The Blue Range Wilderness

For these next long miles you're skirting the edge of the Blue Range — one of the last great pieces of true wilderness in the American Southwest, hundreds of thousands of roadless acres of rugged mountain and deep canyon rolling away to the east, with the Blue River running wild through the bottom of it. There are no towns in there, no roads, barely a trail — about as empty and untamed as country gets in the Lower Forty-Eight, and that's exactly why it was chosen as the place to bring the wolves home. Somewhere out in that blue distance right now, a pack of Mexican gray wolves is denned up in the timber. Watch the meadows and the tree lines as you drive, especially at dawn and dusk — for elk, for deer, and if you are extraordinarily lucky, for the gray shape and the yellow eyes of a lobo. This is their country again.