Authorities are continuing the search for a third mountain lion Friday after a woman was killed Thursday afternoon in what officers are investigating as a potential mountain lion attack on a trail near Estes Park, according to officials.
Hikers spotted a mountain lion near a woman who was lying on the ground at around 12:15 p.m. on the Crosier Mountain Trail in unincorporated Larimer County, south of Glen Haven. One of the hikers, a physician, examined the woman and couldn’t find a pulse.
Woman killed in suspected mountain lion attack in Colorado
In an emailed statement Friday, a spokesperson for the Larimer County Coroner’s Office said the woman’s identity and cause of death would be announced next week.
Two mountain lions near the scene were euthanized Thursday, but the search continues for a third mountain lion, said Colorado Parks and Wildlife spokesperson Kara Van Hoose.
“We saw it at the incident area,” Van Hoose said, adding that dogs will assist in the search, but helicopters will not be used, unlike Thursday. “We know that there’s a third lion in the area and that’s what we’re searching for.”
Before Thursday’s fatal incident, Colorado Parks and Wildlife had recorded 28 mountain lion attacks on humans since 1990.
Three-year-old Jaryd Atadero disappeared while hiking with a church group in 1999 in the Comanche Peak Wilderness Area west of Fort Collins. Wildlife officials never confirmed if Atadero was attacked by a mountain lion, but investigators speculated that is how he died.
In 1997, a 10-year-old boy from Lakewood, Mark David Miedema, was attacked and killed by a mountain lion on the North Inlet Trail on the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park while hiking with his family. This attack marked the first fatal encounter with a mountain lion in the park’s history.
Most recently, a mountain lion injured a Larimer County sheriff’s deputy and a civilian in an attack in the Riverview RV Park & Campground, west of Loveland, in 2020.
The suspected attack on Thursday occurred during Colorado’s mountain lion hunting season, which runs from November to March. Quotas on how many lions can be hunted per area are set by Colorado Parks and Wildlife, Van Hoose said, adding that the practice is used to manage mountain lion populations and as sport.
However, Van Hoose was unable to say how the hunting season affects the number of mountain lion attacks per year.
“Science doesn’t give us a good answer on that,” Van Hoose said. “… It’s tough to say that if a hunter went into an area that had an open quota and took a lion, that that was the lion that was causing problems.”
Wayne Pacelle, the president of Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy, said mountain lion hunting season may actually have the opposite effect than its intent.
“That intensive pressure to kill 500-600 animals a year will have the effect of changing the age strata of the population,” Pacelle said, adding that hunters usually go for larger lions, which are often older, as opposed to younger lions, which are more likely to prey on humans. Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy were two of the organizations at the forefront of the Prop. 127 campaign to outlaw the trophy hunting of mountain lions that was rejected by voters in 2024.
Pacelle did acknowledge that hunting may instill enough fear in mountain lions to stay away from humans, but said the argument wasn’t compelling enough to justify the practice because of the effects hunting has on changing the age of mountain lion populations.
“You’re basically creating a population that’s going to be much more inclined to have human encounters and every once in a blue moon, that encounter is going to be fatal,” Pacelle said.
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