MESA COUNTY — Christina Vander Berg knelt in the dirt on top of a hill, using a tape measure to size up a paw print as the wind blasted grit in her eyes.
She spotted the print from the saddle. Although nearly certain it belonged to a coyote, it’s her job to make sure the tracks don’t belong to a wolf — like the one local ranchers had reported seeing a month earlier.
“I’m just keeping an eye out,” she said as she took a photo of the print and logged the observation on a map on her phone.
Vander Berg raises cattle, judges rodeo, and for the past two years has spent her summers patrolling 50,000 acres of rolling hills covered in sagebrush and heavy timber in Mesa County on Colorado’s Western Slope. Each summer day, she looks for signs of wolves.
She is one of 18 range riders working across Colorado to protect livestock from the state’s most controversial predator. The riders — 15 hired by the state and three, including Vander Berg, hired by the conservation nonprofit Defenders of Wildlife — are a critical part of efforts to help ranchers protect their livestock on the state’s vast summer grazing lands. When they do their jobs well, it minimizes the chances that wolves will pick off cattle and sheep.
The part-time job has placed Vander Berg, 41, smack in the middle of the yearslong turmoil surrounding the return of the native species, which the state reintroduced in 2023 under the mandate of mostly urban voters. Ranchers across rural Colorado — where more than 30 of the predators now roam — have decried the threat posed to their livestock and livelihoods.
The controversy has spawned death threats, necessitated increased security at state wildlife meetings, and caused a rippling breakdown in relationships between rural Coloradans, the state wildlife agency and wildlife advocacy groups.
“I’m not sure if our range rider program is doing this yet, because trust takes time. But my goal … is to provide holistic support to the people who are carrying the burden of this wolf reintroduction,” said Rae Nickerson, who is tasked with running one of the country’s only state-sponsored range rider programs as Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s wolf damage and conflict minimization manager.
Vander Berg, for her part, doesn’t mince words.
It’s been extremely hard, she said, to work on one of Colorado’s most controversial issues for a wildlife advocacy organization in a community where people see wolves as a threat — and see the outsiders who supported the apex predator’s reintroduction as suspicious, at best.
She tries not to get caught up in the rhetoric. Instead, she puts on her boots, straps on her handgun and swings a leg over her saddle.
“At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what we think,” Vander Berg said on a June afternoon as she rode through the sagebrush. “The wolves have been released. Now we need to talk and collaborate and move forward.”
The idea of a range rider might conjure images of a cowgirl galloping after a wolf, hazing it from her herds. But the range riders’ job is much broader — and more complicated — than simple wolf patrol.
There’s the physical labor: tracking predator prints, learning the landscape, keeping an eye out for broken fences and sick cows.
Then there’s the tougher, more abstract mission: building trust in communities that feel unfairly burdened by the reintroduction program and often harbor skepticism toward Colorado Parks and Wildlife and advocacy groups.
“If at the end of the day, folks can’t sleep at night because they’re wondering if a wolf is attacking their livestock, having a rider up there is something tangible we can do,” Nickerson said. “Is it perfect? Is it reducing conflict? I don’t really know. But is it reducing stress? I think so.”
Vander Berg appreciates having a seat at the table on one of the largest issues roiling rural Colorado — even when it’s tough.
“I like being part of the bigger picture,” she said. “And I love a challenge.”
‘Millenia-old risk mitigation’
Sometimes, the challenge is navigating complex conversations. Other times, it’s simpler, like finding the right aspen tree on which to hang a game camera.
Vander Berg squatted in front of a slim aspen on a recent afternoon while her horse, Dollar, pawed impatiently at the ground behind her. She was placing one of the 10 cameras she uses to keep an eye on wildlife on the allotment.
She had scouted the tree several days prior and found it met most of the criteria. It’s on a natural wildlife pathway, it’s not pointing directly into the rising or setting sun, and it’s free of foliage that would block the camera’s view. She uses a camouflage-patterned lock to keep people and animals from messing with its placement. Animals love to lick, chew and rub up against the cameras.
“If I had a nickel for every time I got a picture of an animal’s mouth, I’d be rich,” Kaitie Schneider, the Rockies and Plains representative for Defenders of Wildlife, said while she watched Vander Berg affix the camera.
