Hear From a Wildlife Photographer’s Dramatic Glimpse Into the Dwindling World of the Cascade Red Fox

Gretchen Kay Stuart has chronicled the work of a small team of biologists who are trying to keep a little known and breathtakingly beautiful endangered species from disappearing

Ari Daniel

| Host, “There’s More to That”

April 9, 2026

Gretchen Kay Stuart is a wildlife photographer who has cultivated a special relationship with the Cascade red fox. She first spotted the rare animal in 2020 on the slope of Mount Rainier in Washington State. “I instantly fell in love,” she recalls.

So Stuart started documenting the foxes wherever she could. Sometimes she’s witnessed tragic endings, but other times, the outcome has been more rewarding. For instance, she received exclusive access to photograph a family of these foxes, and her documentation is helping bring awareness to this subspecies that has only 50-some individuals remaining.

In this episode, host Ari Daniel talks to Stuart and Jocelyn Akins of the Cascades Carnivore Project about what makes these foxes special, the threats they’re facing, and what’s being done to keep them from going extinct.

A transcript is below. To subscribe to “There’s More to That,” and to listen to past episodes about a prehistoric cave that entombed animals for millennia; the teeming world of migrating birds, bats and bugs above our heads; and the army of experts and citizen scientists devoted to protecting native bees, find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

Ari Daniel: Gretchen Kay Stuart remembers well the day she saw the animal that would change her life. It was 2020.

Gretchen Kay Stuart: The national parks had been closed because of Covid and a few had just started opening up, and Mount Rainier opened up.

Daniel: Gretchen is a wildlife photographer who uses her images to tell conservation stories about endangered species and their habitats.

Stuart: I was in my little, tiny van that has a little bed in it. I was driving up the mountain, and there on a snowbank was this tawny, fluffy animal. I pulled over. I didn’t know what it was at first, and I stopped and I could see, oh, that’s a fox. But she looked so different. Her coloring, everything about her—really thick, beautiful winter coat. And I pulled over and I took some photos of her and I was like, “What was that fox? This is not a normal lowland red fox.”

Daniel: Gretchen had just seen a Cascade red fox, an elusive high-elevation subspecies.

Stuart: I found that there was nothing really available online other than a little tiny blip about the Cascade red fox on Mount Rainier National Park’s website and Cascades Carnivore Project, which was researching the foxes at the time.

Daniel: That’s where she learned the Cascade red fox was an endangered species native only to the upper elevations of the Cascade mountains.

Stuart: That was exciting because I had been looking for a story to really dive into. So I contacted Jocelyn Akins, who’s the founder of Cascades Carnivore Project.

Daniel: We’ll hear from Jocelyn herself shortly.

Stuart: And I said, “Hey, I want to volunteer. I want to learn more about this fox.” And she let me come to her home and interview her. And by the end of the interview, I told her, “I want to find more foxes.” And she just kind of laughed at me. She was like, “Good luck.” She was like, “We barely even see them with our trail cameras or anything.” I was determined. And that very summer, I ended up finding another individual that I nicknamed Snag because he has a little snaggle tooth. And then later I found his mate, a red-coated fox. I named her Ginger, ’cause she had a red coat. So that was just the beginning.

Daniel: The beginning of Gretchen’s love story with these foxes.

Stuart: Finding the Cascade red fox was a blessing. It changed my life and gave me purpose in a way that I hadn’t expected.

Daniel: So why such big feelings for a small, high-elevation subspecies of fox that only lives in the Cascade mountains? What is it about these animals, and who are they, exactly?

From Smithsonian magazine and PRX productions, this is “There’s More to That,” the show that takes you straight into the fox’s den. I’m Ari Daniel. In this episode, we trek high up into the Cascade mountains to train our lens on the Cascade red fox. We’ll learn why they’re special, what’s threatening them, and what can be done about it. Stay tuned.

Daniel: Gretchen, how do you know that it’s a Cascade red fox? How do you identify them and distinguish them from other foxes?

Stuart: The lowland red foxes are typically red in color, whereas the Cascade red fox is most often black phase, which is like a black-silver color or cross phase, which is more like either red and black or red and tan. They also have a smaller body than a lowland red fox. Their legs typically seem to be shorter. They have fur-lined feet, especially in the winter. In the summer, they shed their winter coat and they look really scrawny, but in the winter their fur becomes really thick and beautiful and even the bottoms of their feet are furry. Of course that keeps them warm up in those high elevations in the winter.

Daniel: Location, she says, is also a giveaway.

