience
Jeff Henry, an author, photographer, and lifelong Yellowstone enthusiast, worked in the park for 19 years before hearing the howls of a wild wolf. He was already a seasoned Yellowstone employee when wolves were reintroduced to the park in 1995.
“I spend almost all of my time in the central part of the park, around Old Faithful, Lake Canyon, and Hayden Valley,” he said. “I rarely go to the Northern Range, and I know that's contrary to what most people like to do when it comes to wolves.”
In February 1997, Henry was taking a nighttime snowmobile ride across Fountain Flats, a trail running alongside the Firehole River near Old Faithful. As he was and still is apt to do, he stopped to turn off his snow machine and take in the silent, starry skies.
“I stopped my snowmobile in the middle of Fountain Flats, leaned against the seat, and looked up at the stars and appreciated the silence,” he said. “When you ride a snowmobile, you're in a cocoon of noise and light. When you turn off your machines, that cocoon dissipates.”
Henry could see pillars of steam rising from the nearby Fountain Paint Pots and watch a soft layer of snow gently accumulate around him. And then, somewhere in the distance, he heard the unmistakable howling of wolves.
“They were near a basin of thermal features called the Quagmire Group,” he said. “It took the wolves a while to move from the Northern Range, where they were introduced, to the parts of the park where I spend my time. That was the first time I'd ever heard wolves howling in the wild.”
For Henry, hearing wild wolves at one of his favorite places during his favorite season of the year was an experience he’ll never forget. He described it as akin to “a religious experience.”
“I never drive that stretch of road, winter or summer, without thinking about that experience,” he said. “That's how it is for me and other long-time Yellowstone people. At any given place along the highway, you've had a memorable experience, and that was my most memorable experience on Fountain Flats.”
Henry and many others let the Yellowstone experience unfold around them, rather than trying to optimize their schedules to reach a specific goal. That was his advice for anyone who wishes to hear wolves in the park.
“There's a favorite saying among photographers: don't let what you're after stand in the way of what you find,” he said. “That's my attitude all the time in Yellowstone, whether I'm shooting photographs or not.”
Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
