On a sunny Sunday morning, our caravan of vehicles pulls over by the side of the Alaska Highway just south of Judas Creek. Our trip leader wants us to look at a trampled patch of snow across the road; at first glance it looks like children might recently have played an impromptu game of tag here.

But at least one person knows right away that four-legged critters made these particular tracks.

"The caribou were working the road shoulders for salt here," explains Rob Florkiewicz, a regional biologist with Environment Yukon. "Salt is fairly rare in the environment, so it holds the caribou on the road."

More than a dozen people have turned out for this Wildlife Viewing trip to learn about the Southern Lakes caribou, and the ten-year effort to increase their numbers.

In 1993, it was rare to catch a glimpse of one of the few hundred caribou still living in this area. Thanks to a voluntary ban on hunting and intensive management efforts, the caribou now number more than 1,000 animals.

Now, as well as tracks, it is not uncommon to see caribou both along the road and on it.

"This is the area where the road kills start," says Florkiewicz. Even though large signs warn motorists to slow down on this stretch of highway, an average of six caribou are killed on these roads every winter.

Marsh Lake is close to the middle of the herd's winter range. It is also one of fastest growing communities in the Yukon, and many people commute into Whitehorse on this road every day.

The granular salt is part of the sand mixture used to maintain the highway. It collects in the snowbanks along the sides of the road, and the caribou like nothing better than to snuffle through the snow and lick it.

"It's like potato chips; you've got to have it," he says.

But the caribou are not here now, so we head off into the lodgepole pine forest that forms their more typical winter habitat. Here the attraction is lichen, the all-important winter food for caribou.

We snowshoe and ski across gentle rolling terrain once scoured by glaciers. The gravelly soils here are low in nutrients and support few grasses and flowering plants, but lichens flourish in these open forests.

"This is as good as it gets for habitat," says Florkiewicz. "The neat thing about lichen is that it is almost totally digestible by caribou. Is everyone aware that they have four-chambered stomachs, just like cows and moose?"

Most of the adults feel compelled to nod their heads, though the look on four-year-old Hannah Shier's face suggests that this is a fact she has not come across yet.

Three distinct herds make up the Southern Lakes caribou. Animals from the Carcross, Ibex and Atlin herds spend their summers in the high country where there are fewer predators and the breezes help them escape the mosquitoes.

In winter they descend into the forests in search of lichens, their main source of food energy. Unfortunately for the caribou, these rolling pine forests are good for mining gravel, building houses and cutting wood as well as growing lichen.

In short there are many competing uses for winter caribou habitat in the Southern Lakes area, and competition will likely only increase with time.

While running a caribou recovery program in the most populated corner of the Yukon is a challenge, this effort never would have gotten off of the ground without help from a large number of people.

"This whole program started because people from Carcross and Tagish were asking 'What's going on? There's no caribou around any longer,'" explains Florkiewicz.

The Carcross-Tagish First Nation offered to stop hunting caribou, as did the Kwanlin Dun, Ta'an Kwach'an, Teslin Tlingit, Champagne-Aishihik, and Taku River Tlingit First Nations.

"This Southern Lakes caribou recovery program is the only initiative I know of where people have volunteered not to harvest caribou for such a long period of time," he says.

First Nation game guardians have been a key to this success, spending time on the land and talking to people in the communities about the importance of the program.

After ten years they are more than half way to the original goal for the program, which was to increase the numbers in the Carcross and Ibex herds to a total of 2,000 caribou.

"No one thought it would take this long for them to recover," he says.

The situation with the Atlin herd is a bit different as the British Columbia regulations allow resident hunters and outfitters to continue hunting caribou on their side of the border. In the Yukon, hunting might be allowed again once the Southern Lakes caribou number about 2,000 animals, but even then not everyone who wants a caribou will be able to get one.

"It's a numbers game. At the upper limit, a three percent harvest would mean 60 caribou would be shared among all the users, so we are not talking about satisfying everyone's needs," he says.

Despite these challenges, the program is a success. The numbers have grown enough that the caribou are expanding back into parts of their range where they have not been seen for decades, such as the Squanga Lake area.

However, the caribou are not putting in an appearance today. We stop for lunch on one of the kettle lakes that dot this area. Caribou often congregate on these small lakes, particularly if there are slushy areas which provide them with minerals and fresh water, but today there are only tracks on the frozen surface.

For more information on the Southern Lakes Caribou Recovery program, contact Environment Yukon at 667-8640. If you see caribou or other wildlife in the Southern Lakes area, you are encouraged to report your sighting to the Wildlife Hotline at 1 (800) 661-0525. You may be rewarded with a coffee mug, a dinner voucher or even a seat on the next helicopter survey of the caribou.