📍 White Wilderness programme · Liptov region, Slovakia
I left for White Wilderness with a packed bag and a mild sense of dread. I’m not sure what I expected, but I was sure it would be a ride. What I got was far better.
Learning to read the snow
The first morning started sharp, with a 6am breakfast, short walks near the house, a few presentations and early impressions of a wolf print in fresh snow. By day two, things got more serious. Driving with Katka in a valley with the windows down at −15°C, scanning roadside snow for tracks, I understood this was going to be a biting experience.
Spectacular views that we enjoyed every single day.
We found at least three wolves moving in what looked like a chaotic pattern — probably hunting. We collected biological samples in fading light and only just made it back before dark. My hands had stopped working properly around noon.
The day that felt like a film
Day three started as a proper expedition and brought the promised adventure. I went out with Peter — who looks, uncannily, like the character Fitzgerald from The Revenant — on a 21 km hike through challenging mountain terrain with 1,000 metres of elevation and snow depth up to my chest on a steep slope. We tracked lynx and followed a wolf group all the way to a high saddle.
Signs of wolf play in the snow on the top of the mountain saddle.
Peter picked up wolf tracks through a section completely churned up by deer — I would have lost them entirely. He spotted evidence of the wolves avoiding a manmade structure, and signs of play in the snow. Watching someone read a landscape like a text is genuinely humbling.
The killsite
If day three was the most atmospheric, day four was the most dramatic. Katka pushed through difficult terrain following wolfpack prints until she found what she was looking for: the remains of a large deer. A killsite, complete and undisturbed.
The killsite of a red deer.
Bird droppings from scavengers. A missing eye. The stomach contents scattered nearby. The pain the deer had to endure was quite evident on the scene. Brutal, yes. But the whole winter-forest ecosystem feeds on wolf kills like this. They earn their place.
Soon after, we found other signs of a dead roe deer and then, overlaid on the lynx tracks, bear prints — evidence that a bear had found the carcass, stole it and dragged it into the bushes. We didn’t follow that trail. Some things are better left alone.
What stays with you
On the last evening we lit a bonfire and finally chatted about everything wolf unrelated. It’s those kinds of conversations that reorganise your life, priorities and worldview. I felt the liberating thought that the relative importance we assign to so many things is artificial. The only things we actually need are this moment, air to breathe, a bit of warmth and something to fill the stomach.
Living here, we Slovaks often forget what kind of natural jewels surround us and that various life forms can coexist and benefit from each other. People from around the world pay to come here and see what has been destroyed in their countries with their own eyes.
I came home tired, a little frozen in the joints, and carrying way more than I’d packed. Most importantly, I met some incredible people who are passionate about protecting and nurturing nature. The wolves are still out there, moving through the Liptov valleys in patterns that, for a few days at least, I could almost begin to read. I left something behind in those valleys and came back different. I’m still figuring out what it was.