Big Cat News from Northern and Southern Colorado

A couple of days ago, I checked the trail camera nearest the house, located about 80 yards up  the ridge in back. With apologies for the infrared flash on the ten-year-old camera, this is one photo of a sequence.

Photo taken about 9:30 p.m. on December 13, 2025.

 M. was out for a walk as I was checking the photos on my laptop. "Guess what I got," I said when she same in. "A mountain lion," she answered. "Steve [our neighbor] showed me a video from his camera."

And here it is, five nights after the photo above.

Not the same cat thought. This one is wearing a collar and tracking device. I checked with the district wildlife manager, who said a study was underway in western Pueblo County and adjacent areas involving a number of collared cats.

Then came the report of a woman killed by a lion while hiking on New Year's Day in western Larimer County, as first announced by Colorado Parks & Wildlife that same afternoon. This Colorado Sun report from January 2 has a little more detail, including an attempted attack on the same trail in November 2025:

Gary Messina said he was running along the same trail on a dark November morning when his headlamp caught the gleam of two eyes in the nearby brush. Messina pulled out his phone and snapped a quick photo before a mountain lion rushed him.

Messina said he threw his phone at the animal, kicked dirt and yelled as the lion kept trying to circle behind him. After a couple of harrowing minutes he broke a bat-sized stick off a downed log, hit the lion in the head with it and it ran off, he said.

“I had to fight it off because it was basically trying to maul me,” Messina told The Associated Press. “I was scared for my life and I wasn’t able to escape. I tried backing up and it would try to lunge at me.

Both reports say the last known mountain lion killing of a human happened in 1999. That refers to the death of Jaryd Atadero, 3, in the Poudre River canyon west of Fort Collins.

To me from a couple hundred miles away, his unwitnessed death like a lion attack. Some people, including his father, at least initially, wanted to believe it was an abduction and murder. His parents wrote a book about the experience.