Monday evening Lisa Anderson was on the Tour de Homes trail at Deer Valley with her dog when she turned a corner and found herself in a dangerous situation.
“When you're hiking, you know, you're looking at the ground,” she said. “All I can tell you is, one second I'm looking at the ground and the next second I see this big face of a moose coming at me.”
Anderson’s dog, an 11-year-old, three-legged Labrador named Abednego, barked in warning.
“She shifted her focus from me to the dog, and so she went after my dog and got him,” Anderson said. “She got him on the head with her hoof. He's got a little cut — he's OK, and he kind of got roughed up around the dirt. I just, you know, went over, and I grabbed my dog from out from under her and pulled him up the hill behind us and got him out of there.”
She can see the spot where it happened from her backyard and said she has seen the same moose and calf multiple times there since it charged her.
She said she’s not sure if the moose meant to attack or just scare her since its calf was there.
Anderson said she now avoids that stretch of the Tour de Homes trail, at least during mornings and evenings when she has seen the moose and calf since the encounter. She said she hopes her story will help educate others, especially visitors, not to approach or interact with large, sometimes aggressive animals.
Moose encounters happen in places like Park City. Utah Division of Wildlife Resources spokesperson Faith Heaton Jolley shared how to be prepared.
“We do see a lot of moose in Park City that migrate down, even right into town a lot of times into people's yards,” she said. “Like with most wildlife, just give them their space. Don't try to approach them, don't try to feed them. You know, leave them alone, let them be wild, give them that wide berth. If you encounter a moose that just comes around the corner, it's right there in front of you, stay calm, you know, don't run away. Talk, make your presence known, and then we recommend slowly backing away in the direction that you came from.”
She said this time of year, when their calves are only months old, moose are known to be more aggressive, especially toward dogs.
Jolley said if a moose attacks, quick action is key.
“Run and hide behind something solid,” she said. “So, if you're hiking, potentially find a big tree that you can kind of hide behind that it's not going to be able to charge through. If you're in a neighborhood, try to get inside a building or a vehicle or behind one or something like that just to kind of give that physical barrier between you and the moose. If it does potentially happen to knock you down, we recommend curling into a ball and then basically doing what you can to protect your head and lying still, until the moose retreats.”
She said moose are protected hoofed wildlife under Utah law. That means it’s illegal to allow a dog to chase them.
Sometimes when moose get too far out of the woods, DWR officers are forced to relocate them away from humans and cars.
That happened Monday morning in Parleys Canyon near the Jeremy Ranch exit. A moose was near Interstate 80, only separated from it by a wildlife fence. Officers tranquilized the animal and released it in central Utah Monday afternoon.
