Through some quirk of bureaucratic processes, there's a good-sized rectangular cutout in the current borders of Alaska's Denali National Park. Known as the Stampede Corridor, this strip of land near its northeast corner exists outside the park's official purview.
Because it falls under state rather than federal regulations, hunters and trappers have seasonal access to the land and its fauna. Park biologists and wildlife advocates, however, would prefer to see the Stampede Corridor subject to the same protections as the park's 6 million acres in order to keep recreational bloodsports at bay.
That's led to four decades of conflict over how to conduct wildlife management in this exceptional territory, with wolf populations — once an existential threat to frontier ranchers, a historic source of income for trappers, a vital apex predator to biologists and ecologists — becoming emblematic of the competing viewpoints.
Director Ramey Newell's documentary A Good Wolf, one of the eight features at this year's Spokane International Film Festival, or SpIFF, offers a window onto the stunning natural beauty of the Stampede Corridor and this much uglier battle of human interests in and around it.
The film can partly trace its origins to Wolf Call, a short film that Newell released on the festival circuit in 2018.
During that project, described by Newell as "a portrait of a person who works at a wolf sanctuary in Colorado," she met Nicole Schmitt, who would go on to become executive director of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance. Schmitt is one of a handful of focal figures and interviewees in A Good Wolf.
"She was familiar with my previous film work down in Colorado, and so she called me up after she took over at AWA to ask if I was working on anything and to propose that I look into this issue that's explored in A Good Wolf," Newell says. "I was pretty acutely aware from the get-go that it was a contentious issue and that people had very strongly held opinions and feelings about it. One of the first people that I spoke with in doing my research up in the Denali area warned me 'You're kicking a hornet's nest.'"
Among that agitated swarm is Coke Wallace, a trapper, hunter, guide and unapologetic curmudgeon who's operated in the Stampede Corridor for around 30 years. In 2012, Wallace made headlines in the Lower 48 for using his aging horse as bait and snaring one of two primary breeding female wolves in Denali's Grant Creek pack. He was featured again in a 2017 National Geographic article on the park's fraught history.
As Wallace says in one of the film's telling exchanges, he agreed to take part in filming because he felt misrepresented by those print articles.
"He's not a one-dimensional character as he has been portrayed previously in written accounts of this conflict," Newell says. "I wanted to make sure that he was presented as a multidimensional human being, even if his opinions or attitudes seem pretty diametrically opposed to some other people's. He's still a complex human, just like the rest of us."
Alongside its human participants, A Good Wolf attempts to tell the lupine side of the story through 1202, the scientific ID for a lone female wolf who, at the time of filming, has survived well beyond the average life expectancy but is showing signs of injury.
Sun, March 9 at 11 am, $7-$12
The Magic Lantern
"We started following 1202's story from the beginning. She was present in conversations in our very first interviews back in 2019," Newell explains, "and we just really lucked out that her story was able to be woven through in that way. She was a pretty incredible animal."
Also present throughout the film are meditative shots of the gorgeous snow-covered (or, depending on the season, rust-colored) landscapes and jagged, cloud-encircled mountains that have made Denali a tourist destination and conservationist grail. Similar to the way she aims to present her human subjects, Newell and her director of photography, Lindsay Taylor Jackson, use the footage to let the park's rugged beauty speak for itself.
"My goal as a filmmaker is never to be objective. I don't think that that is even possible. I would say that in place of objectivity, my goal is to be fair and to be honest. So I tried to do both of those things."
A Good Wolf asks the same of its audience. Newell says her desired outcome is primarily to "challenge people's priors" and encourage viewers to reflect on whatever preconceptions they might bring to the issue. If they come away with a more "nuanced understanding" of how public lands like Denali are managed, all the better.
"I think we've come to a really unsettling place in our culture where we sort ourselves into ideological buckets and refuse to consider or admit or seek any sort of commonality in a lot of ways," she says. "It's harder with some people than with others. But I think that if we're to make any sort of progress or movement on some of these issues that people feel very strongly about, there needs to be some attempt at finding places where there might be compromise." ♦
Correction: This story has been updated to accurately describe biologist and wildlife advocates' goals for protecting wolves in the 6 million Stampede Corridor, as well as a reference to ranching, which doesn't occur inside the corridor.