Stuart: A lowland fox would not be up in the subalpine where you would find a Cascade red fox, so that’s the easiest way to know. But also the Cascade red fox is so endangered that their range has shrunk to only the South Cascades. There are no known individuals above I-90 in Washington, and their populations are so isolated because they’re sort of stuck in these high elevations. They’re on Mount Rainier, Mount Adams, but they rarely come down lower than that unless they’re trying to disperse.

Daniel: And Gretchen, to what do you attribute your ability to find these Cascade red foxes? Do you feel like they’re drawn to you? You just have a knack for finding them, given that they are so elusive and rare?

Stuart: I think it’s mostly determination and time. It’s usually around four months at a time that I’ll be up there looking for the foxes, and much of that requires backcountry hiking, camping. I started finding them a little more easily once I found Snag and Ginger.

Daniel: That’s a remarkable amount of investment to make. What does that look like?

Stuart: Mainly finding a fox for the first time would be a matter of following track and sign. And if I were to see fresh scat, I would stop and wait and look around. And if I were really lucky, I might see one cross behind me. I just got into the habit of walking and then looking behind me every 15 steps or so. And that would often be the trick. They think you’ve passed and you’re just going to keep going forward and I’ll look behind me. And once in a while I just see one scamper past and then I sit low and often they’ll be curious and then they’ll stop and kind of see what are you doing. And they might come closer if you’re lucky.

Daniel: What’s so enchanting about them?

Stuart: Knowing that this is a species that is really struggling to survive in these times of climate change, their habitat is being developed and logged and melting away, and having an encounter with one just feels like a privilege.

Daniel: Like coming across a little fuzzy jewel or something.

Stuart: Exactly! Exactly.

Daniel: Yeah.

Stuart: It is. And finding a new individual is just so exciting because you know how few of them are out there. And so being able to find a new individual that’s previously unknown and document that individual with photography, you’re not only experiencing something rare, you’re contributing to science in a way that is very meaningful. That’s a thrill that’s hard to beat.

Daniel: And Gretchen, the Cascade red fox is threatened. What is causing the threat and why are there so few of these animals now?

Stuart: Well, pretty much any endangered species, the main factor is climate change and loss of habitat. They really depend on these subalpine meadows at tree line, and these places are being logged, developed, overused for recreation. The snow pack, because of climate change, has reduced to such a degree that their predators, such as coyotes, can access higher elevations, whereas before the snow was too deep and they wouldn’t be able to go that high. Sports such as skiing, snowmobiles, they will pack the snow down and give trails for predators to use to access higher elevations. So not only are they losing habitat because of human intrusion, we’re also giving their predators access to their habitat, which they would use to survive in the winter and raise kits. But one of the biggest issues for the Cascade red fox is food conditioning and car strikes. So when people recreating in the high elevations of the Cascades, whether it’s skiing, hiking, if they see a fox and give that fox food even one time, it turns this normally elusive, rarely seen individual into a fox that’s begging on the roadside and …

Daniel: Oh, wow.

Stuart: … not being responsible with trash is the other factor that gets them food conditioned. And as soon as they’re food conditioned, they realize they encounter people more often if they’re by the road. And next thing you know, they’re being hit by cars.

Daniel: Yeah.

Stuart: Just last year, there were two foxes that were struck by cars and killed in a ski resort, and every single individual is so important for the survival of the species. But I really hope that there’s an understanding of the need to keep national parks and our public lands funded and protected for the sake of endangered species, because Mount Rainier National Park sprung into action to close the trails and roads for several miles’ radius around the den site so that this family could raise their kits without the intrusion of humans. The fact that they took that threat so seriously and barricaded trails and roads and even had volunteers who normally hike around and enforce the rule of staying off the fragile wildflower meadows, they instead scheduled themselves to stand guard at these closed trailheads and make sure that people weren’t sneaking in, contrasted with a ski resort outside of park limits where an entire family was killed.

Daniel: This was a den that you came across at a ski resort last summer, right?

Stuart: Yeah. Yeah, I always go up there to just check out the fox situation, see if I can find any individuals. And I found a den site that had four little kits, and they were just emerging from the den and starting to explore. The parents were extremely food conditioned and sadly, the den site was located in a construction zone, and just a mere 15 feet away were boxes of commercial rodenticide.

Daniel: Oh, no.

Stuart: And—yep—so I immediately notified the biologists I work with, and they notified their contacts. And we were under the impression that the rodenticide would be removed, but that wasn’t enforced and at least three of the four kits died of rodenticide poisoning.

Daniel: Oh, how sad.

Stuart: I believe the fourth one probably did as well, but that carcass wasn’t found. And the dad was shortly thereafter hit by a car. Like I said, he was food conditioned. There was a yearling who we had to euthanize that was also later determined to have been hit by a car and the mom was also poisoned by rodenticide.

