Yellowstone Habitats & WolfQuest Maps

Yellowstone National Park

An ideal wolf habitat

Wherever there is plentiful prey and room to roam, wolves can thrive. The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, which includes 2.5 million acres of national park land and over 11 million acres of surrounding national forest, provides an ideal habitat for wolves, provided they avoid the dangers of human interactions outside of the park boundaries.

Recreating the Northern Range

Yellowstone's Northern Range, with its herds of elk, bison, and other ungulates, was chosen for wolf reintroduction in the mid 1990s. So this became the setting for WolfQuest, designed to teach about wolf ecology.

Yellowstone National Park is home to hundreds of animal species and thousands of plants. WolfQuest takes place in actual park locations and depicts the geology and most common kinds of vegatation and animals that you would see there. Each WolfQuest map recreates a different area of the Northern Range and the gameplay follows the seasons.

Amethyst Mountain

Sagebrush steppe, forest, and riparian

WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition's game map for Amethyst Mountain is 7km by 7km (49 square kilometers), ranging from the Lamar River to the summit of Amethyst Mountain, the Northern Range's highest peak at 9,609 feet (2,929 meters).

Riparian habitat, thick with willow, and a few stands cottonwood, is found along the Lamar River and its tributaries. Up the slopes, mixed forest gives way to sagebrush steppe: open grassland dominated by sagebrush, covering Specimen Ridge and the summit. Douglas fir thrives on the cool, north-facing slopes of the ridge, while mixed conifers including lodgepole pine, Englemann spruce, and subalpine fir grow at higher elevations.

Lamar Valley viewed from Specimen Ridge

credit: Yellowstone National Park

Slough Creek

Riparian and forest

WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition's game map of Slough Creek is 7km by 7km (49 square kilometers), ranging from First Meadow (the location of the map in the old game) upstream to Second Meadow and up the mountain slopes to the north. Beavers find willows, aspen, and a perfect habitat here. Slough Creek is a favorite place for wolves to den and raise pups. Granite outcrops with junipers rise from the meadows and along the shores of McBride Lake.

Slough Creek

credit: David Schaller

Hellroaring Mountain

Sagebrush steppe, forest, and riparian

A DLC map for WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition, centered around Hellroaring Mountain in north-central Yellowstone. It has a great variety of environments: rolling sagebrush-steppe gradually rising up to Buffalo Plateau, strands of Douglas-fir forests on mountain slopes, and plenty of granite outcrops going up to the summit. And along the southern section, the Yellowstone River roils through the Black Canyon.

Helllroaring Mountain

credit: Dave Schaller

Lost River

A fictional area in the Mountain West

Sagebrush-steppe, Douglas-fir forests, and riparian valleys separated by the Blade Peak massif

Lost River features both expansive wilderness and a mysteriously-abandoned town. Some years ago, all human residents evacuated the town of Lost River. Nature has begun to reclaim the place, with elk herds and other wildlife wandering the abandoned streets and subdivisions. Wolves may wonder what happened here, but they will never know.

Lost River DLC is a reimagined version of the Lost River: Classic map, remade from the ground up and now equal to the scope and quality of Amethyst Mountain and Slough Creek. Available for purchase on Steam and from itch.io as an in-game purchase.

The original map Lost River: Classic is included with your game purchase.

A town reclaimed by nature.