The victim of a New Year’s Day mountain lion attack on the Colorado Front Range has been identified as Kristen Marie Kovatch—a 46-year-old woman from Fort Collins.
Kovatch was hiking by herself on Crosier Mountain Trail in Larimer County when the attack occurred sometime in the morning. Two other unrelated hikers found her lying dead in the trail around noon the same day, according to a Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) press release, and threw rocks at a mountain lion still hanging around the victim to scare it away.
One of the attending hikers happened to be a physician, CPW public information officer Kara Van Hoose told MeatEater, but there was nothing that could be done for the victim, who reportedly had no pulse at the time. Her wounds were “pretty gruesome,” according to Van Hoose, especially in the neck and head areas.
The hikers reported the incident to 911 dispatchers, who sent CPW officers to the scene, along with a hound team. When the team arrived about two and a half hours later, an officer shot at a lion still loitering in the area—a male subadult—and it was subsequently tracked with the dogs and killed. The hound team also picked up another lion, a female, and euthanized her as well.
By the time the hounds returned to the incident site, it was between 8 and 10pm, and fully dark out. Still, the officers saw a third lion still hanging around the site. The team tried unsuccessfully to track it that night.
“We used dogs and all of that for the next several days and didn’t find any new tracks and no new scent. So we don’t know—it could be another subadult, it could be the mother; we think it’s part of the same family group, but we don’t know if it’s a parent or a sibling,” Van Hoose said. Officers suspect the lion has since fled from the area, but are still warning local hikers to be cautious and report lion sightings immediately.
CPW conducted necropsies on the two euthanized lions, both of which turned out to be around 12 months old. Human DNA was found on all four paws of the male, while none was detected on the female.
“I don’t think we’ll ever really know or be able to point to a concrete reason why it happened,” Van Hoose said. “The lion—the male subadult that the human DNA was found on—had a full stomach of deer, and was in good body condition. He didn’t test positive for rabies or any other neurological diseases, so I just don’t know if we’ll ever be able to definitively say why this happened.”
Mountain lion attacks on humans are relatively rare, though they typically involve hikers or bikers when they occur. The last known* fatal* attack in Colorado was in 1999, but there have been a total of 28 attacks since 1990. A proposition to ban lion hunting in the state failed in the 2024 election, and a hunting season is currently open in most of the state through March 31.
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