Jacoby

The man wanted to warn us about the wolverine.

Or a wolverine, anyway.

He was rather insistent about it, although no wolverine was visible at the time of our conversation.

This struck me as a reasonable topic about which to issue a warning to a stranger who is on foot in the mountains, that being the usual haunt of wolverines.

Reasonable but also unusual, what with the rarity of wolverines.

Besides which, the species, though renowned for its ferocity when defending a meal against much larger animals such as grizzly bears, is not known to have attacked a person.

(Although given how some people treat wildlife, I imagine someone has deserved to be mauled even if they weren’t.)

We were hiking — my wife, Lisa, our son, Max, and me — on a Forest Service road near Granite.

It was the sort of June day that doesn’t feel like it belongs to the month when summer begins.

Clouds periodically blocked the sun, the thermometer on our dashboard showed 46 degrees, and a west wind was giving the tops of the trees a thorough thrashing.

(Writing about this somewhat later, in the midst of the hottest summer on record in Baker County, I already feel nostalgic for those mild, halcyon days.)

The combination convinced me to abandon my original route, which was along an exposed ridgetop above 7,000 feet elevation.

I chose instead the road that follows Boundary Creek. I figured the location, near the bottom of a modest canyon, would shelter us from the worst of the gusts.

We had walked a couple of miles when Lisa saw the rig ahead, near a road junction.

She recognized from the big round headlights that it was the same model we’ve owned for 16½ years — a Toyota FJ Cruiser.

We walked toward the Cruiser and the man, who was behind the wheel, started in on the wolverine right off.

A friend, he said, saw the wolverine close to the road we were hiking.

The sighting was just a week or so ago, he emphasized, the implication, or so I took it, being that the animal could at that moment be lurking behind any roadside lodgepole pine or tamarack.

I was intrigued.

The story is perfectly plausible.

Remote cameras have captured many photographs of wolverines in the Eagle Cap Wilderness over the past decade and a half.

The Wallowa Wolverine Project has confirmed the presence of a single wolverine, with distinctive markings, in eight of 10 years through 2021. Researchers named that animal Stormy.

Wolverines can get around, though.

In March 2023, two people fishing the Columbia River near Portland took the first confirmed photos of a wolverine in Oregon outside the Eagle Cap in more than three decades.

Since then a wolverine has been seen, and confirmed by biologists, in several places in Western Oregon.

Boundary Creek isn’t official wilderness, a designation only Congress can bestow, but it’s pretty wild country despite lacking legislative pedigree.

The region between the Elkhorn Mountains and U.S. Highway 395, and between Interstate 84 and U.S. Highway 26, is thinly populated and heavily forested — an ideal combination for wolverines and other reclusive animals.

The area includes the North Fork John Day Wilderness, the sixth-largest in Oregon. Its nearest boundary is just a few miles from Boundary Creek.

We chatted with the man and his two companions for a few minutes, mainly talking about wolverines.

I told the only story in my repertoire that involves a wolverine — although I’m pretty confident that what I saw was some other species.

We were driving home from Anthony Lakes Mountain Resort a couple years ago. It was a late afternoon in winter, and the road, as it usually is during that season (and, often as not, others), was snow-covered.

On the steep grade between the ski area and Little Alps, an animal ran across the road, moving from the steep cutbank on the north side to the gouge in the granitic bedrock where Antone Creek flows.

I accelerated — briefly, in deference to the grade and the slippery surface (and to Lisa’s admonition, which was much more persuasive).

I got out of the Cruiser and ran to the road’s edge, peering through the gloaming toward the creek, where much of the light had already leaked out of the day.

I saw nothing.

There were no discernible tracks on the packed snow on the road, and although I could see where the animal had crossed the snow berm on the shoulder the snow was powdery and didn’t preserve marks distinct enough to be of any use.

I know that eyewitnesses, though beloved of fiction writers and television dramas, are in fact generally untrustworthy observers.

I have no reason to believe I’m any more reliable than the average.

I’m confident that my memory of certain of the animal’s attributes is accurate.

Its fur was dark — either black or close to it.

The animal was low-slung and had something of the rolling gait that such animals often do.

I thought of wolverines at the time, and I still wonder.

But it could have been a pine marten or a fisher, both of which, like the wolverine, are of the mustelid family.

I think the animal I saw was too big to be a pine marten. Those weigh just 3 pounds or so. Fishers can go a dozen pounds or so.

Wolverines are considerably bigger than both, with adult males running 30 to 40 pounds.

Not long after my sighting I looked at several photos, and a couple videos, of wolverines. It seemed to me that wolverines aren’t quite as low to the ground as the animal I saw. A fisher seems the more likely candidate.

But then I watched the video of a wolverine running across U.S. Highway 20 just east of the Santiam Pass. The setting was quite comparable to my sighting, on the downgrade of a mountain highway. Highway 20 was not snow-covered, but there was snow off the road.

The animal in that video, confirmed by biologists as a wolverine, seemed to me roughly comparable to what I saw near Anthony Lakes.

But I’m aware of confirmation bias and associated mental hijinks that render memories of briefly seen things decidedly unreliable.

Ultimately, I will never know what animal crossed the road in front of me.

I would like to someday see a wolverine, and be confident in my identification.

It would be a better story than the one I had to share with my fellow FJ Cruiser driver.

Jayson Jacoby is the editor of the Baker City Herald. Contact him at 541-518-2088 or jjacoby@bakercityherald.com.