By Gary Wockner
April 10, 2004

Another fatal mountain lion attack.

Catch your attention? That's the point. The truth, on the other hand, is a different story, as always.

News of the dreaded BEAST has swirled in the media for the past several months. It started with the fatal mountain lion attack in California last fall. The recent publication and wide review of David Baron’s book, The Beast in the Garden, fueled the fire. Like the media reports of the California mauling, Baron’s book and its reviews paint a ridiculous, grossly exaggerated, paranoid portrait of human encounters with mountain lions.

Much of Baron’s book discusses mountain lions in Boulder, Colorado, and the fatal attack nearby in Idaho Springs in 1991. For the record, exactly three people have been tragically killed by mountain lions in Colorado in recorded history. The first was in Idaho Springs, the second in Rocky Mountain National Park in 1997, and the third in Poudre Canyon in 1999. That’s a grand total of three people out of ~4.5 million Coloradoans. If we generalize over the 13 years since the first death, the odds of getting killed by a mountain lion in any one year are roughly 1 in 19 million.

Here’s a little perspective, also tragic: According to the State of Colorado’s Vital Statistics in 2002, the chances of dying of a heart attack or stroke are 1 in 500, of cancer are 1 in 750, in a car wreck are 1 in 7,500, of suicide are 1 in 7,500, of drugs/alcohol are 1 in 10,000, with a gun (murder or accidental) are 1 in 10,000. The chances of dying of a work-related injury are 1 in 50,000.

Given all that, going for a hike in lion country doesn’t look so bad, and certainly looks better than going to work.

I spent ten years hiking, running, and mountain biking in those Boulder mountains almost everyday. I never saw one mountain lion, and never even saw a mountain lion track. I had friends who saw mountain lions. One friend walked up on a mountain lion eating a deer, and the lion sat licking its bloody lips and didn’t even look at my friend thirty feet away.

I have another friend – a wildlife biologist – who tracks, traps, and GPS-collars mountain lions for the Colorado Division of Wildlife along the Front Range. She hires a houndsman with lion-sniffing bloodhounds and a professional tracker, and they sometimes spend days and weeks without even seeing a mountain lion. When they do find one, it’s the mountain lion that’s paranoid and frightened. Later, when she goes out to study the collared lions’ deer-kills, she actually walks up, alone and unarmed, with a GPS receiver and watches the blip-blip on the GPS-screen of the lion frantically racing away over the nearest ridge. She rarely sees them with her eyes.

I imagine a mountain lion jumping on my back, its fangs diving into my neck, its claws clinching in a death-grip. Then I imagine being slowly eaten. What a horrifying image. Of course, it's less likely than being struck by lightning (1 in 350,000) or winning the lottery (1 in 250,000), but it sure makes great news, and a great read. It keeps you on the same TV channel and keeps you turning pages of a book.