The Mystery of Mountain Lions

High Country News writer Sarah Gilman reports on the cougar, North America's most widely distributed large predator — and one of the least understood. Despite decades of telemetry, scat studies, and trail-camera research, mountain lions remain wrapped in myth, fear, and political controversy across the American West. Gilman weaves together biology, wildlife-management history, and the lived experience of communities near cougar country to ask why a species we now know so much about still feels like a creature of legend.