“It’s unreal!”: New York couple who lost cat near Cody reunited after 2 1/2 years

Annie Rosales is living through a surreal, impossible moment after being reunited with a beloved cat that had spent 2½ years living off the land just outside Yellowstone National Park. Rosales was undertaking a cross-country move from San Francisco to New York with her husband, daughter, and two cats in July 2023 when they stopped to stay with friends in Cody. During their brief stay, their female cat Lily escaped and couldn’t be found.

“We stayed an extra day and stayed up all night trying to get her, but she’s a cat,” Rosales said. “We had hope, but she’s a cat. She’s not going to come when she’s called.” After making the heart-wrenching decision to move on, the family settled into their new lives in New York. Lily was long gone but not forgotten. Then in March, the family got a text from an unknown Wyoming number. “It was a picture of a cat, and they asked if we knew this cat because it’s wearing a collar with our number on it,” Rosales said. “I just didn’t believe it when I saw the picture. It was Lily.”

The next week, Rosales flew to Cody and was reunited with Lily. Nobody knows how a house cat survived more than two years in an area with bears, wolves and other predators, but she did it. “When I got her into the hotel and I opened the door of her pet crate, she sniffed me for a second, then she came right up, rubbed up against me, and was purring and meowing,” Rosales said. “It was unreal.”

Rosales has owned Lily since 2019. The family bought an old RV and road-tripped across the country with their 2-year-old daughter and two cats. On their journey east, they stopped to visit friends who lived on a ranch along the South Fork of the Shoshone River between Cody and the East Entrance of Yellowstone. The night before they were planning to depart, Lily snuck out of the RV. After a day of searching, they had to make the difficult decision to drive away.

In December 2025, Rebecca and Jack Deal moved to a property along the South Fork River, 3.5 miles from where Lily went missing. There, they made the acquaintance of two stray cats. One was super-friendly, but the other was very shy and timid, hiding under the porch. It took a while for the Deals to get a close enough look to realize she was wearing a collar. They managed to capture her and got Chris Rosales’s number, but before they could confirm, Lily wanted back out.

Trapping Lily a second time wasn’t easy. After the Deals returned from out of town, Rebecca Deal thought she might have a better chance. Lily had connected with her. Since an old trap failed, the Lily Capture Team concocted a new contraption: a large box propped up by a taut fishing line with a camera to alert them. Three weeks ago, Rosales got a text that Lily was safely captured. She was on a flight to Cody the next day.

Lily is now settling into her new home in New Rochelle, reunited with the family and meeting Rosales’s 2-year-old son Marco, who was born after she ran away. Their other cat, Klay, also got a reunion that quickly settled back into a familiar routine. Lily has received a clean bill of health from a veterinarian. “I just keep looking at her, thinking about what she’s been through,” Rosales said. “What were you doing for that long? What have you seen? What did you have to do?”