Park Closure Urged Pending Lion Study, Safety Improvement

The Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park in southern Orange County, where two children have been mauled by mountain lions in the last seven months, should remain closed for 60 days pending implementation of tougher safety measures, county and state officials recommended Thursday.

The proposal followed a 90-minute meeting in Santa Ana of about 20 representatives for the county Board of Supervisors, parks department and animal control agency, and the state Department of Fish and Game, said Hal R. Krizan, the county’s director of parks and recreation.

“We have concluded that the park should remain closed for 60 days while we have an intensive monitoring of the lion activity there,” Krizan said after the meeting.

The 7,500-acre wilderness park seven miles east of San Juan Capistrano has been closed since the mauling last Sunday of 6-year-old Justin Mellon of Huntington Beach. A mountain lion jumped the first-grader from behind at 11:55 a.m. while he was hiking in the park with his parents and other children.

Justin, who was released from the hospital Tuesday, received more than 100 stitches to close gashes on his head, back and chest and is undergoing precautionary rabies shots and psychological counseling.

Laura Michele Small, 5, of El Toro was attacked by a cougar March 23, not far from the Bell Canyon trail where Justin was mauled. Laura remains partially paralyzed, with loss of sight in one eye. Her parents have filed a $28-million lawsuit against the state, the county and the National Audubon Society, among others.

Approval Expected

Supervisors, who will consider the proposal at their meeting next Wednesday, are expected to approve the 60-day closure and other recommendations formulated at Thursday’s closed-door meeting.

If approved, Krizan said the parks and recreation division of the county’s Environmental Management Agency would work together with state game authorities to develop stricter safety measures for the park. They also will study ways to control the mountain lion population, which ranges through the park and the adjacent Cleveland National Forest and the Audubon Starr Ranch Sanctuary.

An Audubon Society census of the area’s mountain lion population, which supervisors agreed to help fund three weeks ago, will continue while the park remains closed, Krizan said.

To ensure public safety, Krizan said, the county will consider whether to require permits for campers and hikers desiring to use certain areas of the park, especially those trails where cougar attacks have occurred. He said that system now is used in many state and federal wildlife parks.

Although Caspers Wilderness Park already has signs warning the 62,000 yearly visitors of the dangers of rattlesnakes, mountain lions and other wildlife, Krizan said the group will recommend that supervisors approve adding more precautionary signs and providing more information warning visitors of the dangers.

“We’re going to have to find a manner that they (visitors) will have no way that they won’t know (about the dangers),” he said.

Krizan said the group did not discuss eliminating the mountain lions from the area, as suggested by some public officials after Sunday’s attack. Nor would that option be recommended to the supervisors, he said.

“It is our belief that at the moment, that is not a practical solution,” Krizan said.

A 1971 state ban on killing mountain lions expired this year, but the state Fish and Game Department has not reached a decision on whether to renew cougar hunts. The original ban was imposed because it was feared that the mountain lion population had dropped to dangerously low levels in California.

Some now argue that the population, estimated at about 5,000 animals statewide, is too large and that the large cats have lost their fear of man. But other experts argue that killing the solitary animals does not instill fear in the rest of the population.

Krizan also stressed that closing the park for 60 days and instituting stricter safety precautions does not mean that the county was admitting any degree of culpability in the maulings of the two children this year.

“We are just trying to adjust to a situation presented to us,” he said.

Pat Moore, a Fish and Game spokesman who also attended Thursday’s meeting, said the state agency will use the next two months to conduct a survey of the closed park and the mountain lion population. An intensive survey will take the department at least two to three weeks to complete, he said.

“It will give us time to get a better handle on just what kind of mountain lions we have there,” Moore said. “And it’s a great opportunity to do this kind of survey.”

Although a 3 1/2-day hunt for the lion by two teams of hunters and their tracking dogs was called off Wednesday, Krizan said wardens and park rangers will continue to search for the animal.