I've been a game warden in Park County, Wyoming for 11 years.

I took the job in 2013 after four years with fish and game down in Lander, and before that I spent two seasons doing wildlife surveys for the Forest Service in the Shoshone National Forest.

I know these mountains.

I know the Absarokas and the bear tooths and every drainage between Cody and the Montana line.

I've tracked wounded elk through chest deep snow at 9,000 feet. I've pulled drowned fishermen out of

the Clark's Fork in June, when the runoff turned it into something that would kill you in 40 seconds. I've put down a out of the Clark's Fork in June, when the runoff turned it into

something that would kill you in 40 seconds.

I've put down a grizzly that wandered into a church parking lot in Wapiti on a Sunday

morning.

Nothing I've done in this job prepared me for what I found on Elk Creek in May of 2023.

I need to write this down because the official report doesn't tell the whole story.

The report says what the county attorney told me to say.

It says what would hold up.

It does not say what actually happened, and it does not explain the things I saw in that canyon

that I still can't explain.

Sitting here 14 months later at my kitchen table in Cody,

with the doors locked and the porch light on. It started with a phone call on a Tuesday morning,

May 9th. I was at my desk in the regional office filling out harvest reports from the spring

turkey season when dispatch patched through a call from a woman named Brenda Kyle.

She lived on a small cattle operation south of Clark, Wyoming, right where the foothills start

climbing toward the Absaroka Range. She told me her neighbor, a man named Dale Purcell, hadn't been

seen in six days. Dale was 71 years old. He lived alone in a two-room cabin

...