Wyoming Wardens PANIC Over What's Killing Elk in the Wind River Range (Not Human)

Hinzugefügt: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]In the high country of western Wyoming along a 100 miles of the continental divide, the elk are dying. Not falling to wolves, not starving out in a hard winter, not dropping from the cold the way old animals always have the way the country has always taken its weakest in February and given them back to the ground. They are dying standing up and no one understand why. A bull will stop at the feed line in the gray light of a January morning, head sinking slowly toward the snow. A long thread of saliva swinging from its mouth. And it will not run when the truck rolls up 40 ft away.

[00:00:42]It will not run from the dog. It will not run from the man. It will not run from anything anymore because whatever makes an elk run has already gone out of it. It just stands there and sways, hollowed out from the inside by something nobody can see. Something that has been moving through these mountains one ridge at a time, one drainage at a time. And the people whose entire job is to manage this herd have watched it cross from one mountain to the next. And there is nothing, nothing at all that they can do to call it back. I want to be clear about something from the very start because it is the first thing that breaks your understanding of what is happening up here. This is not one sick animal. It is not a bad year. This is a line being drawn across a map slowly, deliberately in a hand none of us can see. It started at a place called Scab Creek in the foothills of the range in the last cold weeks of 2024.

[00:01:50]Then it surfaced near Dell Creek where they found more of them dead on the ground and dead near the feed line through the winter and into the spring.

[00:02:00]Then Blackb up along the headwaters of the Green River. Then Horse Creek north of Hobach Junction. And then this past May, Muddy Creek at the southwestern end of the range. the fifth place in the state where this thing has now planted itself and refused to leave. Five feed grounds and it does not strike at random. It does not scatter across the empty country the way you would expect.

[00:02:30]It moves like it is working its way through the herd on a schedule of its own. Every place it touches, the animals it touches do not recover. There is no recovering from this. Once it is in them, the ending is already written in full before they show a single sign. So I have to ask you the question that I could not stop asking myself. What kind of thing spreads across an entire mountain range on its own, kills every animal it reaches without exception, and cannot be stopped by a fence, by a rifle, by fire, or by the simple passage of time. because all of those have been tried, every one of them, and none of them work. And the strangest part of this whole story, the part that kept me up at the kitchen table reading state wildlife records until 2:00 in the morning with the house dark around me, is not that this thing arrived. Things arrive. The strangest part is that people who have studied this exact land for 50 years saw it coming. They watched it crawl toward them across the decades.

[00:03:42]They said so out loud in public with their names attached and they were not listened to. I have been sitting with this one for a while before bringing it to you because it is not like the other stories I tell. There is no survival in a hospital bed here. There is just a paper trail. And honestly, the paper trail is worse.

[00:04:08]Let me put you in the country first because you cannot understand what is happening to these animals until you understand where it is happening. The Wind River Range is the kind of place that makes you understand why people used to believe that mountains were alive, that they had moods, that they remembered. It runs about 100 m long and 20 m wide. the granite spine of the continental divide, peaks that hold snow into July, and lakes up high that stay half frozen most of the year. On the eastern slope sits the Wind River Indian Reservation, more than 2 million acres.

[00:04:48]Home today to two nations who did not start out together, but who share this ground now. The Eastern Shosonyi and the Northern Arapjo.

[00:04:59]The people who have lived there longest call the country at the foot of these mountains the warm valley of the Wind River. To the west historically were the great basin peoples, the Shosonyi and the Banac and the Ute. To the east range the plains nations and the range itself was never quite a war between them. It was a threshold, a place you crossed carefully on the old natural passes. A place that meant one thing if you were standing on the western slope and something else entirely if you were standing on the east. Before we go any further, do me a favor and make sure you subscribe and let us know down in the comments where you are watching from tonight. Thank you. It genuinely helps more than you know. And what this range meant for a very long time to the people who knew it best was this. More than a hundred years ago, someone took the trouble to write down what the people of this country believed about these particular mountains. They believed the Wind River Mountains were the home of the spirits. They believed that a person standing on the high peaks could look out and see the very land they would occupy after death. I want you to actually stop and sit with what that means because it is easy to let a sentence like that slide past you.

