The Mighty Gray Wolf Has Been Observed in The Sacred Black Hills For The First Time Since 1800

The wolf returns an earnest stare to the camera before darting into the safety and privacy of the aspen and pine-filled forest.

In this day and age, wolves in South Dakota? Isn’t it impossible? Apparently not, since a video clearly shows a gray wolf prowling the Black Hills.

“Most likely, it’s a lone male passing through,” said John Kanta, regional wildlife manager for the South Dakota Game, Fish & Parks, explaining that young males from Wyoming or the Great Lakes population in Minnesota occasionally roam into the Black Hills.

Many Native American tribes in the United States and Canada have revered the Black Hills for millennia. This unusual geographical location has the world’s oldest mountains.

Hot mineral springs have been used for medicinal purposes by indigenous people for thousands of years. These sacred mountains were home to grizzly bears, black bears, wolves, and buffalo.

They all vanished, however, with the unlawful invasion into this territory by Euro-Americans in the late 1800s.

White-tailed and mule deer, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, mountain lions, and a variety of smaller creatures such as prairie dogs, American martens, American red squirrels, Northern flying squirrels, yellow-bellied marmots, and fox squirrels thrive in the Black Hills rivers.