Stubbornness was Haber's best and worst quality

Wolves were an interest that became a passion that grew into an obsession for Gordon Haber. That the animals would one day kill him seemed almost inevitable.

Haber, 67, died sadly and tragically in a plane crash in Denali National Park and Preserve on Oct. 14. He went down in the Toklat River valley while observing the Toklat wolf pack. Thirty-five-year-old Dan McGregor, the pilot of the plane, was lucky to survive despite being badly burned. In the best tradition of Alaska Bush pilots of old, an injured McGregor hiked 20 miles after crawling out of the crash to try to find help. It came far too late for Haber.

No matter what you thought of Haber -- and there were people who thought him a god, along with others who thought him the devil -- it was somehow fitting that it was there in the Toklat valley watching the Toklat wolves that he would die.

Of all the wolves Haber loved, he loved the Toklat pack most of all. He considered them unique. He traced their history back to observations made by naturalist Adolph Murie in the 1940s and beyond. He envisioned a great wolf culture passed down from generation to generation from wolves born and raised in the Toklat drainage.

He was not happy when modern science poked a stick in that idea. Pioneering studies in genetics concluded the wolves of the Toklat were the wolves of Alaska. Genetic tracking showed Alaska to be a huge mixing pool of breeding wolves.

Haber wouldn't buy it. He was convinced he could see with his eyes that biochemistry had it wrong. He was convinced the wolves he first saw in the Toklat in the 1960s and came to watch with an increasing obsession through the 1970s into the 1980s, the 1990s and the new millennium were direct descendants of the wolves Murie had watched long before.

Haber was a stubborn man. It was the best of him and the worst of him.

When it came to wolves and his beliefs about them, he knew no compromise. Wolves were his family, and he fought for them as such. He freed a wolf from a trap along the Taylor Highway in 1997, videotaped the incident and bragged about it. Trapper Eugene Johnson sued and won a $150,000 judgment against Haber in an Alaska court.

As far as I know, it's the only judgment ever won against anyone for interfering with trapping or hunting in Alaska. But it wasn't the only time Haber messed with trappers. He was accused of disturbing traps in the Yanert River drainage near Denali Park in 1994, and he made big news later that year when he found four wolves still alive in snares set by state wolf-control biologists along Moody Creek.

One wolf chewed off its foot to escape. When an Alaska Department of Fish and Game employee helicoptered in to finish off the others, Haber videotaped him taking five shots to kill a wolf leashed to the end of a wire tether. It was explosive video that aired on CNN and NBC.

A day later, then-Gov. Wally Hickel shut down the state wolf-kill program pending an investigation. It would be a long time before it got rolling again. It took a woman, Sarah Palin, to stand up to Haber and the Outside interests that backed him. Palin did it in large part because her father was convinced wolf control works.

Once, long ago, Haber admitted that it was obvious to him, too, that wolf control could work to increase moose and caribou numbers in Alaska. It was one of the few views he shared with nearly all other biologists studying predators. There is no doubt that if prey are freed of predation their numbers will increase. This is a biological certainty. Where it gets difficult is in determining how many predators to remove without rendering species extinct, and which predators to remove, given wolves, bears and coyotes are all active in killing popular big game animals in Alaska.