DENVER — A new wolf pack has formed in Eagle County, Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) confirmed on Wednesday morning.
It has been named the Piney Ridge Pack.
“Detection of pups in late spring or early summer is inherently challenging, because of their use of remote habitats in dense cover, secretive nature of very young animals, and time potentially underground,” explained CPW’s Wolf Conservation Program Manager Eric Odell.
So while few details are currently available about the pack, more details will be released in CPW's annual wolf report, which is published each spring, CPW said. Denver7 wrote about the 2026 Gray Wolf Annual Report here.
"Having a new wolf pack this year in Colorado is a great sign for the overall program, pack formation, and, therefore, reproduction in these early years," said Brenna Cassidy, wolf monitoring and data coordinator for CPW, in an interview with Denver7. "When I think about wolf ecology, I really concentrate on the packs because that is the unit of what's really, really important to being a wolf and to being successful."
Four of Colorado's wolf packs successfully reproduced this year, including the Piney Ridge Pack. The others are the One Ear Pack in Jackson County, the Three Creeks Pack in Rio Blanco County and the Copper Creek Pack in Pitkin County. As of Wednesday, it does not appear that the King Mountain Pack in Routt County successfully raised pups this year.
"Having four breeding packs this year and four breeding packs last year, even though we have a really small population, still is very, very encouraging," Cassidy said. "... This is a great sign for the program. This should be encouraging news on our journey towards a self-sustaining population."
Below is the latest wolf movement map released by CPW each month.
On average, wolves birth four to six pups each spring. Odell said his team is continuing to monitor the packs and will include the minimum count of the state's wolf population in the 2027 spring report. Wolf pups typically have a survival rate of roughly 50%, though that can fluctuate year over year.
"There can be low years where maybe there is a disease outbreak, and then there can be really successful years, like we had last year, where we had over 80% of the pups that we detected survived over the year," Cassidy said.
When wolves create packs — which is defined as when a pair attempts to den and raise pups — CPW can better determine where their staff should implement conflict minimization tools and techniques to protect livestock because those wolves are likely not dispersing as much. Those tactics include things like fladry, scare devices and range riders.
"When wolves are in packs and therefore usually are protecting a territory against other wolves, that is overlapping both public and private land, and while that can make things tough for the producers that are within that core territory, it does make those wolves a little bit more predictable," Cassidy said. "So, for a conflict team, that means that they can allocate some of those resources... Those things can be allocated to areas that have higher wolf presence that is a bit more predictable than somewhere where we don't know if wolves are going to go over here, over here, over here."
The creation of packs is also good for the animals, which tend to survive longer in a group compared to when they are solo, according to research, Cassidy said. The chances of reproduction and successful hunts also increase in packs.
“We are still working from a modest amount of data in Colorado — due to the relatively new nature of our wolf population as well as its small size — but so far we are seeing a clear pattern of wolves in packs surviving longer than wolves that are not in packs,” Cassidy said. “For instance, in the last biological year (April 1, 2025 - March 30, 2026), we experienced 10 mortalities among our wolf population, seven of these were dispersers and only three were pack members. This shows us the benefit of having more packs on the Colorado landscape for both adult survival and reproduction as we work to achieve the goals of the Colorado Wolf Restoration and Management Plan. ”
According to CPW's depredation tracker — which monitors instances where a wolf seriously injured or killed livestock or a working dog — one calf was attacked by a wolf in Eagle County this biological year, which runs between April 2026 and March 2027. It occurred on July 16. It is not yet known if the wolf or wolves involved are members of the Piney Ridge Pack or not.
Denver7 has been following Colorado's wolf reintroduction program since the very beginning, and you can explore all of that reporting in the timeline below, which starts with our most recent story.
In Colorado, CPW is responsible for naming each of its wolf packs. Colorado currently has five. The name of the pack comes from some sort of geographic feature somewhere in their general territory.
"It doesn't mean that the den is right at that feature," Cassidy said. "It doesn't mean that the wolves spend a ton of time right at that feature, but (it is) somewhere that we know that they use and that is going to be in their territory."
Piney Ridge is a prominent feature in Eagle County, she said.
"Wolf pack territories are generally several 100 square kilometers," Cassidy explained. "So if you go looking at Piney Ridge, you're not going to see anything... If people are thinking about viewing wolves, they're often thinking about somewhere like Yellowstone. That's such a different situation than we have here. That is a very established place. That place is very well-known for viewing wolves. That's not what we have in Colorado."
Anybody who sees a wolf is asked to take photos and video, and report it using this CPW online form.
Denver7 in-depth wolf coverage
The below list outlines an overview of the known wolf population in Colorado:
- Four wolves surviving from the original 10 that were released in December 2023 (one died of a likely mountain lion attack, a second died from injuries sustained prior to his capture as part of the Copper Creek Pack relocation effort, a third wolf became sickly and died, a fourth died in Wyoming, a fifth died during a re-collaring operation in February 2026, and a sixth died in northwest Colorado the following month)
- Two wolves surviving of the five wolf pups born in the spring of 2024 (one male was killed by CPW after multiple depredations in Pitkin County, a second male was shot for the same reasons in September 2025 and a third wolf was killed by CPW in June 2026 after a series of depredations)
- Eight wolves surviving from the 15 that were released in January 2025 (one was shot and killed by Wildlife Services in Wyoming, a second died of unknown causes in Wyoming, a third died in Rocky Mountain National Park, a fourth died in northwest Colorado, the fifth died in northwest Colorado after it was likely hit by a car, a sixth died in southwestern Colorado, and a seventh died in northwest Colorado)
- At least 14 pups born in four packs in 2025: Two in the Copper Creek Pack, four in the King Mountain Pack, five in the One Ear Pack and three in the Three Creeks Pack
- Two uncollared wolves that moved south from Wyoming several years ago and have been reported in and out of North Park. It is not clear if they are alive or still in the state.
