Apex Predator: Stalked by a Wild Beast

It is late morning April 30th 1998. About 40 minutes southwest of Denver, Colorado, a short hop of the I-25 lies the Roxborough State Park. In this 3,000-acre national landmark, the clear spring sun rests lightly upon forests of ponderosa pine and Douglas fir. Mixed together with great swathes of prairie land and shows topping stripes of orange sandstone. These giant distinctive rock formations jucked into the skyline. It's hot for April 27 degrees, though small snow drift still litter the hillsides in this place of extremes, whether summer sun, scorches and the high thirties and in winter nighttime temperatures regularly dip below -20. Today there is little wind and not a cloud in the sky. Halfway up the park's highest point, Carpenter Peak, the air is dominated by birdsong. The descending trail of canyon wrens and the rhythmic chirping of white throated swifts make the trees and bushes pulsate with a constant lively thrum. High above, golden eagles wheel and cry. There isn't a person in sight. Here in this vast and protected wilderness, the world seems at peace. And then suddenly, silence. The bird song falters as if in anticipation, an eerie warning of the strange and terrible thing making its way down the mountain. Quiet at first, but getting louder, snarling, screaming, violence hurtles down the trail. As it barrels into view, it's hard to make out exactly what this awful creature might be. Half human, half beast, covered in fur and dripping blood, this tornado of teeth and claws careers down the rocky slope. Samplings snap in two with a force of impact as the creature tumbles through the brush. Eventually, the catta-walling creature slams into a figure large enough to halt its progress and for the first time, it's possible to make out two figures locked in a deadly embrace. One of them is 24-year-old Andy Peterson. You could feel the claws come out. You could hear the popping sounds pop pop pop on each side of my neck. They were inside my neck calling me down. Andy is fighting for his life. Minutes ago, this avid hiker was enjoying the downhill return of his favorite trail. Now, he is in a death grip, his flesh punctured and lacerated, blood cascading down over his eyes, blinding him. And his world is darkening. The bottom jaw was on the top of my forehead. The top of the jaw was in the back part of my head. And I realized, oh my gosh, it's got me. It's got me. That was it. I'm not going to get out of this thing. Never wondered what you would do when disaster strikes. If your life depended on your next decision, could you make the right choice? Welcome to Real Survival Stories. These are the astonishing tales of ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. People suddenly forced to fight for their lives. In this episode, we meet 24-year-old part-ranger Andy Peterson. On April 30, 1998, Andy wakes up late. He decides to put off his list of jaws and instead head to his favorite national park for an invigorating hike. It's a decision that will change his life forever. On his way back down the trail, having enjoyed panoramic views of Carpenters Peak, Andy is stalked and then attacked by an apex predator that seems intent on ending his life. I was on my knees looking right into this mouth. You could see the four dominant teeth. It just smelled like rotting flesh. The future remains of this beast's recent kill serve as a horrifying preview of what Andy now seems to be becoming. It's next meal. I got the claws in my neck and it's pulling me down like this vise grip just grinding, grinding, grinding. I can't move my arms. I can't move my legs. I got a waterfall of blood in front of me. All I know is I got to get out of here. I'm John Hopkins. From the Noisepotcast Network, this is Real Survival Stories. It's April 30, 1998. In an untidy bedroom on the outskirts of Denver, Colorado, light is streaming through a crack in a badly drawn curtain. A groggy, Andy Peterson stretches and yorns rolls over to check the time and size. He is overslept. Not that he is late for anything in particular. It's his day off. But he's got a long list of jobs to do. And now he's starting on the back foot. I woke up late that day on my day off and I said, oh man, I got so much to do. I got errands in town to get done. I got groceries to get. I got laundry to do, you know, just all kinds of stuff. And I went, yeah, who cares? Let's go on the hike. Recently, Andy has been working as a park ranger in the nearby city of Lakewood. But his heart lies in another park a little further south. In downtown Denver, one of the main state parks is Chatfield State Park. There's hot air balloons, there's horse stables, there's mountain bikes. Everywhere you look, there was action going