When the hair on her dog Dazy’s back stood up, Lauren Sampson figured there must be a bear nearby.
It wasn’t enough to upset the Whistler resident and her friend Stacey Anderson, who were out for a short evening hike Monday evening on a bike trail on Blackcomb Mountain.
“We just started yelling, and kept hiking,” Sampson said. “There are always bears around.”
But a few minutes later, Dazy and the two women rounded a bend in the trail and a large animal — which they later learned was a cougar — charged at the leashed dog.
“It came right up to her face, and it wasn’t backing down,” Sampson said. “At first I thought it was someone else’s dog — it was just a huge, fast-moving animal.”
The two women started screaming and the animal moved a few feet into the bush. They threw sticks and started backing down the trail while maintaining eye contact. The animal stayed with them.
“I felt like it was going to charge a second time, and there wasn’t much I could do,” Sampson said. “It was just looking at us — we wanted to run, but we figured it was a bad idea.”
She said they kept yelling and banging sticks on trees and finally turned to walk — and run a little — down the trail. About 20 minutes passed before two men rode up on mountain bikes. Their dog had been running ahead of the cyclists and surprised the cougar.
A cougar climbs a tree next to a bike trail on Blackcomb Mountain.
“The dog was racing down, he was 10 feet ahead of us, and startled the cougar,” said Ben Haggar, one of the cyclists and a freelance photographer who was happy to have a camera with him.
“We had to ride our bikes right underneath the cougar — it was up a tree right next to the trail.”
The women didn’t realize it was a cougar until they saw the photos.
The two cyclists rode a distance down the trail then stopped and watched while the animal climbed down and disappear into the bush.
A conservation officer later told the women the cougar was probably either guarding a fresh kill or considered their dog a potential meal.
“It wasn’t aggressive to us,” Haggar said. “The dog was pretty freaked out. He stayed between us the rest of the way down.
“It was great to be so close to such a big cat.”