Daniel: Gosh, how tragic.

Stuart: It was horrible. I mean, this is a fox that’s on the brink of extinction, and an entire family lost compared with an entire family thriving is something that should be looked at and taken seriously. It’s just another example of why our national parks and public lands need to remain funded and intact.

Daniel: This is something that Jocelyn Akins has known about for a long time. As a wildlife biologist and founder of the Cascades Carnivore Project, she’s been studying the threats to the Cascade red fox for almost two decades.

Jocelyn Akins: Our goal has always been to study and restore carnivore populations at risk of extinction and protect the mountain ecosystems that they call home.

Daniel: Like Gretchen, Jocelyn stumbled into the Cascade red fox and fell in love with them kind of by accident. Back in 2008, she was on Mount Adams, about 50 miles away from Mount Rainier, studying a different high-elevation carnivore.

Akins: I was studying wolverines in the area, but I couldn’t find any. And I was finding these foxes that live high up on the slopes of the Cascade volcanoes. And these are places where it’s just very white and snowy in the winter and there’s almost no other critters around. So I was a little bit curious about what these foxes were, how they survived in this really remote, wild, blizzardy landscape.

Daniel: So she emailed her mentor, Keith Aubry, who had been researching mountain carnivores since 1978.

Akins: I wrote, “I detected a red fox at 6,000 feet at a camera station.” And he wrote, “You have detected a native Cascade red fox, and this is a record of particular interest to conservation.” And so it was a start of an interesting research question for me. Nobody knew that they were on Mount Adams where I began my research. He’d studied them years earlier on Mount Rainier where there’s a national park, so there’s more support for research. It was just like a big question mark. And I’d put one little dot on the map about this unique fox and that it lived somewhere that nobody in modern times knew that it occurred there.

Daniel: Around the time she started this new field work, Jocelyn came across an old red snowmobile.

Akins: A crappy 1996 Ski-Doo Phazer, and I would just go off on my own. I actually had a job as a wildlife technician. And so I would dream all week, I’d read endless scientific papers while I carpooled to this job I had. And then I would get on that little snowmobile, and I would go as far as I could. And I would set a wildlife camera, and I would put a little bit of bait, some road-killed deer out.

Daniel: A wildlife camera being one of those motion-detecting cameras, so if an animal passes in front of it snaps a shot?

Akins: Yeah. They’re triggered by heat and motion and anything that passes by, you’ll get a photograph of.

Daniel: Unlike Gretchen, the photographer, Jocelyn hasn’t seen very many Cascade red foxes in real life, but the few times she has were memorable. Once she says she was up on Mount Rainier at the site of a known fox den.

Akins: I was just up there visiting the den, taking measurements, trying to understand what are these important places for them. And all of a sudden the mom came trotting across the snow slope right toward me. I was just blown away. I couldn’t believe it. And as she got close to me, she just walked right past me, walked to the entrance of the den and made this little fox noise, like this little eh, eh, eh, ehm. And then we waited a couple seconds, and then three little fox kits came to the entrance of the den. So they were so little that they weren’t out and about. And I don’t know why she did that, but it was pretty amazing.

Daniel: What an incredible experience. Jocelyn, say more about the kind of day-to-day operations of the Cascades Carnivore Project. What is it that takes place in the work that you’re doing?

Akins: We conduct research on carnivores. That’s always been what we’re most proud of, is that we’re able to collect these big data sets on species that are hard to find. I got my doctorate at the University of California studying conservation genetics. So one of the things that we do a lot of is that we use DNA to understand how carnivore populations are doing.

Daniel: Meaning, like, getting a sense of their size and genetic diversity.

Akins: Yeah, exactly. When you collect a little sample from a carnivore, whether it’s a scat sample or some hair from their back or something, I like to call it like a little gold nugget of information; like this one little scat sample can tell you which carnivore it was. So the species, it can tell you the individual carnivore. So, like, this is Freddie the Fox. It can tell you everything it ate. We sequence the DNA from the scats, and we can see every single prey item that the carnivore ate.

We look at several sections of the genome of each individual fox, and we can see, like you said, how much genetic diversity is in the population. And we can also see how individuals are connected across the population. We see this through the movement of their genes, that they move along high-elevation-landscape features like ridge lines. Okay, we need to make sure that we protect these spots. And one of the hopeful things about the Cascade red fox, they’re really well connected, and that’s partly just their nature. They’re a highly mobile species; they’re able to disperse long distances. But it also tells you a bit about the landscape is fairly intact and they can move around the whole South Cascades and interbreed with unrelated individuals. And that’s really good for a small population.