on. While 15 miles south of that was a quiet little state park named Roxborough State Park. In Roxborough State Park, Andy has found his own slice of paradise. Expensive and simple. It has four main trails. One of which takes the Intrepid Hiker straight up the highest point, the so-called Carpenter Peak Trail. The one that I loved the most was the almost four mile trail to the very top of the mountains. It was about a thousand foot in climb. The roots can be punishing for the unseasoned walker. But the precipitous nature of the climb has its rewards. Sitting up on top, you know, you have this breathtaking view of just an incredible scenery. And this became kind of my go-to hike, my timeout, my getaway from everything, getaway from the noise, the work, the people just timeout. Andy rolls out of bed, throws a few essentials into a backpack and jumps in the car. It isn't a long drive and the day is still young by the time he reaches the park. He leaves his car by the visitor's center, steps out and breathes in the refreshing, clean air of nature. He stands at the foot of the Carpenter Peak Trail with a glorious spring sunshine warming the surrounding wilderness. Grasslands fan out on all sides with a gentle incline up ahead, growing to steeper rocky slopes sprinkled with trees higher above. The stage is set for another of Andy's great escapes, a peaceful sanctuary from the pace of life. As he begins the hike, he checks the whiteboard by the visitor's center where walkers record animal sightings. A black bear has been spotted with her cub's not far along the trail, near this very spot. Apart from that, the board hasn't changed much since the last time Andy came. There are foxes, deer, a few eagles and infaded marker pen from about a year ago, a mountain line. Andy heads up the trail. He is travelling light with just snacks, a bottle of water and a leatherman-style pen knife in his small backpack. He's done this route so many times and he more than that will be overkill. As his boots crunch rhythmically up the dry mud path, Andy seems lost in his own world. He passes another man walking alone but he barely lifts his head in acknowledgement. Despite the thinness of the path and the tightness of the brush on either side, forcing the hikers to sidele past each other at close quarters, Andy is not interested in connecting. As he continues up the trail, the sun grows warmer and sweat beads on his brow but he doesn't break stride. A spring breeze provides pleasant respite and before long the summit is in his sights. This year's about to crest the peak. He passes four women making their way down and just as with the male hiker he passed earlier, he doesn't even look up. The only thing I thought of was me, me, me, me. I want to get to the top. I want to sit on my favorite spot, my favorite rock. I don't want anybody sitting there. I don't need to speak to anybody. I don't want to talk to anybody, just my spot. When he reaches the top, Andy has his carpenter's peak all to himself. He looks out over the foothills all the way to Red Rock amphitheatre, the famous music venue and on to Boulder and Rocky Mountain National Park. He turns his head east to take him the endless plains while behind him hikes peak. and the rest of their 14-as Colorado sequence of 14,000-foot rocky mountains stretches out in all their snow-capped majesty. Andy sips his water. This is what he came for. Not community, not connection, just him and the view. Not for the first time, Andy Peterson is putting himself first. Growing up, Andy lived in the tiny farm town of Hutchinson, Minnesota, with a population of 15,000 where everybody knew everybody. But this simple life was complicated at an early age. His parents split up when Andy was in kindergarten and both remarrayed by the time he was in fourth grade. Andy went from having one home and one sister to suddenly inheriting five step brothers across two hobes. He had to quickly learn how to navigate the duality that comes with divorce. So yeah, in third grade art class, I'm watching all these kids in my class making one craft. Well, that's great, but do I give that one to mom or do I give it to dad? Can I make two? And the teacher's failing you because you're not making it as pretty as the person next to you, twice as fast to try to make two things to give, you know, who do I give it to? So as a kid, one weekend you're at dad's house and there's a set of rules. And the next weekend I'm at my mom's house and there's a whole set of rules. Without the safety of one single place to call home, Andy began to harden to detach from his emotions. In his large blended family, there was often friction and money was regularly tight. By the time Andy reached fifth grade, he was searching for a sense of