Photos from the cameras are just one of the data points Vander Berg collects. As she rides, she marks a plethora of information on a map: cow bones, wildlife tracks, water sources, animal scat. While wolves are her first priority, she also keeps track of all predators and big game, since ranchers are eligible to claim compensation for damage caused by other species, too.
She rides a different route every day, avoiding predictability and traversing as much of the 78-square-mile allotment as possible.
Tracking all of that information, combined with Vander Berg’s hundreds of hours familiarizing herself with the land, means that she will notice when something is awry. And she’ll be ready to respond if CPW alerts her of a nearby wolf. Many of the wolves in the state wear a collar that transmits data about their locations, allowing CPW to give ranchers and range riders a heads-up when one is in their vicinity.
Her job is more than wolf watch, though. She helps wrangle escaped cows, mends broken fences, keeps an eye on water sources, gives directions on the public lands, and monitors the thousands of cows and calves for sickness.
“Itap a little bit of everything,” she said.
Range riders are not a new concept, Nickerson said.
“They’re millennia-old risk mitigation,” she said.
CPW launched its range rider program in 2025 with 11 range riders, who rode, hiked and drove about 14,800 miles on behalf of 34 ranchers. This year, CPW expanded the program to 15 riders deployed across the state. Each rider contracts with the agency and is assigned to an area, but agency staff can move them to other places, depending on wolf activity.
Since reintroduction, wolves have injured or killed 81 head of livestock across the state, . The agency has paid more than $1.3 million to ranchers to compensate them for those losses as well as for more tangential impacts from a wolf’s presence, like lower birth rates.
Ranchers have repeatedly told CPW leaders that the toll of the wolf reintroduction is not only on their herd numbers, but also their well-being.
“The stress that wolves create is unique compared to drought or larkspur or other things because I think, for a lot of people, that those things feel like an act of God — that is a part of raising livestock,” Nickerson said.
Illness or weather may kill more livestock than wolves, but for many ranchers it’s not about the numbers, she said.
“It’s not about the amount of loss, it’s about the amount of stress,” she said.
During calving season this spring, one ranching family near Walden split up night-watch shifts for its herds for more than two months because wolves were in the area, said Erin Karney Spaur , the executive vice president of . The husband stood guard from dusk to midnight, his mom took over through 4 a.m., and his wife then filled in until dawn, she said.
“When (producers) know that wolves are in the area, that’s all they think about, 24/7,” she said.
The producers who are working with range riders have reported positive experiences, Karney Spaur said. She hopes the range-riding programs can scale up to meet more need and span longer than just the summer grazing season. The spring calving season is also a vulnerable time for livestock, she said.
Range riders are one of the tools or strategies CPW offers to prevent depredations. Others include equipment designed to scare the predators away and management of livestock carcasses so that they do not attract wolves.
If a wolf is found to routinely kill or maim livestock, CPW will kill it.
CPW leaders have budgeted $1 million for the range riding program, which is primarily funded through proceeds from the , CPW spokesman Luke Perkins said. When drivers in Colorado choose the specialty plate, they contribute $50 to nonlethal wolf conflict mitigation programs. As of May 31, the program had raised $1.3 million.
operates separately from CPW’s, though the nonprofit frequently collaborates with the agency.
Ranger riders’ overarching job is to give ranchers a break, Nickerson said. Essentially: to be their eyes so producers can more peacefully close theirs.
“Range riding is learning the patterns of your landscape and your wildlife and your livestock so that if there’s a shift that might be signaling that something is wrong — whether itap predator-related, illness, injury — you can catch it in time to react more quickly,” she said.
Job requires extensive skills — and ingenuity
Riders also learn unexpected things, like how difficult it is to lift the exhaust system of a Ford F-350.
Vander Berg isn’t exactly sure what such a system weighs, but she knows it’s extremely heavy. She knows that because one time she scraped the exhaust system off her truck while working in the field. Alone, she had to use chains — ones she’d normally used to close corral gates — to hitch it to the undercarriage of her truck so that she could limp home.
“I never know what I’m going to get into,” she said.
It takes a certain type of person to succeed as a range rider, Nickerson and Schneider said: Independent but community-minded. Tough but communicative. Able to handle mishaps — such as dislocated exhaust systems — and emergencies. And a rider must be comfortable spending hours alone, deep in rugged country without cell phone service.
“There’s nobody else coming,” Vander Berg said.
