NEDERLAND — Pam Rose texted a Colorado Parks and Wildlife official on the evening of Dec. 9 to tell him she had started to fear for her 11-year-old daughter’s safety because two mountain lions seemed to be casing her home.  

The lions had been around for weeks by that point. Rose had seen them watching the horses from a hillside on her land in the Roosevelt National Forest. Reports of lions attacking dogs in her immediate neighborhood, coupled with their sudden interest in the livestock and Bagel, had put her nervous system in “overdrive,” she says. 

The night she texted Colorado Parks and Wildlife was a breaking point. A lion had been sitting outside of Bennett’s garden-level door, seemingly waiting for her to bring Bagel outside to pee. Bennett saw it 25 feet away and rushed the dog back inside. “I felt like it knew our patterns,” Rose says. “It knew Bagel lived there, and it was waiting to attack.”  

Rose, Bennett and Bagel were luckier than dozens of Nederland-area residents who’d had mountain lion encounters in the months and weeks before. 

During those last three weeks, seven dogs died, two had been stalked, one survived an attack and one vanished. 

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