self and validation outside of the family home. It led to experimentation and rebellion. My first cigarettes was in fifth grade. I bought them off my brother for a dime a piece. My first marijuana, my first joint was in seventh grade. And my first hallucinogenic, my first hardcore drug was eleventh grade. I quickly started living on the fast lane in parties. I didn't want to go home as much as I could be away from home. Already in with friends, I did that. And so I just found myself searching. As soon as he finished high school, Andy left town. He drove west into the mountains with a paper map and no idea where he was going. From Minnesota, he traveled west to Montana, camping out in national parks, having off grid with little to no contact with family or friends. Nobody knew where he was or where he was going. Neither really did Andy. For the first time in his life, he was totally alone and totally free. He traveled down through Wyoming and Arizona to the Grand Canyon and Rocky State National Park, all the time soaking in the peace and quiet. After partying with a friend in Colorado, Andy was running short on cash, with a car in need of an oil change and a body in need of a hot shower. He headed for home. But after returning to Minnesota, he didn't take long for things to sour. Andy got a job in a lumber mill and resumed the constant battles with his parents. One day, on his break at work, he had an epiphany. And I just sat there and went, "I gotta get out of here." "There's nothing here for me. I'm fighting with the family. I don't wanna do this." And so I said, "I'm just gonna head back to Colorado where my buddy is and see what life throws at me." You know? The trouble was, Andy didn't have any money. But he knew someone who did. I went to my grandma's house and I played the old little sorry grandchild type. "Hey, grandma, I'm moving to Colorado. I don't have any money. Can I get just a little bit of money?" She didn't even hesitate. This sweet lady turns around and she writes a checkout. "I have no idea how much for her. She writes a check. All's in half. Hands it to me. And I wish I could have paused a little longer to truly thank her just for her love and support." So she gives me the check and put it in my wallet, give her a hug and she's like, "Come back and visit grandma." And I was like, "Yeah, okay. Got what I wanted. I'm out." It wasn't until Andy stopped at a gas station on Route Colorado and thought to look at the check. And I would quite how generous his grandma had been. And I'm sitting there staring at this piece of paper in my hand. And at 20 years old, no goals, no nothing lined up. I'm staring at a check for $10,000. I've never seen that much money in my life. And I just got excited. I called my buddy from a pay phone. I said, "Party's on me. I'm almost there." True to his word, Andy and his friends spent his first night in Colorado, partying in Denver into the small hours. After a long and heavy night, Andy got into an altercation outside a nightclub. It led to his friend being tackled to the ground. His head was split open on the pavement. With a body full of drugs and alcohol and a passenger covered in blood from a freely weeping gash in his head. And he tried to drive to the hospital. No clue where I'm going. And I just started driving around trying to find the hospital. He's trying to tell me where to go, but he can't really see. And also when we get on to this road. And normally you've got sidewalks and a middle line. And also in this road gets more narrow and narrow. And the dotted line disappears. And it does like this U-shape. And at the end of this U-shape down there. All of a sudden I see this food truck, box truck looking vehicle. And it's coming towards us. And I realized there's not a whole lot of room for this guy to get by. And now we're driving towards each other. And we come nose to nose about a couple feet away from the head on collision. And I realize it is eye to nose. that is going the wrong way on an off-ramp. I'm going the wrong way on the beginner state highway. Cars are going 70-80 miles an hour on this thing. We could have easily had a pedon collision with of all things in ambulance. The ambulance into which the two inebriated men almost collided took the friend to hospital and he drove home. His next few months continued in much the same vein. He followed the party from Colorado to California and Vegas only to return to his new home in Denver to find a file of unpaid bills and a letter from his bank bearing two terrifying words in sufficient funds. In just three months he had fritted away his grandmother's ten thousand dollars. Andy got jobs and lost jobs. He was fired from a gig in a shipping warehouse and from another on a construction site. Then