[00:06:28]This was not described as a hunting ground. It was not described as a barrier or an obstacle or a hardship. It was described as a threshold between this world and the next one. a place where the membrane between the living and the dead wore thin enough that a living person standing in the right spot could see through it to the other side.

[00:06:52]That is not a casual thing to say about a piece of geography. People do not say that about ordinary mountains. That is a warning folks dressed up in the language of reverence. That is a people telling you as gently as they know how that this place is not like other places. And it was not only spoken, it was carved into the rock itself. Scattered through this region of central Wyoming are some of the oldest rock carvings on the continent. A distinct style the scholars call dinui attributed to the ancestral mountain shosonyi, the people sometimes known as the sheep eataters who lived in these high places for something on the order of 3,000 years. 3,000 years. I keep coming back to that number because I cannot make my mind hold it properly.

[00:07:46]And the figures in those carvings are strange. They are elongated. They are not quite human. long bodies, strange proportions, shapes that do not match the deer and the elk and the sheep you would expect people to carve. And some of those figures line up with characters out of Shosonyi story like Parape the water spirit woman, a being who belongs to the country and the water and not to us. So sit with the full scale of that.

[00:08:17]For 3,000 years, people lived inside these mountains, and they felt the need to mark the bare rock with the images of the things that shared the country with them. They were not decorating. People who are scratching survival out of high granite do not spend their effort on decoration. They were annotating. They were leaving notes in the most permanent medium they had about what was here with them in the dark. Now, I know who watches this channel. I know a lot of you are from Wyoming, from Fremont County, from right up against this range. I know some of you watching right now are Eastern Shosonyi or Northern Arapjo. And your connection to this country goes back further than any record I could ever read you. And I know a great many of you grew up hunting elk in these exact mountains, the way your fathers did. and their fathers before them. So, I am asking you directly. I would genuinely like to hear from you down in the comments because the written record only ever catches a thin slice of what gets passed down at a kitchen table on a winter night. What did your family say about these mountains? What were you told you must not do up there? Where were you told not to go? And did anyone ever tell you why?

[00:09:43]I read every single comment on these videos and on this one in particular. I am going to be reading closely because I have a feeling some of you already know the shape of where this is going. Here is the thing the old people understood that I think the rest of us have quietly forgotten. They never said the mountains were evil. That is a modern reflex. This instinct we have to sort the whole world into good places and bad places, safe ground and cursed ground. What they said was older and stranger and a great deal more useful than that. They said the mountains were old. They said the mountains kept things. And they said in a 100 different ways across a hundred generations that the real danger was never the mountain rising up to strike you down. The danger was that you would walk unknowing into something you had simply stopped paying attention to, something that had been there the entire time. Patient, waiting in the spaces where people no longer bothered to look.

[00:10:54]I need you to hold on to that idea, that exact idea, and carry it with you through the rest of this because there is something in these mountains right now that is doing precisely that. And it took a laboratory and a microscope and a name out of modern science to finally describe the thing that the elders never needed a name for at all.

[00:11:19]The first sign that something had gone wrong was the way the elk began to move, or more exactly, the way they stopped.

[00:11:28]You have to understand what a healthy elk is to understand how wrong this is.

[00:11:33]A healthy elk is one of the most alert, most wary, most spring-loaded animals in all of North America. They are built out of caution. Their whole body is an instrument for detecting threat and fleeing it. They run first and they never get around to asking questions.

