Colorado voted in 2020 to bring wolves back. By winter 2024, ten wolves reintroduced from Oregon had formed the first resident pack in the state in over 70 years — and pups were born. The Rocky Mountain corridor is reconnecting.
A Vote for Wolves
In November 2020, Colorado became the first US state to restore a predator through a ballot measure rather than a government agency decision. Proposition 114 passed by fewer than 57,000 votes. Ranchers voted against. Urban residents voted for. The state was asked to decide whether wolves belonged.
The answer, by a narrow margin, was yes.
>> "We're not just restoring a predator. We're restoring an ecological process that's been missing from the Rockies for 70 years."
— Colorado Parks and Wildlife
The Reintroduction
In December 2023, Colorado Parks and Wildlife airlifted ten wolves — five males, five females — from eastern Oregon, where wolf populations had naturally recovered over the previous decade. Each animal was fitted with a GPS collar and released into Grand County in the mountains northwest of Denver.
The early months were hard. Two wolves were illegally killed. One wandered into Wyoming and was shot under that state's more permissive rules. But the survivors adapted. By spring 2024, at least two breeding pairs had formed.
In June 2024, pups were confirmed — the first wolf pups born in Colorado in more than 70 years.
The Ecological Case
Wolves are a keystone species: their presence reorganises the behaviour of every other large animal in the landscape. In Yellowstone — where wolves were reintroduced in 1995 — elk stopped overgrazing riverbanks because they became wary of ambush. Willows and aspens recovered. Beavers returned. Rivers changed course. This cascade, sometimes called a trophic cascade, had been documented across multiple ecosystems.
Colorado's high country has been missing that regulating force since the last wolves were killed in the 1940s.
The Numbers
- 0 — wolves in Colorado from ~1945 to 2023
- 10 — wolves reintroduced, December 2023
- 2 — breeding pairs confirmed by spring 2024
- First pups — born June 2024
- ~25 — estimated population by early 2025
Still Contested
Ranchers' concerns are real. Livestock depredation by wolves is a genuine cost that falls on individual families. Colorado has a compensation program, but paperwork and verification delays mean some losses go unpaid.
The political fight is not over. But wolves are back in the Rockies. The land is beginning to remember what a full food chain feels like.