It’s actually a fairly similar dynamic to where I live. I don’t live in spectacular mountains like the Rockies, but it’s mountainous terrain, and anything flat enough to settle was settled a long time ago. Any recreational green space of any size is either just something that was too steep to farm or build on, or is sucking swamp, or is right up against wild forest - just as that county preserve has Fort Collins on one side and RMNF on the other.
A county preserve where I do a lot of short walks (because I can drive there from home or work in 15 minutes or cycle in 30) has a ‘McMansion Hell’ neighbourhood right on one side of the road, but I’ve seen bears and coyote in there (as well as deer, marten, mink, fisher, otter, numerous smaller mammals, and some pretty spectacular stands of hemlocks). Can’t recall whether I’ve ever seen sign of a cat in there, but we certainly have Lynx rufus and Lynx canadensis in this part of the world.
This preserve isn’t a huge thing, it’s maybe a square mile, total (the county says it’s 256 ha). It isn’t nearly enough habitat to support even a single bear (a typical black bear will range over anywhere from 2000 to 20000 ha). But there’s enough public and private open space adjacent to it that the bears definitely are able to pay a visit, to forage and to fish. It also isn’t enough space to support a human party for overnight visits, so camping there is forbidden and I visit there only for day trips.
I guess I’m in the beasts’ home when I walk there, and I treat the place as if it belongs to them and I’m a visitor. It still feels like suburbia. I can recall last winter getting the hairy eyeball from some toddler’s mommy (or nanny, maybe, but the nannies are usually nicer) who was pushing the kid in a stroller down the long driveway to one of the McMansion mailboxes. She obviously saw the scruffy guy across the street putting on snowshoes as a threat, and neither I nor my car was nice-looking enough to be in that neighbourhood unchallenged! (I was dressed for snowshoeing, not for a social call.)
It surely isn’t an expedition into the wilderness. (I know. I do those too. I’ve done a 220-km solo hike through the Adirondack Park, sometimes as far as 25 km from the nearest road.) When I see people running in the preserve (and I do, there’s a nice six-mile loop around a canyon rim that’s popular with cross-country runners), I certainly wouldn’t label them ‘runners’ with scare quotes and imply that they’re in an area that should be off-limits to humans and deserve to be killed by the local wildlife!