So now we have a really good distribution map. So we know where they’re doing better and we’re starting to focus on those places to really understand what their needs are, what their threats are, what humans can actually do to restore their populations.

Daniel: In 2022, in large part due to the work of Jocelyn and her colleagues, the Cascade red fox was classified as an endangered species in Washington State.

Akins: It obviously is saying, “Oh, they’re endangered.” That doesn’t sound like an accomplishment. However, it unlocked a lot of support and resources, and then it also brought other people to the table. We have this great partnership and project with the University of Washington. We have a graduate student there that’s studying the threat of coyotes. And then we also started working with the Yakama Nation. Their reservation comprises one-third of Mount Adams, which is one of the main strongholds of the Cascade red fox. Just getting out the word, it was a bit of a PR campaign like, “Hey, there’s actually a fox. Hey, it lives high in the mountains and it’s not doing very well.” So we went from that to getting people to understand that it was a species of concern, to having it listed as an endangered species in Washington, and then that turning into other people picking up the mantle with us to start learning about what threatens it and what we can do about it.

Daniel: Jocelyn says it took years to determine and then convince people that the Cascade red fox was struggling.

Akins: And then now we’re in the phase of, okay, why? And it’s shockingly hard to figure out. We have this great group now—a Cascade red fox working group. So we have research scientists from the U.S. Forest Service and the Park Service. And we have a researcher that studies the Sierra Nevada red fox, just trying to put our heads together and figure out what we can we actually do.

Daniel: With climate change acting as one of the biggest threats, she says it can be easy to feel like it’s a problem too big to tackle.

Akins: But I have learned there are things we can do. We can find places where the landscape is more resilient to warming in the mountains. They call them climate refugia, north sides of the landscape that hold snow that are colder. Tribal researchers are shouting how important wildfire is to the landscape. It opens up meadows in the forests that are really important for all sorts of wildlife.

Daniel: Jocelyn, tell me about how you came to collaborate with the photojournalist Gretchen Kay Stuart, and how does each of your efforts interact with the other?

Akins: Early on, it was me out on my own enlisting friends trying to collect data about a species that nobody was paying attention to. And then Gretchen Kay Stuart, she came to Mount Rainier and she saw a Cascade red fox. So there was this one fox that I nicknamed Whitefoot. This fox Whitefoot has become an ambassador, because she was commonly seen on the south side of Mount Rainier by all sorts of people. So she was many people’s introduction to what is a Cascade red fox. Gretchen is an incredible photographer and she took these amazing photos. And then she goes, “Oh, well, who is this fox and oh, who studies them?”

And so she learned about Cascades Carnivore Project, and we met, and then Gretchen asked me, “Well, where else can I take photos?” And Gretchen started tromping around, totally dedicated all the time, dawn to dusk. And what she did was she was able to see foxes that I knew were there from their DNA, but I never saw them. And she saw them and she had such patience. And not only did she just glimpse them like some people got to, but she got these incredible photographs. And she was so generous and we were able to use those photographs for our own communications. And she’s gone on to really help us and show the world that there’s this gorgeous fox that lives up high in the mountains. It’s really a testament to photography. It’s very hard to tell a story. I mean, numbers help, but a gorgeous photo, I mean, you can’t go wrong.

Daniel: Gretchen, how does your photography practice intersect with ecology?

Stuart: There’s a lot that you can see in person that you won’t catch on a trail camera attached to a tree. So documentation of kit rearing has not been done before for the Cascade red fox to this degree. And I’m doing this as a community scientist, as volunteer work. Biologists, they have busy schedules. They are very athletic, hiking up and down the mountains and trying to service as many of their monitoring stations as possible. And they don’t have the luxury to sit for hours and hours in a blind sitting still. That’s something that photographers and community scientists can contribute. So I try to encourage other wildlife photographers to do the same, to get involved with community science, figure out a species or habitat that they really connect with and are passionate about and dive in. You’re going to end up seeing things that are unknown and you’re going to end up making discoveries, whether it’s behavioral or otherwise. And those types of contributions really help the scientists researching those endangered species.

Daniel: Just through your patience.

Stuart: Mm-hmm.

Daniel: The photos in the Smithsonian article, they’re beautiful. And we were able to see in an instant, probably the months and months of painstaking work, of chance encounters, of diligent observation that you’re invested in, we see it unfold over a few pages, but this is a tremendous amount of work and time and care.

Stuart: Yes, it is.

Daniel: Gretchen, can you describe a favorite image that you’ve captured of these foxes, a favorite photograph?

