Ultra-Rare Animal Walks up to Montana Backpackers—What Is It?

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A small-ish dark-colored mammal with a tiny bear face and a bushy tail walked up to Reddit user @Gyrtohorea and his wife while they were cooking a meal during a backpacking trip in Glacier National Park. The couple was spending a few nights camping near Cracker Lake when the mystery animal popped up about 10 feet away from them, reared up on its hind legs, and then ran away up a mountainside. Turns out, it’s a wolverine, one of the rarest mammals in North America.

Gyrtohorea shared a few photos of the wolverine on the Reddit thread r/animalid, in which people post photos of animals for help identifying them, and the post blew up. The community was thrilled that the man stumbled across a wolverine, and the post garnered over 1,500 comments.

As the post exploded in popularity, Gyrtohorea chimed in with some additional information about the encounter. He revealed that the wolverine sighting was actually from September 2017. He’d shared the post after a moderator posted a photo of a wolverine asking people to stop identifying things as wolverines when they’re not wolverines.

Except, Gyrtohorea thought, he and his wife actually had seen a wolverine, so he shared his photos from 2017. He says although he asked the community what the animal could be, he knew it was a wolverine and was aware how rare the encounter was. He seemed thrilled at how excited everyone was, since he said over the past seven years, he’d tried showing people the photos and no one seemed to realize how special it was.

“I AM happy to find a group of people that appreciate this though, as everyone I have ever talked about this with and shown them photos was never very impressed,” he wrote in a reply to a comment on his original post. “It’s always been kind of disappointing for my wife and I that no one ever shared in our excitement.”

Check out his photos of a rare wolverine here:

About Wolverines

Wolverines are the largest terrestrial members of the Mustelidae family, and they’re related to weasels and minks. Historically, their range included the Sierra Nevada mountains of California and the southern Rocky Mountains in Colorado, Wyoming, and New Mexico.

Today, according to the National Wildlife Federation, wolverines roam the North Cascades Range in Washington; the Northern Rockies of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming; and a small portion of Oregon’s Wallowa Range. Wolverines also live in Alaska, Canada, and Russia.