Published July 17, 2026 03:53PM
On June 2, a house cat named Fridge snuck out of her owners’ tent at a campground near Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes National Park and vanished into the desert.
The three-year-old cat ended up surviving 39 days alone in the backcountry, enduring high temperatures, and lack of food and water, and the presence of predators. Fridge’s survival astonished her owners and raised questions about how an indoor cat managed to stay alive for nearly six weeks in Colorado’s backcountry
“There’s no way that this tiny little cat survived this long with no food, no water,” her owner, Na-Kee Bullen, told Outside. “We had kind of given up hope at that point.”
Fridge’s Ordeal By the Numbers
- Fridge spent 39 days alone in the backcountry
- Na-Kee Bullen woke at 5:30 A.M. on June 2 to find the tent cracked open and Fridge gone
- Bullen and her boyfriend searched for eight hours before getting back on the road to Minnesota
- Fridge lost roughly three pounds in the high desert, dropping from about nine pounds to just under six
- Temperatures in the region went from low-nineties during the day to the forties Fahrenheit at night
A Frantic Drive Back to Colorado
Bullen, who lives in Minnesota, woke around 5:30 A.M. on June 2 to find the door of her tent cracked open and both of her cats gone. Louis, her nine-year-old cat, was right outside, but Fridge was nowhere to be seen. Bullen and her boyfriend, Jefferson Howard, spent the next eight hours searching the surrounding area. The couple drove up and down nearby roads calling Fridge’s name and setting out treats. They tried to book another night at the campground to extend their search, but to no avail.
Then, the two made the hardest decision of the trip: they posted signs, called the local shelter, and got back on the road to Minnesota without Fridge.
“Not even in my worst nightmare could I have guessed this could happen,” Howard wrote on his Instagram. “It was so awful and felt like a piece of me was gone.”
On July 11, Bullen, who is a tattoo artist, was at work, about to start a tattoo, when Howard called in tears. “Go outside, go outside. I need to tell you something,” he told her. Her first thought was that someone had died. Instead he told her, “Someone called. I think they found Fridge.”
The shelter’s photo confirmed it was Fridge. Bullen handed her appointment to another artist, grabbed her things, and drove 16 hours through the night to Colorado’s San Luis Valley where the animal shelter is located. She was standing at the facility’s doors when the staff unlocked them the next morning.
Fridge was frail, she said. The cat typically weighs eight to nine pounds and came back under six. When Bullen took her to a vet, they found her paws scarred, her nails worn short, and dried blood under her toes that wasn’t hers.
“They’re like, she had to have been killing mice or maybe small rabbits,” Bullen said. “I wish I had a little GoPro on her so I could see what she was doing, what kind of animals she ran into and how she survived.”
Domesticated cats are adept at surviving outdoors. A 2023 study on free-ranging cats found that they cat over 2,000 different species, from rodents, to birds, to small lizards and insects. A 2026 follow-up study found that when cats do eat insects, beetles make up roughly 80 percent of the menu.
What crunchy bugs could Fridge have lived off of? According to the National Park Service, Great Sand Dunes is home to over 1,000 known species of arthropods like insects and spiders, including at least five beetle species found nowhere else on Earth.
Fridge also had to watch her back. The park also hosts coyotes, mountain lions, black bears, bobcats, and golden eagles.
“Driving into that campsite, we saw deer, coyotes, all different kinds of animals,” Bullen told Outside. “I’m like, how did you survive 40 days with all of these predators? The entire world is against you right now.”
At the time of Fridge’s disappearance, Bullen and Howard were driving from California back to Minnesota when they stopped at the Sand Dunes. Before the trip, Bullen worried Fridge would be the wanderer, and bought harnesses for both of her cats. Instead, Fridge would curl up on the camping chairs beside her owners, while Louis wanted to explore.
“She was definitely like ‘I want to stay by my mom,’” said Bullen. “Something must have scared her for her to run away like that.”
Life After the Backcountry
Whatever Fridge endured out there, she is still as affectionate as ever. The moment she was out of the carrier at the shelter, all she wanted was to curl up between her owners.
One thing, however, did change. “She was not as food-driven before, and she’s very food-driven now,” Bullen said. “She’ll jump up on the counter as you’re cutting chicken and steal a chicken breast and take off with it.”
As for camping with the cats again, Bullen isn’t sure her heart can take it. But if she does, she has a plan: “Definitely AirTags. That was a big mistake, that I did not have them,” she said, as well as making the cats sleep in their harnesses.
“Fridge is a fighter,” Bullen said. “She really is.”
Another Colorado Cat Cheats Death
Fridge isn’t the only Colorado cat to have cheated death. On July 11—the same day Bullen got her phone call—a seven-year-old Denver cat named Bones squeezed out of a partially open truck window on Interstate 70 and jumped out of the vehicle while it was moving at highway speed.
According to Summit Daily, he survived and the Apple AirTag on his collar helped searchers narrow his whereabouts to the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnels. The Colorado Department of Transportation halted traffic for the rescue, and Bones was back with his family by 5:30 A.M.
