05/16/2026
A young gray wolf born near Mount Hood walked into California in January 2021 and did not stop until he was seventy-five miles northwest of Los Angeles, the farthest south a wolf had been documented in the state since 1922.
His designation was OR-93. He was born in 2019 into the White River pack in northern Oregon and fitted with a GPS collar in June 2020. Seven months later, on January 30, 2021, his collar pinged from Modoc County in northeastern California. He briefly crossed back into Oregon, then re-entered California on February 4 and turned south.
Over the next two months, OR-93's GPS data drew a line down the length of the state that no wolf had traveled in a century. He passed through Modoc, Lassen, Plumas, Sierra, Nevada, Placer, El Dorado, Amador, and Calaveras counties along the Sierra Nevada crest. He crossed into Alpine County, then Mono County. By mid-March he was in western Tuolumne County, near Yosemite. By late March he had reached Fresno County. Then he turned west, crossed Highway 99 and Interstate 5, and entered San Benito County on the far side of the Central Valley. By April 1 he was in Monterey County. His last collar transmission came from San Luis Obispo County on April 5.
He was the first wolf documented on California's central coast in two to three hundred years.
Between January 30 and April 5, OR-93 covered at least 935 air miles inside California, averaging a minimum of sixteen miles per day. Air miles, meaning straight-line distance between collar points. The actual ground distance through the mountain terrain, agricultural valleys, and highway corridors he navigated was significantly higher. He crossed the Sierra Nevada. He crossed the Central Valley. He threaded through some of the most heavily trafficked infrastructure in the state. He passed near major population centers. Nobody saw him. A hundred-pound wild predator walked the length of California over sixty-five days and the only evidence of his passage was a series of GPS coordinates transmitted from his collar.
After April 5 the collar went silent. For seven months, nobody knew where OR-93 was or whether he was alive.
On November 10, 2021, a truck driver spotted a dead canid on a dirt trail along a frontage road parallel to Interstate 5 near the town of Lebec in Kern County. A warden responded and identified the animal immediately by the radio collar. Necropsy at the state wildlife forensics lab in Rancho Cordova confirmed injuries consistent with a vehicle strike, significant tissue trauma to the left rear leg, a dislocated knee, and soft tissue trauma to the abdomen.
He died seventy-five miles from downtown Los Angeles. The last wolf confirmed that far south in California had been captured in San Bernardino County in 1922, ninety-nine years earlier.
OR-93 was the son of OR-7's legacy in a direct sense. OR-7, who we covered previously, was the first wolf to enter California in nearly ninety years when he crossed the border in 2011. One of OR-7's sons founded the Lassen pack in northern California. His daughter, OR-54, dispersed as far south as the Lake Tahoe basin before she was found dead in Shasta County. OR-93 pushed the line further than any of them, carrying the same dispersal drive that had sent OR-7 south a decade earlier, except OR-93 did not turn around. He kept going until he ran out of California or California ran out of him.
There are roughly twenty known wolves in the state today. All of them live in northern California. The central coast, the Sierra foothills, the San Joaquin Valley, and the mountains around Kern County where OR-93 died are empty of wolves and have been for a century. OR-93 proved the habitat is still there. The corridors still connect. A wolf can walk from Mount Hood to the outskirts of Los Angeles if nobody stops it. What the corridor lacks is not connectivity. It is a second wolf walking the same route at the same time.
Source: Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife / California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) Telemetry Data 2021
