On a sunny morning two years ago, a group of state officials stood in the mountains of northwestern Colorado in front of a handful of large metal crates. With a small crowd watching them, the officials began to unlatch the crate doors one by one. Out of each came a gray wolf — arguably the nation’s most controversial endangered species.

This was a massive moment for conservation.

While gray wolves once ranged throughout much of the Lower 48, a government-backed extermination campaign wiped most of them out in the 19th and 20th centuries. By the 1940s, Colorado had lost all of its resident wolves.

But, in the fall of 2020, Colorado voters did something unprecedented: They passed a ballot measure to reintroduce gray wolves to the state. This wasn’t just about having wolves on the landscap

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