Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley

For four years, they toiled in parallel wilderness laboratories a thousand miles from home, both quietly minding their own plant science.

Bill Ripple, ’84, and Bob Beschta were working in separate obscurity, simply attempting to explain the decline and rise of key tree species in Yellowstone National Park’s northern range.

The two Oregon State University scientists scarcely noticed the distant mournful howls of the gray wolf. They paid scant attention to the caravans of wolf watchers who traversed Yellowstone’s remote Lamar Valley with their scopes, binoculars and video cameras.

Ripple and Beschta concede they had little more than a passing interest in what park naturalist James Halfpenny calls “the greatest ecology experiment of the 20th century.”

“Too busy,” recalls Beschta, a professor emeritus in forest engineering whose forte is stream hydrology and riparian areas.

	Elk in Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley
Beschta(seated) and Ripple in a College of Forestry lab.

One moment, they are immersed in the anonymous study of aspen, willow and cottonwood; the next, they are suddenly, unwittingly and ironically joined at the hip boot on the national ecological stage for their landmark assertions about … wolves.

“Amazing,” marvels Ripple, a forestry professor whose expertise is aspen and willow.

“A little bit serendipity,” agrees Beschta, whose specialty is cottonwood.

Even more amazing to both is the profound impact they believe the wolf is having on the ecosystem as a top predator. After spending four years connecting dozens of dots, they published a study crediting Canis lupus with single-handedly beginning to restore the ailing Lamar River Valley.

And the implications, like the wolves themselves, have spread beyond the borders of the Yellowstone ecosystem to the Pacific Northwest, where splinter packs are expected to take up residence soon.