Colorado voted in 2020 to bring wolves back. By summer 2024, two of the ten wolves reintroduced from Oregon had formed the Copper Creek Pack, and pups were born. The Rocky Mountain corridor is reconnecting.
A Vote for Wolves
In November 2020, Colorado voters decided by ballot measure, rather than leaving it to a government agency, that wolves should return. Proposition 114 passed with 50.91% of the vote. The state was asked to decide whether wolves belonged.
The answer, by a narrow margin, was yes.
The Reintroduction
In December 2023, Colorado Parks and Wildlife airlifted ten wolves, six females and four males, from Oregon. Each animal was fitted with a GPS collar and released on public land in Grand and Summit counties, west of Denver.
The early months were hard. One was found dead in April 2024, likely of natural causes, and another was reportedly killed by a mountain lion that summer. But the survivors adapted. By spring 2024, one pair had formed the Copper Creek Pack.
In June 2024, a pup was confirmed, the first born to the reintroduced wolves. By August, videos showed three.
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. Willows and aspens grew back in places. Beavers returned. Scientists still debate how much of this the wolves caused, a chain reaction known as a trophic cascade.
Colorado's high country had been missing that regulating force for decades.
The Numbers
- 2019, a wolf from Wyoming spotted on a Colorado ranch
- 10, wolves reintroduced, December 2023
- 1, pack formed by spring 2024 (Copper Creek)
- First pup, confirmed June 2024
- 15, more wolves brought from British Columbia, January 2025
- 32, minimum count in CPW's annual report, May 2026
Still Contested
Ranchers' concerns are real. Livestock depredation by wolves is a genuine cost that falls on individual families. Colorado has a compensation program for livestock losses.
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.
_Sources: Colorado Parks and Wildlife, "Colorado Parks and Wildlife successfully completes gray wolf capture work in Oregon", 23 December 2023. E&E News, "Colorado confirms first pup from reintroduced wolves", 21 June 2024. Cowboy State Daily, "Colorado Has At Least Three Wolf Pups Now", 27 August 2024. Phys.org (AP), reintroduced gray wolf found dead in Larimer County, 24 April 2024. Colorado Newsline via Kiowa County Press, "Survival rates of Colorado's reintroduced wolves are falling below a critical threshold", 4 June 2025. Colorado Parks and Wildlife, "CPW Releases Gray Wolf Annual Report for Biological Year 2025-2026", 7 May 2026. National Park Service, Yellowstone wolf page._