The third and most amazing happened a few summers ago during an evening hike to a favorite haunt.<\/p>\n
Walking at dusk, something spooked my dog, and she quickly fell in line behind me at the top of a small draw.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ll go down together,\u201d I reassured her, suddenly aware of the wildness of this seldom visited area.<\/p>\n
Reed grass, reaching 4 feet high, blew in the wind. Then, just 20 yards below, there she was, an adult mountain lion gliding away from me at an angle through the grass. I grabbed the dog and squatted down for cover. A strong breeze blew uphill toward us hiding our scent, and to my great delight, three medium-size kittens appeared bounding alongside their mother.<\/p>\n
Still unnoticed, I watched her cubs frolic about while she sat under some oak brush with her backside toward me. Gnats buzzed around her ears, causing them to flicker.<\/p>\n
After several minutes, I felt like I was intruding on a quaint family moment, so I stood up and uttered a small cough.<\/p>\n
She whipped her head around and glared at us with a mixture of alarm and anger. We stared at each other for a few moments, and I felt the hair on my neck rising looking into those wide golden eyes.<\/p>\n
I casually backed away with the dog on a leash, and she and the cubs streaked out of sight, scuttling loudly along some nearby deadfall.<\/p>\n
Observing such a natural scene made me feel proud there is still room for people and wildlife to coexist. I stopped going to that area to respect her privacy, although I would like to retrieve the water bottle I left in all the excitement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
third and most amazing happened a few summers ago during an evening hike to a favorite haunt. Walking at dusk, something spooked my dog, and she quickly fell in line behind me at the top of a small draw. \u201cWe\u2019ll go down together,\u201d I reassured her, suddenly aware of the wildness of this seldom […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6363],"tags":[188,13],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-122199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ds-news","tag-dolores-star","tag-frontpage-lead"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122199\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122199"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=122199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}