As if trekking, mountain biking, and navigating through 600 miles of South Dakota backcountry isn’t challenging enough for teams competing in Primal Quest Badlands presented by SPOT, they’ll also have to contend with interesting wildlife, such as big horn sheep, bison, and the elusive black-footed ferret.

Of course, none of those are quite as intimidating as the mountain lion, which also calls the Badlands and Black Hills home.  These powerful and graceful predators can weigh in excess of 150 pounds and can be up to nine feet in length.  The cats possess agility that even an adventure racer would envy, being able to jump as much as 18 feet in height or 20 feet in length, and they can drop more than 50 feet without suffering injury.

The lion in the photos accompanying this post was struck by a car on Highway 41, a busy stretch of road that runs from north to south through South Dakota. As you can tell , this is a rather large cat, and those paws should give you a little indication of the kind of damage he can do.

Teams from Primal Quest Montana probably thought that we had left the scary wildlife behind with the all the bears in the Big Sky State, but these cats will give you something to think about out on the course as well. Just remember, you don’t have to out run the lion, you just have to out run your teammates!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 11:42 am and is filed under Location, Primal Quest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.