Gray Wolf Enters Sequoia National Park for First Time in More Than a Century
A lone gray wolf has accomplished something her species has reportedly not managed in over a century: enter Sequoia National Park.
The three-year-old female, known to wildlife officials as BEY03F, crossed into the California park on May 17. The historic moment was not witnessed by anyone physically present. Rather, it was through her tracking collar that the historic trek and arrival were captured.
BEY03F’s journey has already taken her hundreds of miles across California, including places where wolves had not been documented for more than a century.
This Wolf Has Been Making History For Months
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BEY03F was born in 2023, over in the Beyem Seyo Pack in far northeastern California. By 2025, she had traveled hundreds of miles south. While traveling through Yowlumni Pack territory in the southern Sierra Nevada, she was captured and fitted with a tracking collar.
For young wolves, leaving home is part of a process wildlife biologists call dispersal. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says wolves commonly leave their birth packs to search for mates and eventually form new packs
That search took BEY03F to some unexpected places.
Back in February, she also became the first wild wolf documented in Los Angeles County in more than a century. She later made another century-scale first in Inyo County before continuing her history-making tour toward Sequoia National Park.
“Until they find a mate—that is their goal in life—she’ll just keep looking,” Hunnicutt told the Los Angeles Times.
Therefore, a journey of this magnitude is by no means aimless, bizarre wandering. For a dispersing wolf, finding a place to belong can require an extraordinary amount of ground.
Wolves Returned to California On Their Own
BEY03F’s arrival also marks another chapter in California’s natural wolf recovery.
Gray wolves once lived throughout the state, but the California Department of Fish and Wildlife says the species was likely wiped out there during the 1920s following decades of hunting and trapping.
Then, wolves began coming back naturally on their own.
A male known as OR-7 crossed into California from Oregon in 2011, becoming the state’s first documented wild wolf in modern times. Other dispersing wolves followed, and California’s first modern pack took shape several years later.
CDFW notes that wolves were never reintroduced to California; they found their own way back, gradually expanding into the state from neighboring populations.
More than a century after wolves disappeared from much of California, BEY03F is still pushing that return a little farther south, one soul-searching journey at a time. Who knows what page in the history book she’ll rewrite next.
