After the recent death of a Colorado woman attacked by a mountain lion on New Year’s Day, the behavior of outdoor adventurers in the West may change, permanently.
Many of us share our favorite outdoor spaces with lions, in surprisingly close proximity. But lion attacks have been so rare we’ve never treated them as much of a threat. This latest death may change that.
We’ve learned who the victim was in this case, Kristen Marie Kovatch, a 46-year-old resident of Fort Collins. She was an avid hiker, according to her family. She was found by a pair of men hiking the same trail, who saw a lion guarding her body. They threw rocks at the lion to scare it off, then tried to revive Kovatch. One of the men was a doctor, but he could not detect a pulse.
The coroner later determined Kovatch had died due to asphyxiation by having her neck compressed. If you’re like me and always assumed you’d be able to fend off a mountain lion attack, unless it came from behind and severed your spinal cord with a strategically placed bite to the neck, you should know that Kovatch was also an ultramarathon runner.
This was no frail, front-range urbanite out for her annual Jan. 1 commune with nature. Kovatch was a strong and experienced hiker. The nature of her death suggests she might have died after a struggle with the lion.
This tells me I need to start arming myself when I’m out in lion country, which is just about everywhere I like to play outdoors. By arming, I mean bear spray. Carrying just when you’re in grizzly country is no longer enough.
A man out on the same trail where Kovatch was killed reported an encounter with an aggressive lion in November. He was running on the trail before dawn (bad idea) and saw the lion’s eye shine from his head lamp. The lion charged him and after a tense standoff, he eventually fended it off with a stick.
Pepper spray probably would have ended the threat more quickly.
Maybe you recall the YouTube video of a man stalked and threatened by a snarling, threatening mountain lion on a Utah trail about five years ago. Again, a blast of bear spray likely turns that six-minute horrorfest into a less-frightening 30-second incident.
As firearms of the firing kind go, I don’t hope to someday see every trail hiker in America packing heat. The presence of firearms is the one constant in all accidental shootings, and if all hikers are carrying, and mostly not well trained, trailhead accidental shootings could pose a danger more threatening than lions.
If you are well-trained and experienced in the safe use of handguns, I wouldn’t hesitate to use one in defense of an aggressive, threatening mountain lion. Yes, it’s their home, but I put a premium on protecting human life. Just because we’re in their space doesn’t mean we’ve signed a death warrant.
Go online and check out that Utah incident. That’s no fur baby chasing that dude down the trail. If I’d been carrying, I can’t say for sure I would have ended that encounter, permanently, but I might have.
With bear spray I wouldn’t have hesitated.
That Utah hiker first encountered the lions’ cubs, and experts determined that video depicts a mama lion defending and protecting her young, rather than engaging in a predatory stalk. A gun would have ended things permanently. With bear spray, however, mama lion would have a bad day, but she’d live to raise her young.
Those of us who love the outdoors do so in part because it still represents the other, a space we enter because it represents a wildness that remains beyond our complete control. From the brief description Kovatch’s brother offered of his sister, it sounds like she was the sort of person who relished the solace the other provides when we step away from “civilization.”
We don’t go there to dominate. We go there to survive and live in a more intense and complete engagement with the natural world.
That’s probably what Kristen Marie Kovatch was doing on New Year’s Day.
May she rest in peace.