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. 

Greeley Next to Embrace Its Prairie River

Urban river trail, Fort Collins, Colorado

When I was a kid in Fort Collins, we enjoyed the Cache la Poudre River — upstream from the city. We fished in it, hiked in its canyon, my Boy Scout troop planted willow cuttings to stabilize the banks, and so on.

The river in town? I hardly saw it, except when crossing  the bridge on North College Avenue. Like so many river towns, Fort Collins turned its back on the "urban Poudre." It was junky.

Nowadays, all that has changed for the better. There are in-town trails and foot bridges and access points, with a riparian park, Gateway Natural Area, extending through the foothills.

 Now Greeley, once again, takes cultural signals from its upstream neighbor is planning to change its part of the Poudre for the better, reports the Colorado Sun:

For decades, cities across Colorado abused rivers, using them as dumps, funneling them into canals and surrounding them with concrete and bridges. Greeley wasn’t any better, and as a result, the length of the Poudre decreased by 15%, or about 2 miles. Squeezing the river increased its speed, and that led to erosion, killed much of the aquatic life and, most of all, led to flooding. It also limited, if downright evaporated, the chances of any recreation. . . .

Greeley hopes to change that by, among other things, reconnect the river with its historic flood plains, giving it room to spread out, increasing its length and creating spawning beds for fish, wetland ponds, boulder clusters, gravel bars and places where the public can spend some time with it, if not in it.

Greeley students ponder a river map (City of Greeley).

Traditionally, rivers that flowed out of the Rockies onto the Plains were seen mainly as conduits for irrigation water, their purpose being to flow "efficiently" and tp deliver said water to the downstream ditch companies.

Since roughly the late 1980s, that utilitarian approach has changed. 

Pueblo built its Riverwalk, which takes its name and concept from San Antonio's River Walk, although it will only ever be a fraction of the length. It makes downtown Pueblo a more enjoyable place.

Cañon City's Arkansas Riverwalk Trail runs seven miles from the mouth of the Royal Gorge downstream toward Florence.  

It is quite popular. Perk, my first Chesapeake Bay retriever, swam there a lot and made one of his most spectacular retrieves just below the Raynolds Avenue bridge, when he picked up a fledgling swallow that had fallen from its mud nest up under the bridge and delivered it, wet but unharmed, to my hand.

Florence has its own modest river walk. Objections from some intervening landowners have kept it from connecting to Cañon City's — and they have a point, because a trail would cut through pastures and make parts of them effectively unusable. 

Grand Junction, eyesore that it is, has done some good things in the Colorado River as it passes through. Other communities down the Arkansas seem mostly to regard that river as a flooding threat.

I hope this trend of interacting with our urban rivers continues.