No pictures here, just questions on canid tracks???

[wizrd]

Spent some time first week of March at a remote hunting camp in NY's Adirondacks. No snow in the northeast this winter, it's very seldom this area doesn't have three feet of snow on the ground in the woods the first week of March. We were able to get back in with the 4-wheel drive vehicles 2 miles off the road, which is usually impossible in March. Taking a walk early one morning down an old logging road, I come across a set of tracks, first thought to be coyote, but very large tracks for coyote, I thought. And a much longer stride than I had ever seen from a coyote before, but not running. Followed them about 3 or 4 hundred yards, the snow was about 1/2 inch of new snow on top of five or six inches of really hard crust, hard enough to hold me up without breaking through the crust, so the tracks looked pretty clean & fresh.
Well, after the 3 or 4 hundred yards, the track ( one track that I had been following, turned into three tracks) I had never seen this before, whatever they were, those animals were walking perfectly in the same tracks. This caused me to stop & take a much closer look. They appeared to be canine tracks, but large, I took a dollar bill out And layed it next to the track, the track was about an 1/8th of an inch wider than the bill. I then folded the bill to match the lenght of the track, when I measured it back at camp later, the length was just a bit over 3 1/2". Are these exceedingly large for coyote tracks? Could they be something else? NY state department of conservation says there are no wolves in NY, buy they have also analyzed the DNA from the Adirondack coyote population and say that it contains a large percentage of wolf blood from the Canadian Algonquin wolf pack. It is this crossing that they says gives the Adirondack coyote their greater size. Any ideas on the tracks guys? Large for coyote? or not? I've got lots of coyote in my own neighborhood, 60 miles south, but none ever looked this big. What about the in-line walking, same track? Any ideas or experience?

[Iron Hoarder]

The colder the climate the larger the animals even of the same "breed" tend to be. They have to have the body size to generate the heat to survive. Could just be large coyotes or some kind of cross breed. Animals do tend to migrate over time though particularly as pressure from hunting has eased in recent years and more habitat is taken up by housing. It is possible some wolves have moved from somewhere else. They could just be passing through.