Vander Berg packs her saddlebags accordingly — the supplies she carries would impress even the best Eagle Scout. There are the basics, like a first aid kit, food, toilet paper, extra-warm clothes and water. Then there’s duct tape, a hoof pick, wire cutters, saws in two sizes, a rain slicker, a flashlight, a headlamp, a dog water bowl, a portable charger, a Leatherman multitool, a whistle, matches, a lighter, a hatchet, an extra leather strap.
And there’s the equipment she needs for her job — game cameras, memory cards, a notepad, pens and pencils, rulers and measuring tapes.
Later in the summer, when the herds are higher on the hills and farther from roads, Vander Berg brings a backpacking stove and simple food like cups of ramen. She’ll spend up to 12 hours in the saddle those days, she said, and sometimes won’t return to camp until after 11 p.m.
Beyond backcountry skills, range riders also need to know how livestock behave, Nickerson said. They need to know how to identify pink eye and hoof rot, and they need to know which cow is always panicking and can be ignored — and which cow’s panic might indicate a threat.
Other skills can be taught, Schneider said, such as identifying wolf prints and determining whether a wolf caused a specific depredation.
Ranch hands, outfitters and hunters often make good candidates, Nickerson said. But they also need one more critical skill: communication.
“(Range riding) is the only nonlethal tool that gives a producer a real break in their stress and their workload,” Nickerson said. “So if you have a range rider thatap not communicating with you, itap kind of against the point.”
Vander Berg didn’t grow up on a ranch or in Colorado.
She spent more than two decades in emergency services with a focus on fire investigation, a career that moved her around the country, including a stint in Colorado. In 2015, she returned to the state, this time settling down in rural Mesa County.
She learned to ranch and be a cowgirl by showing up. For years, she helped neighbors with their brandings and vaccinations. She rode in the backcountry with cowboys and bought her own small cattle herd. Eventually, local ranchers hired her on as day help. Then, in 2025, she signed on as a range rider with Defenders of Wildlife.
The trust she’s built in the community over the years is critical to her work. A multigenerational pool of ranchers graze their cattle on the allotment she’s tasked with riding. They need to know that she’ll keep herself safe, keep their interests in mind and let them know of anything amiss.
“If you do the right thing, people trust you,” Vander Berg said.
A tool in the toolbox
Vander Berg’s cell phone rings incessantly when there are rumors of a wolf.
Her neighbors want to know if she’s heard of a wolf in the area, if a paw print they found could be from a wolf, or why they spotted Colorado Parks and Wildlife trucks nearby.
The range-riding season runs from June to October, but Vander Berg has become the de facto year-round point of contact for wolf problems in her community. She makes calls to find out what’s going on or sets out to find the CPW trucks folks are worried about to ask staff members if they’re there because of wolves. (Once, it was just a team of biologists looking for toads.)
This is one of the most critical parts of Vander Berg’s job, Schneider said. She is a trusted conduit for communication and information. Much of producers’ fear and frustration stems from not knowing what the wolves or Colorado Parks and Wildlife are doing, she said.
“I think itap that loss of power that is so frustrating,” Schneider said.
Defenders of Wildlife began working on the ground with producers in Colorado in 2019, before the 2020 statewide vote that mandated the reintroduction.
For the last three years — even before the state launched its own program — the organization has hired range riders to help ranchers. In addition to Vander Berg, two riders are working this summer in the One Ear Pack’s territory in north-central Colorado, where wolves’ presence has been concentrated for years.
After the reintroduction, Defenders of Wildlife saw a gap in services and filled it, Schneider said. The organization hires riders where ranchers and riders have expressed interest in its program. The need is vast — even if the organization could hire 50 range riders, that wouldn’t be enough, she said.
Range riding is not a silver bullet, CPW’s Nickerson said. It’s one tool in the toolbox of conflict mitigation.
Nickerson has worked across the West on predator conflict, including in states with long-established wolf populations, like Wyoming, Montana and New Mexico. In those states, she sees hope for Colorado’s future.
“The tension between the agricultural community and the predator-advocate community is real in every state,” she said. “But time really has a benefit long term. Right now, things in Colorado feel really, really hot, and thatap because everything is really new.
“There’s a lot of pressure to get things right the first time, but we are going to learn through our mistakes as we go.”
