Photo by Willy Onarheim

It happens often enough: A hard-working man gets promoted and decides to reward himself with a little R&R before starting his new job. On Dec. 31, 1900, Vice President-elect Theodore Roosevelt resigned as governor of New York, packed his winter gear and headed off to hunt mountain lions near the town of Meeker in Western Colorado.

The hard-charging Rough Rider did well by any standard. Exactly how many cats were taken from the area in and around Coyote Gulch remains in dispute, though experts say the total could have been near 20. Roosevelt attributed much of his success to the effectiveness of his guide's dogs. He was so impressed with the tracking and tenacity of John Goff's hounds that on at least one occasion when a particularly nasty cat started getting the best of the canines, Roosevelt himself dove into the fray.

"After a couple hundred yards, the dogs caught him, and a great fight followed," T. R. wrote to his oldest son, Ted, in mid-January of 1901. "They could have killed him by themselves, but he bit or clawed four of them, and for fear he might kill one, I ran in and stabbed him behind the shoulder, thrusting the knife you loaned me right into his heart. I have always wished to kill a cougar as I did this one, with dogs and a knife." (T. Roosevelt's Letters to His Children, J. B. Bishop, 1928.)

Roosevelt returned to the East Coast with a cougar skull more massive than anyone had seen, and eventually accepted one of Goff's hounds as a pet for his son, Archie. The boy and his dog wrecked havoc, chasing each other through the White House. The mountain lion trophy held the informal world's record for several years, and a score of 15 12/16 still gives it a high ranking among entries of the Boone & Crockett Club's record book. Roosevelt was one of the club's founders.

Over a century later, sportsmen looking for a mountain lion hunt worth writing home about should still consider a trip to Colorado. Cougar were once widely distributed across North America, and on this state's Western Slope, they have all the resources necessary to thrive.

The Colorado Plateau dominates the area's geography. It's a high desert environment that includes parts of Utah and New Mexico. The Centennial State's portion has a combination of rugged terrain, sparse vegetation and abundant prey that makes for ideal cougar habitat. Elevation is usually moderate, in the 5,000- to 8,000-foot range. Lofty buttes and mesas are crosscut by deep drainages with steep cliffs, and exposed rock that's often unstable. Cover ranges from piñon and juniper woodlands up high to broken patches of sagebrush and other scrub down low or out in the open.

Then there's what wildlife biologists refer to as "biomass," the amount of food available per unit of area, and for mountain lions, Western Colorado is a virtual smorgasbord. Numerous prey species in truly huge numbers make this locale one big hotspot for cougars.

Conventional wisdom ties mountain lion population and distribution closely to deer: You'll find cougars where mule deer and elk reside, and the more prey, the more predators. If that's true, Western Colorado should have more lions than anywhere.

The Division of Wildlife estimates that the state's mule deer number half a million. Elk add about another 250,000 head. The majority of both species are distributed well west of the Continental Divide. There are also bighorn, pronghorn and substantial populations of livestock. Mountain lions also eat a variety of small game.

The diversity and density of potential food sources helps explain why lions that qualify for the Boone & Crockett records come from all sections of Western Colorado. With so much meat on the ground, you might expect the area to be crawling with cougars -- and you could be more right than you know.

NATURE OF THE BEAST
Dr. Ken Logan, a wildlife field biologist, has been studying Puma concolor in the western United States since 1981 and recently completed a 10-year project in the Chihuahua Desert for the New Mexico Game & Fish Department. In that environment, the prey base was determined to be relatively thin, but Logan's team still recorded the second highest density of mountain lions anywhere in North America: about four adults per 100 square miles. Recently, the Colorado Division of Wildlife hired Logan to conduct the most intensive research into mountain lion population dynamics they've ever done, and he's fired-up to collar some cats.