The search for mountain lions along a remote trail in Colorado where a solo hiker was fatally attacked ended Monday after authorities killed two of the predators — including one with human DNA on its paws — but could not find a third.
The victim of the New Year's Day attack was identified as a 46-year-old woman from Fort Collins, about an hour's drive from the attack site on the Crosier Mountain trail, east of Rocky Mountain National Park. It was the first fatal mountain lion attack in Colorado since the late 1990s, and the fourth killing in North America over the past decade.
Victim Kristen Marie Kovatch died of asphyxia due to having her neck compressed, the Larimer County Coroner’s Office said in a statement Monday. The injuries were “consistent with a mountain lion attack" and her death was ruled an accident, the coroner’s office said.
Kovatch's family said she was an ultramarathon runner who died doing something she loved — hiking and enjoying the beauty of Colorado's public lands.
“We are devastated by the sudden and tragic loss of our beloved Kristen,” the family said in a statement. “Our family is struggling to comprehend this heartbreaking moment.”
Two hikers found Kovatch's body on a trail southeast of the community of Glen Haven, Colorado, at around noon on Jan. 1, state officials said. A mountain lion was nearby and they threw rocks to scare it away. One of the hikers, a physician, attended to the victim but did not find a pulse.
Later that day, two mountain lions located in the area were shot and killed by wildlife officers.
A necropsy revealed that one of those animals, a male, had human DNA on its four paws, Colorado Parks and Wildlife spokesperson Kara Van Hoose said Monday. The other lion killed did not have signs of human DNA, she said.
The search for a third mountain lion spotted in the area stretched over four days with no further sign of the animal, officials said. Hiking tails in the area were closed while the search was ongoing.
Mountain lions — also known as cougars, pumas or catamounts — can weigh up to 130 pounds (60 kilograms) and grow to more than 6 feet (1.8 meters) long. They primarily eat deer.
Colorado has an estimated 3,800 to 4,400 mountain lions, which are classified as a big game species in the state and can be hunted.
A Glen Haven man running on the same trail where Kovatch was killed encountered a mountain lion in November. He said it rushed him aggressively but he fought it off with a stick.
It was one of several mountain lion encounters east of Rocky Mountain National Park in recent months, according to Van Hoose. In two of those cases, the predators killed dogs being walked by their owners, she said.
FILE - The General Store is seen Oct. 24, 2006, in Glen Haven, Colo. (AP Photo/The Denver Post, Karl Gehring, File)
Denmark and Greenland are seeking a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio after the Trump administration doubled down on its intention to take over the strategic Arctic island, a Danish territory.
Tensions escalated after the White House said Tuesday that the “U.S. military is always an option." President Donald Trump has argued that the U.S. needs to control the world’s largest island to ensure its own security in the face of rising threats from China and Russia in the Arctic.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned earlier this week that a U.S. takeover would amount to the end of NATO.
“The Nordics do not lightly make statements like this,” Maria Martisiute, a defense analyst at the European Policy Centre think tank, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “But it is Trump, whose very bombastic language bordering on direct threats and intimidation, is threatening the fact to another ally by saying ‘I will control or annex the territory.’”
The leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom joined Frederiksen in a statement Tuesday reaffirming that the mineral-rich island “belongs to its people.”
Their statement defended the sovereignty of Greenland, which is a self-governing territory of Denmark and part of NATO.
The U.S. military action in Venezuela last weekend has heightened fears across Europe, and Trump and his advisers in recent days have reiterated a desire to take over the island, which guards the Arctic and North Atlantic approaches to North America.
“It’s so strategic right now,” Trump told reporters Sunday.
Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen and his Greenland counterpart, Vivian Motzfeldt, have requested a meeting with Rubio in the near future, according to a statement posted Tuesday to Greenland's government website.
Previous requests for a sit-down were not successful, the statement said.
Thomas Crosbie, an associate professor of military operations at the Royal Danish Defense College, said an American takeover would not improve upon Washington's current security strategy.
“The United States will gain no advantage if its flag is flying in Nuuk versus the Greenlandic flag,” he told the AP. “There’s no benefits to them because they already enjoy all of the advantages they want. If there’s any specific security access that they want to improve American security, they’ll be given it as a matter of course, as a trusted ally. So this has nothing to do with improving national security for the United States.”
Denmark’s parliament approved a bill last June to allow U.S. military bases on Danish soil. It widened a previous military agreement, made in 2023 with the Biden administration, where U.S. troops had broad access to Danish airbases in the Scandinavian country.
Rasmussen, in a response to lawmakers’ questions, wrote over the summer that Denmark would be able to terminate the agreement if the U.S. tries to annex all or part of Greenland.
But in the event of a military action, the U.S. Department of Defense currently operates the remote Pituffik Space Base, in northwestern Greenland, and the troops there could be mobilized.
Crosbie said he believes the U.S. would not seek to hurt the local population or engage with Danish troops.
“They don’t need to bring any firepower. They don’t to bring anybody.” Crosbie said Wednesday. “They could just direct the military personnel currently there to drive to the center of Nuuk and just say, ‘This is America now,’ right? And that would lead to the same response as if they flew in 500 or 1,000 people.”
The danger in an American annexation, he said, lies in the “erosion of the rule of law globally and to the perception that there are any norms protecting anybody on the planet.”
He added: “The impact is changing the map. The impact I don’t think would be storming the parliament.”
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said he spoke by phone Tuesday with Rubio, who dismissed the idea of a Venezuela-style operation in Greenland.
“In the United States, there is massive support for the country belonging to NATO – a membership that, from one day to the next, would be compromised by … any form of aggressiveness toward another member of NATO,” Barrot told France Inter radio on Wednesday.
Asked if he has a plan in case Trump does claim Greenland, Barrot said he would not engage in “fiction diplomacy.”
While most Republicans have supported Trump’s statement, Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Thom Tillis, the Democratic and Republican co-chairs of the bipartisan Senate NATO Observer Group, have criticized Trump’s rhetoric.
“When Denmark and Greenland make it clear that Greenland is not for sale, the United States must honor its treaty obligations and respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Denmark,” their statement on Tuesday said. “Any suggestion that our nation would subject a fellow NATO ally to coercion or external pressure undermines the very principles of self-determination that our Alliance exists to defend.”
Geir Moulson in Berlin and Mark Carlson in Brussels contributed to this report.
FILE - Danish military forces participate in an exercise with hundreds of troops from several European NATO members in the Arctic Ocean in Nuuk, Greenland, Sept. 15, 2025. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi, File)
FILE - A plane carrying Donald Trump Jr. lands in Nuuk, Greenland, Jan. 7, 2025. (Emil Stach/Ritzau Scanpix via AP, file)
FILE - United States Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller reacts on the sidelines of the ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Sunday, Oct. 26, 2025. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein), File)
CORRECT THE ORDER OF SPEAKERS, FILE - Denmark's Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, right, and Greenland's Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen, left, speak on April 27, 2025, in Marienborg, Denmark. (Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau Scanpix via AP, File)