[00:11:52]And that reflex is the thing that has kept them alive in country full of wolves and bears and men for as long as there have been elk. So when the ranchers and the hunters and the men who worked the long cold shifts at the winter feed grounds began to notice elk that would not run, elk that would not even lift their heads at the approach of a vehicle, the wrongness of it registered in the body before the mind could put any words to it. There is a particular animal dread that comes over a person when they see a wild thing that has lost its fear. Because an animal that has lost its fear is an animal that something has gone out of. Something essential, something that was supposed to be there and now simply is not. And it was so much more than the stillness once people started to really look. The animals were drooling, long ropes of saliva hanging from their mouths that they did not seem to notice or care about. They were thin in a way that made no sense for the season. Ribs pressing through the hide in the middle of a mild winter with feed spread out on the ground right in front of them as though the food simply could not reach whatever was wrong inside. They would stand with their heads drooping toward the snow, ears gone slack, eyes pointed at something a thousand yard past anything that was actually there. They would stumble. They would walk in slow, wandering, aimless lines and trip over flat ground that had nothing to trip on.

[00:13:36]They were, by every visible sign, animals that were still up and walking around long after something essential had already left them. Shells, that is the word people kept reaching for independently again and again without anyone teaching it to them. shells of elk moving through the snow. I have watched footage of this more than I would recommend to anybody and I'm not going to show you the worst of it tonight because some of you do not need that particular image living in your head. But I will tell you this, it does not look like sickness. It looks like something is wearing the animal. And then there was the pattern, which is the part that turns my stomach the longer I sit with it. Whatever this is, it did not spread the way you would expect a thing to spread through a wild and scattered herd, thinning out across the empty country, a case here and a case there, random and diffused the way nature usually works. No, it concentrated. It showed up again and again and again in the exact places where the elk gather most tightly together. The feed grounds, the specific patches of ground where every single winter without fail, the animals are drawn together by the dozens and the hundreds packed into the same trampled stretches of snow. Breathing the same air, eating off the same earth, nose tonse to nose. The disease was not out wandering the wilderness, hunting for victims one by one. It did not have to.

[00:15:23]It simply waited where it knew the crowd would be. And the crowd came back every year right on schedule into the same ground because the crowd was being gathered there on purpose by us. Let me give you the actual shape of that gathering because the scale of it matters to everything that follows.

[00:15:45]West of the Continental Divide across this stretch of Wyoming. The state runs 21 feed grounds of its own. 21. They stretch from the Groontra River drainage in the north all the way down to the southern end of the Wind River Range. 21 separate places where wild elk are deliberately fed through the winter, concentrated into dense crowds. year after year after year, generation stacked upon generation. And that is just the state grounds. Alongside them sits the National Elk Refuge, which feeds the single largest elk herd in the entire nation. Tens of thousands of animals drawn down out of the high country into one wintering ground. For decades, this was simply the way it was done. And I want to be fair about why because nobody set this up to do harm.

[00:16:44]It kept the elk alive through winters that would otherwise have killed them by the thousands. It kept the starving herds off the ranch's haystacks and out of the hay meadows. It was by every honest intention behind it an act of care, a kindness. People built this system because they wanted the elk to live. But here is what the people watching most closely understood and understood early long before the disaster actually arrived. When you take the most cautious, most wary, most naturally spread out animal in the country, and you pull it into a dense crowd in the same fixed spot every single winter, you have built a machine.

[00:17:29]And the machine has a purpose whether you intended one or not. If anything ever gets into that crowd, anything at all that passes from one animal to the next through contact, through saliva, through the shared ground, then the very system you built out of kindness becomes the most efficient possible engine for spreading it. You have manufactured the perfect conditions. You have without meaning to rung the dinner bell and you have rung it every winter for 50 years.

[00:18:01]For whatever happened to be hungry and the thing that finally came when at last it came cannot be killed.

[00:18:10]I need you to really sit with that because it is not me reaching for a dramatic line. It is the plain literal physical truth of what is inside those animals and it is the single most disturbing fact in this entire story.

[00:18:28]You cannot shoot it because it is not a predator standing in the open. You cannot freeze it out because the deep Wyoming winter cold enough to kill a man in an hour does not touch it in the slightest. You cannot easily burn it out of the ground because it binds itself to the soil and it stays bound. You cannot wait it out because it can persist in the bare dirt for years lying there inert and patient waiting for the next animal to lower its head to graze that same patch of earth. So I will ask you again and this time really chew on it.