Stuart: My favorite photograph is of Whitefoot, which was the first fox I ever encountered. She was just such a special fox. It’s a photo of her against a snowy white backdrop. She’s just sort of looking to the side. And of course, seeing the little kits for the first time, which was something I’d been wanting to witness for so many years, finally being able to do that—I absolutely love those photos of the kits as well.

Daniel: Gretchen, what is this like for you when you see these foxes get killed? You spend so much time watching them. Do you mourn? How do you process that?

Stuart: It’s really devastating. When you’re in the midst of the situation, you’re very science-focused and dealing with the emergency at hand. And I think it’s a self-defense mechanism where you block the tragedy of it all from your mind until hours later after we had to euthanize that young female.

Daniel: This is the yearling Gretchen mentioned earlier, the one that had been hit by a car.

Stuart: At the end of the night, I went back to my van and I just felt nauseous and sort of numb. And then a couple of hours later, I was just bawling, crying, in tears. And that wasn’t even a fox that I knew well. Ginger, who I spoke about earlier, who I knew very well, I had documented her for three years and she definitely had gotten to know me. She was very playful. There was one occasion where I was photographing some deer because they were in this shadow and the light was really beautiful, and I had stopped and … she jumped out behind me and startled me. She had this mouse in her mouth, and she was just trotting around. That was such a special encounter. She was one of the foxes that would stop and hunker down and take a nap in the meadow in my presence. She ended up being killed by a predator. At the time, there were very few individuals that we even knew of left. Thankfully, now we know of more, but at the time, her death felt like a huge blow to the population. It was particularly heartbreaking. I mean, this type of work is an emotional rollercoaster, and most of it, sadly, these days are lows rather than highs.

Daniel: What do you think the future of the Cascade red fox looks like?

Stuart: I mean, foxes are pretty adaptable species overall, so I have hope that they can adapt. I mean, these are foxes that came over the Bering Land Bridge. They’re Ice Age-native mountain foxes. If they’re able to adapt to the changing climate; and if there are enough prey species to keep them sufficiently fed; if they’re able to form strategies to avoid new predators that may be able to access them as the climate warms and as the snow disappears; if we’re able to ban rodenticide in the state of Washington, educate people about the dangers of feeding wildlife, educate people about the fact that there is this very special endangered fox up in those mountains and not to feed and not to leave our trash in their habitat and to drive slowly and cautiously at night.

Daniel: Gretchen, we started this conversation with you saying that that first encounter with the Cascade red fox changed your life. And I’m wondering what you meant by that.

Stuart: For one thing, I moved all the way from Maine to Oregon and Washington. And I did that because I wanted to continue my work with this fox. I don’t know if I’m going to be documenting their end or their survival story, but it’s just a privilege to do this work. And if I can, in the smallest way, contribute to this rare mountain fox’s survival, that just makes all of the months spent in these mountains so worth it.

Daniel: To see Gretchen’s photographs and to read more about the Cascade red foxes, visit SmithsonianMag.com. We’ll put a link in our show notes. Gretchen Kay Stuart’s favorite Cascade red fox photograph will be featured in a new exhibition, The Nature of Hope, celebrating the life of Jane Goodall. The image is also part of a fundraiser sponsored by the conservation group Vital Impacts to benefit the Jane Goodall Institute.

On the next episode of “There’s More to That,” we’ll hit the road to celebrate the 100th anniversary of America’s iconic Route 66.

If you like this show, please consider leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. It helps new listeners find the show, and we’d appreciate it.

“There’s More to That” is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX productions.

From the magazine, our team is me, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly. From PRX, our team is Ali Budner, Cleo Levin, Genevieve Sponsler, Sandra Lopez-Monsalve and Edwin Ochoa. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

Our episode artwork is by Emily Lankiewicz. Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson. I’m Ari Daniel. Thanks so much for listening.

Daniel: What else have you seen them doing, playing or hunting?

Stuart: There are a couple of really interesting behavioral revelations. This one evening, I saw the kits playing tug of war with a weasel carcass, but we had never known of Cascade red foxes to consume weasels. I was just like, “Is that a weasel? It really looks like a weasel.” They’re known to be pretty vicious. And it was interesting because they didn’t eat it. They just used it as a toy. A couple of days later, the dad fox showed up with another long-tailed weasel. And again, he was adamant that the kits play with this weasel and the kits would each take one side and play a tug of war and start ripping it apart.

Daniel: Oh my God.

Stuart: But not eating it. Again, it was strictly a play toy. The kits would kind of lose interest and set it down and be playing with each other. And the dad would run over, pick up the weasel and bring it back over to them and insist they play with it. I don’t know if it was a lesson in reducing prey competition, but that was really interesting to witness.