A Utah bowhunter encountered her “largest worry” whereas chasing elk through the season opener on Aug. 20. Laurien Elsholz, 23, was deep in a ravine close to the Stansbury Mountains in Tooele County when the odor of demise caught her consideration and precipitated her to gag. Nearly instantly, one thing emerged from the comb and swatted at her leg.
“I heard some crashing noises after which all of it occurred so quick,” Elsholz stated. “I regarded to my proper and I used to be nose to nose with a mountain lion.”
She instantly struck the younger cat within the head together with her mountaineering pole, inflicting it to retreat a bit. By the point she processed what was occurring, she realized that the cat wasn’t totally deterred. She began yelling out to her companions just a few yards up the ravine, urging them to remain away.
“I began backing up whereas making eye contact with it and I backed into some thick timber and couldn’t go anymore, so I used to be type of trapped,” Elsholz stated. “I used to be attempting to determine the way to get round this cat with out one thing taking place, and it lashed at me 4 occasions. It jumped at me, hissed, and was like ‘get out of right here.’”
Elsholz acknowledges that the cat was in all probability simply attempting to guard a kill.
“It had simply killed one thing and wished me to get away from its meals. I used my stick with hit it yet another time and it backed up just a little bit, and that’s once I began recording.”
The video reveals the cat strolling forwards and backwards with its tail tucked between its legs. Elsholz continued yelling all through the video, and the cat begins strolling towards her once more proper because the footage ends. In keeping with Elsholz, the cat lashed out once more, and she or he struck it with the stick a 3rd time. She pushed to the best of the cat and began backing up the hill, going through the cat the entire time. Ultimately she and her sister, girlfriend, and few buddies obtained out of the woods, however not earlier than the mountain lion adopted them for a couple of mile.
Elsholz is grateful that the interplay wasn’t extra violent. However when she posted the video on Fb, her expertise was met with a number of criticism. Some lamented in feedback that the lion was utterly calm and she or he wasn’t at any danger, and a few berated her for not carrying a gun.
“Mountain lions hardly ever assault folks. Saying you’re fortunate to have gotten out alive is a little bit of a stretch. You’re in lion nation. That lion confirmed zero aggression in direction of you, a lot so that you just had been in a position to get your cellphone out and file it. You’re fortunate to have had the encounter,” one remark reads.
Elsholz does think about herself fortunate, but in addition factors out that coming nose to nose with a mountain lion within the woods is undeniably scary irrespective of how calmly the cat behaves. And as she explains, the cat wasn’t essentially calm, because it swatted her and swiped at her a number of occasions when she didn’t have her digital camera turned on.
So far as whether or not she ought to carry a gun or not, the avid shed hunter desires to get one sooner or later.
“I often hook a big knife onto my looking pack and carry bear spray on my aspect, however this present day I completely spaced that I had bear spray as a result of I used to be simply so scared,” Elsholz says. “However I’ll look into getting a gun, as a result of I might really feel loads safer going again to that mountain vary once more.”
