NARRATOR: Every winter, the North Cascade Highway gets snowed in.

[motors revving] The only way into these mountains from the Methow Valley is by snowmobile or ski.

Stephanie Williams and David Moskowitz are prepared to do both.

Because the wild animal they're studying lives only in remote mountain environments.

We're gonna service one of our monitoring stations, and it's about, you know, it's well over five miles from the end of the plowed road.

So we get here with the snow machine, and then we get our skis on and we ski on out to the site.

Don't forget the meat.

No.

NARRATOR: Stephanie and David's passion for wildlife biology in these mountains have inspired them to take on a mission that most might consider too inaccessible and impractical.

Stephanie is a professional mountain guide, and David is an award-winning wildlife photographer.

These are handy skills to have in trying to locate and document what is surely the most elusive animal on these mountains, the wolverine.

This animal is literally mythical, right?

I mean, this is this creature that has this ability to survive in this harsh landscape.

Where other creatures flee, go down out of the mountains, or go to sleep for the winter, wolverines just stick around.

I think of them as the spirit animal of the alpine.

It's almost like they're playing in this terrain, up and over steep shoots, over ridges, onto the top of mountain peaks, in the dead of winter, as if it was flat ground.

NARRATOR: Finding wolverines takes funding, staffing, and government support that has been hard to come by.

So in 2017, David and Stephanie teamed up to create the Cascade Wolverine Project.

It's a citizen science effort to answer some very basic but unknown ecological questions, like are there wolverines in this area?

And if so, where exactly?

They set out cameras where they think a wandering wolverine might travel, like mountain saddles and confluences of drainage valleys.

Then they return to see what their camera's recorded.

Bait's gone.

[snow crunching] What'd you say?

Bait's gone.

All right.

This has been out for three weeks, so we'll see if the camera's working anymore.

Yeah, still has half the battery.

Already, we can see a marten in here.

NARRATOR: All of their bait is gone, but it wasn't a wolverine who feasted.

It was one of their cousins of the Mustelid family, a marten.

STEPHANIE: You can kinda see his bushy tail.

NARRATOR: Since their last visit to this monitoring station, their camera's taken several hundred images of a marten.

A very well fed marten.

Yep.

Typical.

DAVID: We should actually be called the Cascades Marten Project.

Word.

Yeah.

With the occasional wolverine mixed in.

Yeah, you know, you kinda get your expectations up for a wolverine.

It's so rare to get them that there's some disappointment.

But that's normal.

[chuckle] Like, this is usually what happens.

NARRATOR: Wolverines are hard to study because they're solitary by nature, and they are wanderers of great distances.

A single wolverine might have a home range of a 100 square miles or more.

They're a small animal in a huge environment, so it's just the chances of coming across them are very low.

I've almost seen a wolverine once.

It ran behind my back, [snow crunching] and I looked around and found its tracks across my ski tracks Among the research community in Washington, I think we had a round table of 20 field biologists asked to raise their hand how many times they'd seen a wolverine.

And I had seen the most, twice.

I had seen the most.

So this is like, it gives you a sense of how rare they are.

NARRATOR: No one can say for sure how many wolverines once lived in the North Cascades.

Like their Mustelid cousins, the sea otters, they were hunted for their fur, and by the early 20th century, had vanished completely.

Now biologists believe that wolverines from Canada are slowly reestablishing in the North Cascades.

David and Stephanie's camera stations provide an on the ground way of witnessing what is happening in these remote and rather inaccessible mountains.

We have usually 10 to 12 stations throughout the winter, and we maintain them over the course of the winter, hoping for images, so that we get simply presence.

Do these animals show up?

And for changes over time as land use changes.

All right, let's see what we got here.

500 photos, all of the Pine Marten.

About like what it usually is here.

NARRATOR: Part of what makes this grassroots effort so unique is the photography element.

Let's try to bring this down to about, yeah, I guess that's as far down as it'll go.

NARRATOR: They use typical trail cameras, but David has developed his own setup with DIY ingenuity, trial and error, and literally duct tape.

I'm doing, like, studio photography here.

We've got different lighting set up at different powers, and I'm using a really nice camera to get portraits, essentially, of these wildlife.

[camera clicking] The photos of wolverines at night have a really particularly kind of ethereal sense to them.

You're kind of like pulling back the blinds on this animal.

So it's like, you just imagine them out here on this snowy night in the winter in the wilderness.

And then there's just this split second where there's lights exposing them, and you get this kind of window into their world.

[camera clicking] And that's what we're going for.

Awareness, excitement, a sense of wonder about a very cool animal that is facing a very unknown future.

NARRATOR: The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife estimates that there may be as few as 25 wolverines in the North Cascades.

Conservation groups have advocated listing the wolverines under the Endangered Species Act for more than 20 years.

STEPHANIE: Without federal protection as an endangered species, it's hard to get that continuous monitoring effort going.

Boom, green.

Green is good, right?

NARRATOR: The need for monitoring has been picked up by grassroots volunteer groups, forming a patchwork of survey areas from the North Cascades to Mount Hood.

We're always kinda scraping by.

Each year, it's sort of like, okay, how are we gonna pull this off?

And then somehow we do.

NARRATOR: With the cameras reset, the last thing to do before heading back is to hang fresh bait.

Stephanie hangs a piece of roadkill that a local donated to the cause.

All right, that's it.

And we try to be as resourceful and scavenging as a wolverine is, but we run on a shoestring budget.

All right.

NARRATOR: No wolverines on the cameras today.

There's our marten.

NARRATOR: But they'll be back in a couple weeks to check again.

Dang.

NARRATOR: At least the trip out of the mountains is downhill.

I just, the other day, actually, came across fresh wolverine tracks.

That's kind of one of those things where you're like, [gasp] they really do exist!

[laugh] They're not just, like, showing up in photographs, like a mirage or something.

[laugh] That definitely kinda catches my breath.

It's like, oh, this happened within the last maybe 12 hours.

I just crossed paths with a wolverine.

It refuels my desire to do this.