Yellowstone Wildlife - Wolf & Bear Safari

Thanks to careful preservation and reintroduction programs, Yellowstone National Park is as rugged and bustling with nature today as it was centuries ago. Spend two days with a private guide tracking and viewing two of the most impressive and charismatic animals living in the park - bears (grizzly and black) and gray wolves.

Although inhabited for over ten thousand years, Yellowstone was only truly discovered by North American settlers in the last 150 years. Explorers who chanced upon the region before the 1860s were dismissed as fantasists who had fabricated their accounts of Yellowstone - after all, tales of a land filled with prehistoric forests and giant erupting geysers were difficult to buy into at the time!

On the brink of extinction as recently as the 1970s, bears in Yellowstone National Park have picked up in number through careful management and conservation. Even still, there are currently only a few hundred grizzlies and a similar number of black bears in Yellowstone.

The same story applies to the wolves in the park, with the difference that they actually did vanish from the map around the middle of last century. The Canadian Grey wolf was introduced back into Yellowstone in 1995, with several large packs now ruling the forests and countryside. As well as having to learn how to share the land with the bears, the wolves have also had to teach themselves how to hunt the park’s bison.

On an average visit to Yellowstone there is always a chance of glimpsing one of these amazing creatures, but on this two-day tour the odds are greatly increased as you’ll follow an expert biologist to the locations best known for spotting wolves and bears. Your guide will also educate you on their behaviour as you watch them going about their business, making for an unforgettable trip.

Yellowstone is understandably a worldwide natural attraction, but can feel a bit overcrowded at times (anyone who has tried visiting Old Faithful during the peak of Summer will agree), but if you want to see the wilder side of the park then this tour could well be what you’re looking for. The guide knows his/her stuff and you’ll find watching the bears and wildlife up close yet undisturbed while getting your own personal narration on their behaviour fascinating. As a nature tour, it could only get better if you took Attenborough along for the ride!

A note for anyone worried about following large carnivores: park officials have calculated that the odds of being injured by a bear to be one in 1.9 million.