Two injured in wolf attack on Dalton Highway, troopers say

Two people were attacked along the Dalton Highway on Monday by a wolf that ran away after a motorist nearby shot at it, Alaska State Troopers said.

Troopers said the animal appeared to have been fed prior to the encounter along the highway, the remote 415-mile road between Livengood and Deadhorse. The man and woman, who have not been identified, suffered puncture wounds to their legs, according to a troopers spokesman, who said they are from Alaska and were in a private vehicle.

The pair was stopped in a construction zone at Mile 37 just before 3:30 p.m. when the wolf bit them while they waited for a pilot car outside their vehicle, troopers said in an online summary Tuesday. Another motorist shot at the wolf, which ran into nearby woods and wasn’t apparently injured, they said.

Alaska Wildlife Troopers didn’t find the animal Monday and no sightings had been reported Tuesday, officials said.

Troopers said the people involved in the attack were not feeding the wolf. But the animal was “observed by motorists walking in the roadway going from vehicle to vehicle as if it had been fed before,” troopers spokesman Tim DeSpain said in an email Tuesday.

Feeding wildlife is illegal under state law.

Troopers said officials from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game had been notified about Monday’s attack. Officials there didn’t immediately respond to a request for more information.

Workers on the construction project described seeing the wolf for about a week, DeSpain said. It wasn’t clear if the animal was part of a pack, he said, but workers had seen other wolves in the area as well.

The Dalton Highway, also known as the Haul Road, is the only road accessing Prudhoe Bay oil fields and one of the northernmost roads in the world. Truckers and other drivers occasionally report spotting wolf packs along the route that transects swaths of wilderness through the Brooks Range and to the tundra of the Arctic coast.

Originally constructed by Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. to support the development of the trans-Alaska pipeline and service the North Slope, it opened to the public in 1994 and is maintained by the state. The road is still heavily used by commercial truck traffic delivering fuel, supplies, equipment and other materials.

The construction project where the encounter Monday took place is an ongoing state reconstruction project between Miles 18 and 37, according to the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities.

Wolves roam the Chugach Mountains and into the urban fringes of Anchorage, sometimes triggering alarm. Two packs roaming Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson and the Ship Creek area on either side of the Glenn Highway in 2010 prompted calls among Eagle River and East Anchorage residents for authorities to shoot and kill aggressive animals.

That same year, a teacher jogging near the Southwest Alaska village of Chignik was killed by wolves, the second known fatal wolf attack in North America.

Wolf attacks on humans are rare but do occur, especially when the animals are rabid, according to a report by the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research. Between 2002 and 2020, the researchers identified 489 cases, 380 of them involving rabid wolves, according to the report. Another 67 were described as predatory attacks and 42 provoked or defensive attacks.

The researchers said there is “an urgent need” to learn more about so-called bold or fearless wolves “and understand at what point a harmless degree of habituation to humans” can lead to potentially dangerous behavior.