[00:19:07]What do you do about a thing that is already down in the ground that survives everything you would normally reach for to end a threat and that the animals themselves faithfully carry to one another every single time they gathered to be fed? The honest answer, the one the agencies will not say plainly into a microphone is that there is nothing you do. You watch, you count, you wait for spring. And the warnings, do not forget, were already on the rock. They were already in the elders mouths generations ago, long, long before anyone in a lab coat had a name or a microscope for this. The people of these mountains had already said the very same thing in older and plainer words. The land keeps things. The danger is what you stop paying attention to. Do not gather where you should not gather. Do not crowd the threshold. They did not know the mechanism. Of course, they had no concept of what was actually moving between those animals. They did not need one. They had simply watched this country closely for 3,000 years. Long enough to learn a truth that we apparently had to relearn the hard way.

[00:20:24]That some places are not meant to be crowded. that some thresholds punish the gathering. So, let me finally tell you what it is, because it does have a name, a modern one. And the name is almost a letdown when you first hear it, almost a relief, right up until you understand what it actually describes. And then it is so much worse than anything I could have invented. It is called chronic wasting disease. And the thing that causes it is not an animal. It is not a virus. It is not a bacterium or a parasite or anything that is alive in the way we normally mean that word at all. It is a protein, a single misfolded protein called a pron, a shape that is the whole of it. A protein that has bent itself into the wrong shape. And when that wrong shape touches a healthy protein, the healthy one bends and folds wrong as well. And then those two corrupt others and those corrupt others still. It does not spread by living and breeding the way a germ does. It spreads by teaching. It is a corruption of pure form, passing silently from one to the next, hollowing out the brain of the animal one wrongfold at a time, slowly turning a living mind into sponge, an empty space until the elk standing at the feed line becomes exactly the thing that people kept calling it without knowing why.

[00:22:00]A shell still on its feet, already gone.

[00:22:05]And this is precisely why the name does not make it any smaller. We have known what this is for decades. We can see it under a microscope. We can test for it.

[00:22:16]We can map it. We can name every single feed ground it has reached and put little dots on a wall. And with the full weight of all of that knowledge, we still cannot stop it. There is no cure.

[00:22:30]There is no vaccine. There is no treatment. None. Not even something to slow it down. An animal that has it will die of it. Always, every time, without one single exception in all the years we have been watching. So understand what that means. The science did not solve the mystery. The science just picked the mystery up and set it down somewhere else. It stopped being the question of what is killing them because we answered that and it quietly became a different question, an uglier one. The one that nobody in an official capacity wants to answer out loud, not what is killing them. Why was nothing done?

[00:23:16]And that right there is the part I genuinely cannot let go. Because the answer as to why nothing was done is not that nobody knew. People knew. People said it plainly for 50 years. And the feeding just kept going. Anyway, the criticism is on the record. And I want to be careful here because this does not come from cranks or conspiracy people or anybody with an axe to grind. It comes from people who have spent their entire lives in this country watching this exact disease move steadily toward them across the decades. The understanding that concentrating elk at feed grounds promotes the spread of precisely this kind of disease is not some fringe theory whispered around a campfire. It is the mainstream scientific understanding and it has been for a long time. And there are people, residents who have lived in among these feed grounds for half a century, who tracked this thing for decades as it crept up out of the south, up from Colorado, up from the Laram region, who said plainly and on the record that it is a genuine shame the wildlife agencies allowed the feeding programs to continue running as long as they did, that the programs could have been phased out, should have been phased out long long ago. The way they were shut down almost everywhere else in North America that took the threat seriously. These people looked at the machine and they saw it clearly for what it was and they said so. And the feeding continued regardless, winter after winter after winter, gathering the elk back into the same ground. Because stopping was hard and complicated and expensive and politically miserable, and because the real disaster was always conveniently going to land on some future year that simply had not arrived yet. Well, it has arrived now. five feed grounds in the Wind River Range and the count is still climbing. The disease has crossed rivers that serious people genuinely believed would hold it back.

