A man accused of harassing multiple hikers along the Continental Divide Trail suffers from schizophrenia and needs help, according to his mother.
Nicholas “Cottonmouth” Sampson, 36, was arrested July 24 in Carbon County on breach of peace charges stemming from claims that he hit a male hiker in the nose after screaming obscenities at a female hiker.
The new case comes a year after Sublette County Sheriff’s deputies arrested Sampson after reports that he shoved one male hiker to the ground and hit another male hiker, in his 60s, so hard he fell to the ground on different occasions last July.
Carbon County Sheriff Alex Bakken announced Sampson’s most recent arrest in a Friday statement touting it as a halt to the man’s well-known harassment campaign along the trail.
To Sampson’s mother Karen Sampson, it’s just another gut punch to her son’s lengthy struggle with mental illness.
“He has had mental health issues that came up later in life (of) schizophrenic and paranoid (disorders),” said the Sampsons’ family friend Brian Henderson, who is also a mental health counselor. “When he’s been in treatment, he does tremendously well. He’s very bright; quite a charismatic person.”
The trouble is, continued Henderson, people who are feeling well while on mental health medication will often come to the conclusion they no longer need the medication and quit taking it.
Bear Spray Showdown
Nicholas also lashed out at people on hiking trails in Florida while “having a breakdown,” said Henderson.
Authorities got permission from Nicholas’ father to administer him medications, and he did well for a while. But when he hiked into Wyoming, he had problems again.
On July 19, 2024, a hiker contacted the Sublette County Sheriff’s Office to report that a transient traveling on foot approached him, yelled curse words at him, threatened him, and shoved him to the ground, according to an affidavit filed days later in Pinedale Circuit Court.
“Sampson had been involved in multiple other calls within Sublette County involving threatening and physically assaulting hikers,” the document notes.
One of those reports surfaced three days after the alleged shove on July 22, 2024.
A couple whom court documents describe as out of staters in their 60s were hiking in the Big Sandy area when they met a man screaming “get the f*** away,” says the case affidavit.
The stranger ran up and hit the husband so hard from behind he fell to the ground and suffered minor injuries, reportedly.
The wife drew a can of bear spray, but the stranger went to his tent and retrieved his own bear spray, says the document.
The affidavit says the couple retreated from the stranger and found a place to camp for the night, but neither slept.
All three hikers identified Nicholas as the stranger, from photos of Nicholas deputies showed them, court documents say.
Jail Stint
Back home in New Hampshire, Karen Sampson is all too familiar with reports like these. They signal her son’s urgent need for help, she said.
“We provided … every piece of evidence related to Nicholas’ mental health” while he was in Sublette County’s custody, she said.
That meant reviewing and compiling even more harrowing reports taken from hikers and their blogs.
“Yeah, and I apologize for the hikers, and we’re trying — and I get it,” said Karen. “They’re just out there to hike and have a good time, and this is a monkey wrench in their day.”
Sublette County Sheriff’s Lt. Travis Bingham had his own concerns about Nicholas’ mental health, court documents say.
Out on the trail, he was “paranoid and evasive,” wrote Bingham in an affidavit calling for a mental health pause in Nicholas’ 2024 battery cases.
Once in jail, Nicholas exhibited an irrational fear of females — from a jail intake nurse to his own public defender, the lieutenant wrote. He refused to go through the booking process. He self-confined; he broke a jail TV and a tablet, added Bingham.
The judge paused the case in August 2024 so Nicholas could be evaluated for mental health competency.
Nicholas was eventually found competent enough for court, Sublette County Attorney Clayton Melinkovich recalled in a Thursday phone interview.
But by that time, March 2025, Nicholas had already been incarcerated for the better part of a year — a longer sentence than a prosecutor would typically reach on misdemeanors.
It was in the interest of justice to dismiss the charges and let the man go, Melinkovich added.
The Ones Let Go
Henderson called it a “tremendous heartbreak,” that Nicholas “was just let go” rather than kept in treatment.
Under Wyoming law, however, the state can’t keep holding people once their criminal cases are over unless they continue to pose a danger to themselves or others via mental illness.
It’s a facet of the law that’s played a part in other noteworthy jail releases. Those include a man accused of gouging a woman’s eye out and killing her, and another man accused of murdering his girlfriend and hauling her body across the state.
Karen Sampson said Nicholas was restored to competency by March because of Henderson and the family’s advocacy for getting the court to order compulsory medication of him.
The family hasn’t stopped trying to help him, said Henderson, but they can only do so much.
“Since he’s an adult, it’s just people watching someone — like watching someone drown — and they can’t do anything,” said Henderson. “There are people around who want to help a person (but) the impossibility and frustration of it is heartbreaking.”
Melinkovich put it another way, saying the state can only do so much, also.
“At the end of the day, you have a lead-a-horse-to-water-type situation,” said the prosecutor. “The state can lead any person to water. Yet if that person’s not willing or capable of participating, there’s no real way for them to be helped. We can’t just keep them in an institution and force-feed them meds for the rest of their lives.”
Yet, Melinkovich worried aloud, if Nicholas does not seek help and stick with it, he could run into an even worse tragedy by driving another hiker to react to his attacks with defensive force.
Hiking
Nicholas can’t stay at Karen’s home, she told Cowboy State Daily. He’s proven a danger there before, and restraining orders have followed.
He was wandering the streets of New England homeless as winter approached in 2023.
Karen reasoned that since she couldn’t bring him home, she had to get him to a warmer place so he didn’t die, she said.
She arranged for him to fly to Florida, where he’d had a brush with the law in 2022, but had also discovered a combination of medications that worked well for him, she said.
Nicholas hiked the Florida trail. Then the Arizona trail. Then progressed to the Continental Divide Trail headed north, she recalled.
“We thought it was very therapeutic for him,” she said. “Then we found out differently.”
That is, the hiking helped Nicholas. But his antics near population centers terrified other hikers.
The First Priority
Karen took issue with the humorous tone of Bakken’s Friday press release announcing Nicholas’ arrest, saying it’s “plastered all over social media like we’re 12 years old. That’s what makes me the most angry.”
The statement said reports of Sampson’s threatening, yelling or assaultive attacks stretch from the deserts of New Mexico to the mountains of Northern Wyoming, and that the Carbon County Sheriff’s Office has dubbed him “The High Country Harasser.”
“We'd like to take this opportunity to encourage our residents and visitors to enjoy all of the scenic trails that Carbon County has to offer, especially now that ‘Cottonmouth’ is enjoying a complimentary stay at our 5-star county accommodations,” the statement adds.
Bakken in a Wednesday interview told Cowboy State Daily that mental health is a “huge problem” from which he hopes Nicholas can find relief, and which he doesn’t wish on others.
But, Bakken continued “my job as the sheriff is to make the community safe. And given Mr. Sampson’s past behavior in Wyoming and other states, it is apparent he does pose a danger to the community.”
Nicholas is only facing misdemeanors once again, so he will be released — and likely return to that trail, the sheriff said.
“The more viral I can make that post and the more times it’s shared, the more aware our community members can be (of that),” he said. “(Even) if that means writing it in a light-hearted way.”
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