he remembered that his parents had always said they'd give him money if he went to university. So he sent his mother lists of books and classes he wanted to attend and she sent checks. Money that suffice to say Andy didn't spend on studying. But this was just another short term for financial fix. Something a little steadier was required. Then he stumbled across a new professional possibility. One that held a greater appeal than anything he'd previously tried. Becoming a part ranger. I didn't want to sit in front of a computer all day. I'm more active. I want to be outside. Park ranger. Camping Bolton's fishing. Hiking. Oh yeah. That's more of my style. Austin. Austin. And so Andy reached an equilibrium of sorts. Still partying regularly but also working at something that he did actually in his own private way. Enjoy. And every week without fail he would head up to his favorite spot in Roxborough State Park to get some space to be alone and to escape reality for a little while. Right now sat a top carpenter's peak. The reality is that the weather is beginning to turn. The wind is stirring into life and clouds are forming overhead. Kind of a drowning. I can get out of here. You know the wind's picking up. Still had three and a half miles to get down. So I turn around and I start walking down this trail. Andy finishes the orange he brought as a snack. Takes a few more gulps of water and he gets on his way. He hasn't gone far back downhill when suddenly he stops in his tracks. Two vivid purple and white flowers dangle and luringly just off the path. It's a surprise to see them there. The area surrounding the path is arid and trampled. Andy takes a moment considering these intricate and beautiful splashes of color on a backdrop of greens and browns. He takes a deep breath drinking in the natural splendor. He goes to continue when a faint noise makes him turn. And I look down further on the trail and I hear the snap sounds. And underneath this little pine tree sure enough I see this big brown first. sitting under this pine tree where the noises come from. And I know what a German shepherd dog is. I know what a fox is. I know what a coyote is. And I'm looking at this and I go, this is a mountain line. This is a mountain line. Andy stands, stalks still. There is nobody else around. There is just him and a few feet of the trail in the shade of a pine tree. There is a mountain line. And immensely powerful predator, rarely seen, but deeply feared. There is just one thing playing in Andy's favour. Right now, the beast is distracted by an early lunch. Its powerful jaws tear the flesh and crack and crunch through the bones of a recently mauled mule deer. It looks at briefly scanning the horizon before returning to its meal. He's careful not to make any sudden movements. And he turns his head to look left down the mountain at the visitor's centre way below. He can see the parking lot where he left his car. But if he's going to get down there, he's going to have to walk right past the mountain line. It hasn't looked up at Andy, not yet anyway. I know at any moment this line, their senses are far better than mine. This mountain line is just going to look right at me and its game on. Trembling, Andy tries very slowly and very carefully to remove the pen knife from his pack. Without taking his eyes off the mountain line, he gently unfolds all of the tools from their slot. I folded out the screwdriver part of the knife and I realised all these knives have just poking all out of this knife set now. And if I fall on this thing, there's two, three knives at the bottom. I'm just going to stab myself in my gut. I start fighting with this line and I fall on this. It's just going to stab myself. So I started folding all these blades in to make a makeshift-type weapon of just the big blade. And I folded in the screwdriver part in the middle of the blade and it slipped at the end and slammed back into the case of the knife and kind of did this little echo across the mountain. The pen knife's click reverberates across the slopes. It seems an impossibly loud noise to emanate from such a small object. Andy sharply enhales. And just for a second, his eyes dart down away from the line and towards the tool in his hand. Clanced at the knife that made that little clap-type noise as the blade went back in. And I look back at the line gone. Line's gone. I didn't even see it move. They're so fast. They're like stealth. They're so fast, so quick, so elusive. And I look and I'm like, where'd he go? Where'd he go? Where'd he go? And I look further down this trail and I did a U-shade. And at the corner of the tree's sure enough, there's that line staring right outside the brush, staring right at me. Andy is looking at the line dead in the