[00:25:40]Natural boundaries that were supposed to buy us time. It has now reached the national elk refuge itself, the great gathering ground of the largest elk herd in the entire country, the very heart of the whole system. And the responses being laid on the table now in 2026 are exactly the kind of responses you are forced to reach for once the easy window has already slam shut behind you.

[00:26:08]Reduce the herd. Cull the numbers down.

[00:26:11]Finally, finally talk seriously about ending the winter feeding that should have ended decades ago. And in the meantime, find the disease by walking the feed grounds after the feeding season is over. Searching the bare spring ground for elk skulls that still hold enough brain matter to test. I want you to really hear that last one because I do not think it can be said plainly enough. The management plan in the year 2026 now includes people walking out across those trampled feeding grounds in the spring, looking down at the dirt, gathering up the heads of the animals that did not make it through the winter.

[00:26:56]Now I am going to do the thing I always try to do with you. The thing I think you have come to trust me for which is to step back and be completely honest about where the facts end and where the wondering begins. I am not going to sit here and tell you that the Shosonyi predicted chronic wasting disease. They did not. That would be a lie. And I do not lie to you. Not ever. Not even when the lie would make a better story. The Denwy carvings are not a secret diagram of a misfolding pryion. The ancient belief that these mountains are the home of the spirits is not some coded clinical warning about protein chemistry. I want to draw that line in the dirt as clearly and as firmly as I possibly can. And then I want to leave it drawn there between us so there is no confusion about what I am and am not claiming. But I am going to set two things down side by side right next to each other. And then I am going to step back and I am going to let you do whatever you want with them because you are intelligent people and you did not come here to have me tell you what to think. On the one side, you have a people who lived inside these mountains for 3,000 years and who came away from all of that time with one single consistent stubborn idea. Carved into the rock, carried in their stories, spoken at the kitchen table. That this is a place that keeps things. That the danger here is what you crowd into, what you stop respecting, what you stop watching. that some thresholds in this world are simply not meant to be gathered at. And on the other side, you have a modern agency staffed by educated and well-meaning people that took the most cautious animal in all of America and gathered it into the same fixed ground every winter for generations.

[00:29:04]That was warned clearly for 50 straight years that it was building something dangerous. And that is now reduced to walking those same grounds in the spring, looking down, gathering skulls.

[00:29:17]I will say only this. One of those two records was paying closer attention to the true nature of this place than the other. I have my own quiet opinion about which one it was. I do not know what they knew. I want to be honest with you.

[00:29:34]I generally do not. But I am sure they knew something. And I know it remains a mystery and I have made my own peace with it. Sitting in that not knowing.

[00:29:47]Maybe after tonight you will do too because the thing is still moving. That is where this story ends. Which is really to say that it does not end at all. And that is the hardest part to carry. Every winter the snow comes down across the high country the way it always has and always will. And the elk come down out of the peaks with it, drawn by instinct and by hunger and by long habit toward the same trampled feed grounds they have always known. Gathered there by our design into the dense and crowded herds that this disease has learned so patiently to wait inside. The pryion is in the soil now. It does not leave. It does not die. It does not tire. And it does not sleep. It folds and it folds and it folds. Patient in a way that nothing actually alive could ever manage to be lying there in the spaces under these mountains where people stopped looking a very long time ago. The Wind River Range is still the home of the spirits if you happen to believe in that sort of thing. And if you do not believe in any of that, then it is still undeniably a place where something invisible and untouchable and untreatable is quietly hollowing out the herd one animal at a time, while the people in charge of it are reduced to walking the ground in spring and counting the dead. And the more I sit with all of it, the less certain I am that those two descriptions are anywhere near as far apart as we would all like them to be. If you made it all the way here, all the way to the end of this one with me, do me a favor and comment the words warm valley down below so I know exactly who stayed with me through the whole thing. Make sure to subscribe if you have not done that yet. It generally means the world to me. And please let me know down in the comments what your own family told you about the mountains where you grew up. Whatever place that was. I read all of the comments. So, please do let me know. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next one.