Watch: Backpacker has standoff with cougar, birds come to her rescue
A backpacker in Arizona became terrified when she came face to face with a mountain lion that perched on a tree over her campsite and refused to leave.
Tiffany Foster was on the fourth day of a five-day solo backpacking trip in Saguaro National Park and had just witnessed a herd of deer stampeding up out of the canyon where she was camping.
“After probably three to five minutes, I turned around and there was a huge cat clinging to a tree about 10 feet from me,” Foster described on her Semi Feral Hiker YouTube video. “It was perched about 2-3 feet off the ground on the trunk of a tree.”
Foster slowly backed away a couple of feet and fetched her bear spray and pocketed her Garmin inReach satellite messenger. She then started picking up rocks and tossing them at the cougar, along with yelling at it.
It wouldn’t budge. She turned on her iPhone and began videotaping.
“I wasn’t able to film what finally got it out of the tree,” she wrote in the video. “A flock of scrub jays came to my rescue. They dive-bombed him and annoyed him.”
Though you can’t see the birds, you can hear them in the background.
“Finally, a glorious flock of scub jays flew over and started to mob the cat,” Foster wrote in her description. “After a few pecks from the birds, he got down out of the tree.”
She thought it left, but it came back momentarily to check out a bag of her dirty clothes. It’s presumed she was able to scare it away with rocks or her yelling, as it finally left the campsite. But Foster was not feeling at ease.
“That is probably the scariest that’s ever happened to me my entire life,” Foster said in the video. “Y’all I’m terrified. This is no joke. I had a cougar in my camp. And that jerk sat in the tree above my bear box and didn’t want to leave. I threw rocks, I yelled. I feel pretty sick to my stomach right now. Of course, every noise is a…cougar.”
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During the ordeal, Foster had texted her husband and the National Park Service.
“Right after he left, I started getting responses to my frantic inReach texts,” she wrote in her description. “The National Park Staff said I should leave immediately. I didn’t need to be told twice either!”
In four hours, she hiked 10 miles in the dark and got out of the park.
“I was told later that this was THE most alarming human/cougar encounter documented in the Rincons since the 1890s,” Foster wrote.
The National Park Service closed the area through Sunday due to mountain lion activity, warning hikers to avoid Grass Shack Campground along the Arizona National Scenic Trail, Tucson.com reported.