eyes. His mouth is hanging open, revealing four predominant teeth, long, sharp canines that seem to jut out of its mouth with exaggerated menace. And on its head, the line has pulled its ears back flat against the scar, which means only one thing. It's getting ready to pounce. I'm staring at this line realizing, please, somebody come up this mountain because this is getting dangerous real quick. Please, somebody come up here because now the fight is on. It's the 30th of April, 1998. And near the top of the highest peak in Roxborough State Park, a 24-year-old man is locked in a stairing competition with one of nature's most effective killing machines. Up to 200 pounds of pure muscle and eight feet from nose to tail, the Colorado mountain line has a record-breaking leap of 20 feet straight up or 40 feet horizontally. For context, that's like performing a slam dunk in a professional basketball hoop that is stacked on top of another professional basketball hoop. A 40-foot horizontal jump would clearly half the court. Also known as cougars or pumers, they have been recorded leaping into trees while carrying 100 pounds of fresh kill in their mouths. And they can reach running speeds of 50 miles per hour. All in all, the stats are not in Andy Peterson's favor. The fastest guy ever recorded was Usain Bolt. In the Olympics, I believe, was 28 miles an hour. So you're not getting away from these angles. They love the surprise ambush. They'll go for the head and neck area. They'll grab the neck and head area in the severed spine or break the vertebrae until whatever it has stopped breathing. High up on the slopes of Carpenters Peak, Andy is trying to control his own breathing. He has been stood quite still, staring at the lion for some minutes now. The creature stares back. In its eyes, there was a kind of terrifying certainty, a calm power that shakes Andy to his core. When these lions look right at you, they look through you. Almost like they open you all up and see every strategy, every fear, everything about you, like they're a step ahead, because they're so elusive, so powerful that you realize really quickly, I'm in trouble. I mean, the fear alone was so heavy. My legs were shaking so bad where it was hard to stand up. Under his breath he pleads for someone, another walker, to come up the trail. But no one does. So slowly, very slowly, Andy starts to back up the trail, moving uphill away from the big cat. As the path bends, a scrub oak momentarily obscures the lion from view. The second it broke the lion's sight in a blink of an eye that lion jumped, launched and landed right in front of me. I could reach out and pet this thing. It was that close. Startled, Andy takes a step back down the trail, and the lion uses the opportunity to take the higher ground, jumping above him on the uphill slope. Andy takes one more step down the trail, and the lion pounces. It jumped right on me, slammed into my chest. The lion's razor-like retractable claws rake and his torso and neck drawing blood. But somehow he riggles free. The lion pounces again, but Andy dodges the attack and sets off down the trail as fast as he possibly can. He runs back which downhill, swinging his pack out in front of him like a shield and screaming at the top of his lungs. In his other hand, he still grips the pen knife. He cannot afford to put a foot wrong on the twists and turns with the trail with its loose rocks and tree roots threatening to trip him with every step. The lion follows an effortless counter, and then Andy stops. We came to three boulders, like three foot steps of boulders. And at the top of the steps, I took a swing with the knife in the pack. It lined us kind of backed up like, you know, didn't even get close to it, because it was so quick. And I had the knife in my left hand, as hard as I could. I took a swing towards its head. And again, it just kind of backed up. Like it was almost slow motion like it went right by its face and nose with the knife. On his precarious perch, teetering on the rocky steps, Andy tries to use his knife to keep the lion at bay. He attempted to get some more distance between himself and the predator. After I swung the second time, I jumped down that boulder step, a three foot drop. And that was the first time me and that mountain line looked each other dead in the eye, same height. Same level. It was refeed up, and we looked right at each other. And it launched with such force, and slammed in my chest with such force. Through me down the mountain side, we snapped two, three-inch diameter trees. I mean, they just popped and snapped off like toothpicks of the power of this lion. I heard this huge loud thud as the back of the mountain line slammed into this big bush. The bottom claws of the line