Meeker

And I'm actually from rural America myself, from Colorado, far northwestern.

part of the state little town called Meeker.

2,500 people were famous for having the longest continuously running rodeo in Colorado since 1885.

And the sheepdog trials are there too.

What state was that in?

We were in Meeker, Colorado.

Nice.

And what, what do you remember about that hunt? And, and was it, uh, like a buildup to that elk hunt or did you have multiple hunts prior and then you just happened to shoot your first elk when you were 12 or what's the progression?

between however many there are in a certain community like Durango and the tens or hundreds of thousands that used to exist, especially on those large western slopes.

mule deer herds and so we're talking it's like a scale issue it's an order of magnitude like 10 orders of magnitude scale that between a herd that would have 50,000 mule deer that's a migratory mule deer herd such as like the White River herd over in Meeker compared to what's in town in the town of Meeker so it's definitely they're different animals and there's a definite dichotomy between in perception of the plight of the large migratory deer herd versus the one that they always see in town.

That's why we have communication specialists like you to help us communicate those sort of nuances.

That's right, John.

We just are now looking.

In the early 2000s, when we first detected chronic waste disease on the Western Slope, there was a lot of concern about it from our agency and hunters.

And in 2001 and 2002, we sampled over 20,000 deer and elk for chronic waste disease and for the vast majority, with the exception of around Meeker.

The vast majority of the western slope, we did not detect it with the highest sampling we've ever done.

And today, Rio Blanco County has the wolf pack.

So Denver got the wolf and Meeker got the bill.

Tracy Ross over at the Colorado Sun has covered this program since day one.

And back in May, she reported that it had hit what the agency itself was calling an inflection point, with the program's leaders stepping down, the wolf population dwindling, and the conflicts with ranchers going up.