We started the day off by eating breakfast with Gary at the breakfast joint next door. We boarded the bus at about 7:00 am to get to the Lamar Valley to give us the best chance to see wolves. As we were on our way we had to stop on the road to let a big bull elk walk across and walk alongside the road so we could get a good look at it. While we were finishing the drive into Lamar we got passed by the wolf watchers so we made our first U-Turn to go catch up with them. While following the Doug McLaughlin to find the wolves, we saw a few bighorn sheep rams that we had to pull into the turnout to look at. Once we were done looking at the rams, we continued on our way to the Hell Roaring peak just to get passed by Doug  again going the other way so we made our second U-Turn for the day to catch up with them so we can listen to his stories and knowledge about the current wolf status and how the pups died this year.

We finally caught up with Doug and learned that distemper is the number one killer of the wolf pups this year. After we finished our talk with Doug we got a tip that the Junction Butte pack was hanging out in the Silver Slough Creek area to find the wolves. The group was able to see the last three wolves just as they were getting ready to go over the hill so everyone was a lot chipper the rest of the day. The next stop was lunch and then we made our way to an 8 month old elk kill that was a huge bull elk with double drop tines on it. After the carcass we ventured out to the famous wolf den of wolf 09. After that we finished the day by heading towards lava creek to tie the day up when we made one last U-turn to go make one last effort to see the famous pika which turned out to be the right choice as we were able to see one within the first 2 minutes. Once we were all done looking for the pika, we finished the trip towards the lava creek where  mike read an Aldo Leopold essay about how wolves are the smartest hunters and help strengthen the wildlife in the area.