were down by my knees and my thighs. The top claws were up on my neck. You could hear the popping sounds pop, pop, pop on each side of my neck. And you could tell now that they were inside my neck pulling me down. And I was on my knees looking right into this mountain lion's mouth. Held in place by huge pause with razor sharp claws dug deep into his flesh and with his head held in its teeth. And he starts stabbing wildly at the lion's head and neck with his pen knife. But the knife doesn't have a lock. And in his furious stabbing, the blade has folded back on his hand. So that with every swipe, he presses the sharpened edge deeper into his own fingers. He can smell the rotten flesh of the beast. previous kill, and in can hear its fangs crack on his skull. All you heard is "Haw" as a teeth raked on top of my head. All of a sudden it was just like this waterfall and red, and I realized I'm losing time. This is real as it gets. I can't turn around and hit reset. I can't turn around and unplug the video game. This is as real a moment as I get in my life. This is the scariest moment of my life. With time running out, Andy does something he has never done before. And I didn't know what else to do because nobody else is coming up on this trail and I scream as loud as I could. God help me! While appealing to the heavens and he continues to fight. With the blades of his pen knife still semi-retracted, he needs to reach over to his weapon. He's desperate, trapped and in intense pain, he stretches over the lion's head. It continues to attack as his right hand grapples to unfold the pen knife. And then he makes a discovery. I reached over this lion and I handed this knife and I reached back and I felt two soft spots. And as far as I could, I shoved my thumb into the eye of this lion. The lion squeals and pressing home his advantage and he stabs a gain. This time he makes good contact. With a yelp, the lion loosens its grip and Andy stumbles free, bloodied and shaking, coursing with adrenaline. Looking over at his assailant, he can see that the lion's eye is damaged, but it has a gash on the top of its head. Elsewhere its fur is thick and matted with blood. His blood. Before it can rally and mount another attackable surely finish him and he picks up a rock from the trail and holds it at the lion. He misses, but he tries a gain and a gain. I saw this basketball-sized rock, half way in the dirt, ripped that out of the dirt and overhead through it. Bam! Swam it right into the side of the lion and shuffle the lion down a few more feet. The animal stumbles as the heavy rock strikes its flank, forcing it a few crucial feet further away. But with that, Andy starts running. Now go go go go go go. So now I'm running for my life. I see the blood dripping and splattering on my shoes and the trail as I'm running. I'm keep looking back. Please don't chase me. And I'm running through in this huge set of pine trees shade the trail and it does this L shape. And I'm running around the corner of the sill. And I turn and look behind my shoulder. And at the corner of the tree sure enough there's a smountain line staring right at me again. Badly hurt and leaving a tell-tale trail of blood behind him, Andy is being stalked. He is already dizzy to soar in tated. His body, a cocktail of adrenaline and injury. He takes a few more steps, but when he turns around again, it isn't the lion he sees. But something very, very different. I saw this transparent face of a man. I saw this transparent face of Jesus because the piece that rushed through me the moment I saw this face. I didn't know who he was. I didn't know what it was. But the piece that rushed through me was so real, was so complete. Like I got you son. I got you. With his energy levels renewed by a sense of hope that seems heaven-sent, Andy runs again. There is no sense of how close the lion is. His focus is just on his feet slapping and stumbling on the ground. And then, as if from nowhere, he barrels straight into the arms of a couple of hikers. The sight of Andy's slashed body and faces horrifying. The two walkers sit him down and give him water, but in his adrenaline state of terror is manic. He insists he needs to continue. So I stood up and pulled away some nail and I keep running. You know, I'm just screaming, "Help, help, help, 911. About one." You know, I'm screaming all this stuff running down like a complete fool running down, running down this mountain, just screaming like a bloody idiot. The trail beneath his feet becomes smoother, flatter. The visitor center isn't far now, maybe half a mile. Andy is still in a terrible way. He may not be able to make it even that far. But thankfully, his pleas have now been heard. Two of those ladies that I couldn't even look at