Elk in the Sierra Nevada: An Invasion or a Recovery?
It’s more than a question of history. The elk could have big effects on the future of this iconic wilderness.

Tule elk, Point Reyes National Seashore. | Photo by Mark Newman/Getty Images
In August 2022, a young bull elk was photographed ambling along a forest road outside the tiny community of Weimar, California. Throughout much of the American West, the sighting would have been fairly common and hardly newsworthy, but here, in California's northern Sierra Nevada range, it made local headlines. There are herds of elk on three sides of the Sierra—the forests to the north, the coast to the west, and the more open country to the south. But not in the mountains, at least not now.
The Weimar bull was one of several elk that have wandered into the Sierra in recent years. Most are young males, dispersing from their homes in search of a place to start new families and herds of their own. For human residents, their arrival is a mixed blessing, bringing new wildlife viewing experiences but also potential damage to agricultural land and other private property. An adult elk eats over 20 pounds of vegetation every day, and weighing between 400 and 1,000 pounds, seldom lets something as flimsy as a human fence get in their way.
“Elk are coming down from the top and up from the bottom,” Rick Lanman, the founder of the Institute for Historical Ecology, said. “They can disperse 100 miles in a day if they want to. So there’s no real barrier.”
Lanman is the lead author of a recent study in the journal PLOS One, challenging the conventional wisdom about elk in the Sierra. He and his coauthors, biologists Thomas Batter and Cody McKee, dug through newspaper archives, museum specimens, and local Indigenous history to make the case that elk aren’t visitors to the Sierra but a native species with a vital role to play in the ecosystem.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife published its most recent elk management plan in 2018 and included a map of elks' historical range. It shows the three subspecies biologists now believe inhabited the state before settler colonization: Roosevelt elk in the northwest corner of the state, Rocky Mountain elk in the northeast, and tule elk along most of central and southern California. But the Sierra is notably missing from the map, cleanly carved out between the subspecies’ ranges.
Sierra elk may be a victim of a phenomenon that biologists call shifting baseline syndrome. Each generation treats the status quo of their own time or a recent previous one as the norm, even if it represents a world already massively changed by human activities. In the case of the elk, this baseline may have been set by one of the most devastating natural disasters in California history.
On the morning of April 18, 1906, San Francisco was rocked by a magnitude 7.9 earthquake. The quake and the fires that followed destroyed 80 percent of the city. Two of the state’s most important biological collections were destroyed or damaged—the California Academy of Sciences and the Stanford Museum of Natural History. If those collections contained any specimens of elk in the Sierra, they were lost in the flames.
Researchers believe that there were upwards of half a million elk in California prior to colonization. However, during the 75 years before the San Francisco quake, that number plummeted, likely due to hunting and landscape changes during California’s so-called Fur Rush. Hunters moved into the Sierra and began systematically killing large wildlife for fur, meat, and sport. Tule elk very nearly went extinct. This race to catch and kill as many animals as possible decimated populations and altered historic ranges.
Lanman and his coauthors of the recent paper suggest that elk may have been present throughout the Sierra before these first colonists arrived but in relatively low densities, making them particularly vulnerable to hunting. American settlers continued to pour in throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, converting the land to agriculture and other human needs. This may have been the last nail in the coffin of the Sierra Nevada elk.
Ben Sacks, an adjunct professor of wildlife genetics at the University of California, Davis, has studied the decline and recovery of California elk through their genetic diversity. He says that the findings of the new paper fit the more recent observations of elk in the area. “It doesn't surprise me at all,” Sacks said, “especially given that we have them kind of starting to colonize the Sierra Nevada now as well.”
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife did not respond to a request to comment on elks' historical status in the Sierra Nevada. In a previous statement to the Bay Area–based Mercury News, the agency said that it had not yet analyzed the paper but would consider all available findings when updating its elk management plan.
The historical range of elk in California has been revised before, when new findings came to light. CDFW policy once held that only two subspecies of elk, tule and Roosevelt, were native to the state. But a 1969 study by Dale McCullough of the University of California, Berkeley, showed evidence of Rocky Mountain elk in two northeastern California counties. The 2018 elk management plan added this population to the agency’s historical map.
“I love this kind of research,” Sacks, who was not involved in this study, said. “I think it's the only way you can ever really know, to combine whatever final remains that have been found as well as historical accounts, old newspapers and trappers journals and things like that."
The people with the most direct knowledge of precolonization elk populations in California are not museum curators or agency scientists but the Indigenous descendants of the people who have lived in the Sierra Nevada for thousands of years. California and Nevada Indigenous nations endured centuries of genocide, both physical and cultural, but survived in various nations and tribal groups throughout the region. One of the best pieces of historical evidence for Sierra Nevada elk cited in Lanman’s study is the account of Jonathan Sides, a Northern Paiute man, interviewed by the Reno Gazette-Journal newspaper in 1880:
“It was interesting to hear this cultivated Piute [sic] talk of the early days in Nevada, before the white man’s foot had been set upon its soil. Deer, he said, are not so plenty as they used to be. There were, in the old time, lots of elk, antelope, and mountain sheep in the Sink of the Humboldt.… Now, the wild sheep, the elk, and the antelope are never seen.”
Sierra magazine contacted representatives of 10 Indigenous nations in the Sierra for this story. Most declined or have not returned comment by the time this article went to press, but Robert Robinson, chairman of the Kern Valley Indian Council based in Lake Isabella, California, sent this statement:
“I have no confirmable information regarding Roosevelt elk in the Sierras. Tule Elk are native to the area and still inhabit portions of the area."
The question of historical elk range in the Sierra Nevada is more than academic. It may influence one of the biggest issues affecting the region as climate change becomes more severe: wildfire. Elk grazing is a natural fire suppressant, removing small woody fuels that will otherwise build up or require expensive human efforts to control.
“People are paying ranchers to reduce the fuel loads,” Lanman said. “Our fires are getting hotter because the fire fuel loads have accumulated because we suppress fires. But if you can mow the grass and the shrubs and the small trees down, then the canopies of the big trees don't ignite.”
Lanman is quick to point out that his study is only a first step in understanding the range and ecological role of elk before colonization. But whatever their past, the elk coming into the Sierra now show that the species could have a future there, and bring a potentially safer, more balanced ecosystem, if we just let them.