Colorado is a step closer to returning wolverines to the state’s high-alpine landscapes.
The wolverine reintroduction plan is set to be presented to the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission Thursday morning.
Bob Inman, species coordinator for wolverines at CPW, said the 106-page plan is the guide for a process that few have experience with: re-establishing a wolverine population a century after they were extirpated from the area.
“It’s really never been formally tried before, so there are a lot of unknowns about how exactly this should work. There is no blueprint or recipe for how to do this,” Inman said.
Roughly the size of a medium-sized dog, wolverines are in the weasel family and are native to snowy northern regions and mountain ranges in North America. They are scavengers, mostly eating carcasses, and are fairly elusive, solitary creatures requiring vast, undisturbed wilderness. But they have faced threats from habitat loss and climate change, leading to threatened status.
The Colorado Legislature approved the effort to return wolverines to the state in 2024, though the idea has been around since the late 90s. Lawmakers set aside around $1.7 million over four years for the wolverine program. At one point the state had planned to bring Canada lynx and wolverines back at the same time, but prioritized lynx first.
Unlike Colorado’s efforts with wolves, the most recent push was approved by a bipartisan vote of the Colorado legislature and included co-sponsors who were opposed to wolf reintroduction.
CPW has a conservation mission, and in wolverines, which are considered a threatened species, they see an opportunity to fulfill some of those promises, said Jake Ivan, wildlife research scientist for CPW.
“We think we have the largest block of unoccupied habitat here in Colorado — about 20% of all the model habitat in the Lower 48,” Ivan said. “So if we could reestablish a population here, even of 100 animals or so, that would really be a big boost to the population in the contiguous U.S.”
Wolverines don’t pose the same livestock predation risks that highlight the controversial wolf reintroduction conversation. Only a few instances of the animals killing sheep have been recorded. Weighing between 25-35 pounds, they’re not considered a threat to cattle.
Just how soon they can be moved into the state still depends on a number of factors. CPW needs to adopt a compensation rule in the event that a wolverine does kill sheep or other livestock at some point. In addition to some other CPW steps, the state needs a designation from federal officials in order to comply with the Endangered Species Act.
That could prove challenging given the current politics between the state and the Trump administration, which recently threatened to take over the state’s wolf management.
Should the state clear its paperwork hurdles, Colorado could return a species not seen in the state since 2009. In advance of releasing the state’s restoration plan, Ivan and Inman spoke with CPR News about some of the key elements of the conservation effort.
The plan comes just as a coalition of advocates filed a complaint against the federal government on Wednesday in Montana over the lack of federal guidance on wolverine habitat restoration.
Frisco’s wolverine hotel
Like many visitors to Colorado’s high country, wolverines brought to the state will need a few days in a Summit County hotel to get used to the high altitude. Several areas in Canada have been identified as candidates to source wolverines from.
While those Canadian landscapes have similar habitats to Colorado’s snowy mountains, they’re much lower in elevation. The country has also been a key source of wolves for the state.
To accommodate the differences, Ivan said wolverines will spend some time at CPW’s Frisco Creek facility before being released into the wild. It won’t be the first time that CPW has reintroduced animals from lower elevations nor will it be the first time that the Frisco accommodations have been used for that purpose.
“It’s exactly analogous to what we did with Canada lynx 20, 25 years ago,” Ivan said. “Many of those animals came from Manitoba and Quebec, which is clearly much lower elevation than Colorado. And we did not observe any hardships or negative effects of that when we executed that a couple of decades ago.”
The Frisco facility also allows CPW some flexibility in their release approach, allowing a multi-pronged release with multiple release dates. Inman is hoping to relocate pregnant females.
This model is partly informed by an effort in Tennessee that moved pregnant black bears during hibernation, which showed encouraging results for mothers being more willing to stay in their new environment. It would also accelerate the growth of the new population and be advantageous for the local gene pool as it would introduce young wolverines whose parents weren’t entirely of the new Colorado group.
Given that approach, CPW hopes to release some wolverines into the wild while pregnant and allow others to birth at the Frisco facility before being taken into the mountains later in spring.
“We’ll see if either of those techniques work. Maybe one works better than the other, and if neither of them work, then we’ll just drop back to a logistically easier approach,” Inman said. In that case they’d just release males and females out of the box into good habitats.
Helicopters, snowmobiles and skis
Wolverines are solitary creatures that live in harsh environments, including avalanche debris fields. Getting them to those areas in winter and late spring could be one of the more logistically challenging tasks that CPW undertakes.
Inman said drafting the plan included consultations with biologists and wildlife officers around the state who might actually be tasked with hiking a sleeping weasel into the backcountry.
“They understand that these harder options might have better success and they’re fired up to go out and do it the harder way and hopefully be more successful,” Inman said. He added that it’s a unique opportunity and expects staff will be excited about it. “Something like this is one of those things that you look at as an opportunity to be involved in, and so our people are ready to go and give it a try.”
The release plan calls for moving animals via helicopter “or a combination of truck, snowmobile, and skiing with a pulk.” A pulk is a type of sled.
Where’s the ungulate?
In addition to the critters themselves, CPW will also have to pack in animal carcasses like deer or elk to make sure the habitat can sufficiently sustain the transplants.
“This is a species that certainly has the ability to move incredible distances over a short period of time, and we want to try to minimize that and provide incentive to have them stick,” Ivan said.
Carcases, including roadkill, would be acquired in coordination with regional staff and the Colorado Department of Transportation.
Wolverines cache food for the winter, so doing so ahead of time will give them the sustenance to establish their new habitat until they can access native prey. Yellow-bellied marmots, which thrive in the state, are an obvious main food source, Inman said. They emerge in the spring.
In the summer, Inman anticipates elk to be a good food source. “So we think food will be plentiful in Colorado. So the provisioning is just to get them over that initial hump in the first winter when they haven’t had the chance to establish caches,” said Inman.
Steps for success, contingencies for failure
CPW’s plan establishes a number of benchmarks to determine if things are going well or if staff need to pivot. This includes checking to see if the individuals brought to Colorado are staying here, if they’re surviving and if the population is growing.
At the same time, the plan can be halted if things aren’t working.
“(We) certainly reserve the right at any point — if it’s not going well — to press the pause button and reevaluate what we’re doing and what’s working,” he said. “Or to potentially, in the worst case, bail entirely,” Ivan said.
Relocation efforts are often trickier in the field than on paper. Ivan said the Canada lynx program needed retooling at one point.
“It wasn’t going very well initially, and we did take a big pause and restarted the program with some different protocols and it ultimately ended up being successful,” Ivan said.
When and where will wolverines be seen?
CPW has outlined three release zones. The northern region includes areas like the Mt. Zirkel Wilderness near Steamboat and the Flat Tops region outside of Meeker. The central release zone includes the mountains between Interstate 70 and Highway 50 while the southern region encompasses the San Juan Mountains.
The first year of releases would focus on that central region, according to the plan. As for timing, a few things need to happen before CPW can start stashing dead deer and constructing dens.
The Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission needs to pass the compensation plan for livestock depredation. CPW also needs a communications plan for working with landowners and county officials and then the federal U.S. Endangered Species Act waiver from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that would allow for the relocation.
Inman said once the plan is in action, it will also have the added benefit of informing restoration efforts elsewhere, while answering a lot of outstanding research questions about wolverines.
“It is probably the single most significant conservation action for wolverines in the Lower 48 that can be undertaken,” Inman said.
Copyright 2026 CPR News