and give us some serial hell-oh earlier up on that trail were driving out of the park and heard me screaming, running down this mountain. They turned around in their car and ran back that last half mile from the visitor center to where now I was. And all of a sudden, I had one arm up over their shoulders and another arm up over their shoulders. And they were now carrying me the last half mile. The three of them crash back into the visitor center and suddenly pain hits Andy like a freight train. He yells out that his feet are on fire. The hikers remove his shoes and tend to his wounds as best they can on the floor of the visitor center. Not long after, the faint sound of helicopter blades grow louder overhead. Andy had come to the park for some solitude to get away from everyone else. But it is thanks to the kindness of other people that he now stands a chance of making it through. It is the middle of the night on the 1st of May 1998, the day after the attack. On a ward of the Swedish medical center in downtown Denver, someone is screaming. This is a hospital so such sounds are not unusual. What is different about these screams however is that they are not being caused by physical pain. They are being caused by trauma and terror. I remember the first night right after I woke up from the surgery, delosing off and on, delosing off and on. Every 20 minutes I would wake up in the bed screaming because I relived it over and over and over all night long. My mind was just on replay of this attack in vivid detail. The claws, the sharpness of the claws, the sound of the teeth on my head and I went, "I can't do this. This is almost worse than the attack itself because it just kept going and going and going and going and it wouldn't stop." Andy has already been through six hours of surgery. He needed over 100 stitches to suture wounds to his neck, chest, thighs, shoulders, arms and stomach. 74 staples were needed to close the two foot long gashes in his head and he has had plastic surgery to mend the gouge under his eye. The team at Swedish Medical has never used so many staples. The surgeon there for 20 years never used two staple guns so I guess I said a record. While Andy lies in hospital recovering from surgery, a search is going on for the big cat that attacked him. But the arid Colorado air means the bloodhounds can't keep the scent and after three days they stop looking. It is unknown therefore if the line was carrying any diseases. For Andy this means he needs further, extremely unpleasant treatment. I had to have rabies shots and I remember a nurse, Tim if I recall his name, came in and he's like, "Buddy, we can't find it so the shots, the rabies shots got to go where the bite marks are. It's going to be on top of your head. This will not be pleasant. I'm going to tell you that right now. This is going to be excruciating. So hold my hand if you need to and I remember grabbing his hand and 12 rabies shots went in and he wasn't kidding. It was torture. They had to help undo my fingers because my hand was white. He came in the next day with a little cast on his bottom two fingers and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I'm sorry." He goes, "It's okay, it's okay." It doesn't take long for the media to get hold of Andy's story and soon journalists are turning up to the hospital asking for interviews. But he is in no state to court the limelight. In one interview he is so unwell from the morphine he vomits throughout. Surprisingly Andy's dad comes to the hospital to sit with him. A surprise because they don't exactly see eye to eye. This was a guy that I never got along with. It was late at night when he flew in and he comes to the hospital and he sits in this chair and there's this little light in this hospital room. It was just me and him and he says, "How you doing?" I said, "Okay." He goes, "No, how you doing in here, son?" I said, "I don't know. I don't know, Dad." Andy says, "When life was so heavy, 10 years ago, I even struggled with money, with you boys, with work, he goes, life got really hard and really heavy." And he goes, "I just threw it all in the foot of the cross and I said, God, I can't do this anymore." For the first time in Andy's life, his father opens up. This big, tough, alpha male suddenly seems far more vulnerable. Andy lies in the hospital bed full of staples and stitches and covered in dressings and bandages and listens. Four days after he was admitted, he leaves the hospital lucky to be alive. He's told that if it wasn't for the dry Colorado air helping to clot his blood, he may have died on the hillside. Despite such a near miss, it doesn't take long for Andy to return to his old habits. It only took a week for me to fall right back. My old party friends, my old party ways. Initially it's hard for him to reintegrate back into normality. His wounds make him self-conscious. He wears a bandana over his hair, which is not allowed to wash for three months because he might uprooted. So he goes home to stay with his parents to rest and regroup. While he's there, Andy attends church with him, but he's going through the motions for their sake. It isn't until he is at a bonfire party, staring, blurry eyed into the fire that his perspective shifts. While the sun, the fire gets really hot and really deep. And it's like nobody could see me. I couldn't make a conversation for nothing. It's like people's looking right through me. I just walk up to this fire and it just keeps getting hotter and deeper. And I have never heard as clear in my life as you need another lion, son. And I realized then that I was at a crossroads in my life. At that exact moment that I put both feet on God's path. In that moment, Andy's expression changes. He takes a deep breath and steadies himself for a fresh start. A year later, a female mountain lion is found and cornered in a garden near Roxborough. She has a one inch scar on the top of her head and she is missing an eye. Andy has asked if he wants the lion to be put down and he says no, she'd probably just been defending herself. He asks them to set her free, reasoning that if anything, he should be thanking her. She changed his life. Andy went on to repair his broken relationships with his parents, family and friends and to forge new ones. He met his wife Courtney when the Christian ministry she was working for asked her to find inspirational speakers. She came across Andy's story online and gave him a call. They have two children together and a formed a family that it's safe to say would not exist if it wasn't for what happened on that trail in April 1998. I would go through this attack a thousand times over to get that real relationship with my dad, with my wife, with my kids, with others. The incident gave him a desire to fix things that were fractured. When Andy was in the grip of the mountain lion and his world started going dark, all he really wanted was little more time to say sorry. Things that started flashing through my head was the grandma that I took money from. Can I say time out? Time out? Can I say I'm sorry to her? My sister, my brothers that I lied and stole from can time out. I'm sorry guys, my mom that I made cry, my dad that I fought with, time out. And Andy makes the most of the extra time given to her. As well as starting a family, he publishes a book entitled Saved Twice, telling the story of the attack and the subsequent changes he made to his life. His story has been heard by thousands. He even appears on the Oprah Winfrey show to tell his tale. Today Andy works as a real estate broker in Tennessee and loves spending time with his wife and grown up children. He doesn't live in Colorado anymore so his trips to Roxborough State Park are less frequent. But he left something behind to inspire the next Andy Peterson who might find themselves alone on the path one day facing trouble and in need of a kind word. And if you go back now up on that trail on the summit, there's a bench. And it's believe in yourself. Never give up. The hardest thing for me has been to keep the real and raw truth to this story so that the readers can hopefully take something from it and better their lives, their families, their relationships, their schools, their works, their communities. Even if it's just holding a door for somebody. When it's your grocery store, a sweet lady was trying to get a cart and getting groceries in her car and say, "Here, let me take that for you." You know, I'm able. It's one out. Slowed out a little bit. This is real. Life's fragile. So yeah, it gave a whole new outlook on life. Next time on Real Survival Stories, we meet Marco and Desire Crutoff. In May 2025, a hard-working Dutch couple booked an extended holiday to Canada. They hope to reconnect with each other and to take some time to decide what the next phase of their lives should look like, now that their children have left home. But all plans are thrown out of the window when just days into their holiday, the seaplane they've booked for a sightseeing trip crashes into the icy waters of the coast of British Columbia. Trapped upside down, inside the flooded cabin, Desire and Marco must work together to escape the swiftly sinking wreckage before they run out of air or are overcome by the freezing temperature of the water. And even if they can, free themselves, another totally unforeseeable challenge lies ahead. A final sting in the tail awaits. That's next time on Real Survival Stories. Listen right now without waiting and without ads by Joining Noiser Plus.