- Joined
- Sep 10, 2003
- Messages
- 9,044
While hiking in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada the past 3 days, we went up to a meadow fed by a spring so I could get some shots of wild horses. Note the bush to the left front of the white horse. There was a cougar rustling in the bush but I thought it was a horse making the noise. On the way down the trail, I kept hearing rustling in the vegetation along the trail (thick vegetation because of the spring) but I still thought it was a horse, or deer, or antelope. My SO took off up a ridge for a view of the desert on the other side and I continued down the trail. Out of the bushes jumps a cougar, 16 feet in front of me. She glanced over her shoulder at me and bounded back into the underbrush. I''m standing there mouth agape, waiting for my brain to catch up with my eyes, because I couldn''t believe that I finally got to see one in the wild. I''ve been hiking and backpacking 200 miles from nowhere for the past 8 years and this is the first time I had a face-to-face encounter.
The whole event seemed to last minutes but it was only seconds. When my SO came down from the ridge, he didn''t believe he had missed such an opportunity until he checked out the area from which she appeared and he promply claimed that the cougar couldn''t possibly have been as large as I stated because the footprints were small.....then he noticed a large tail mark in the sand and that the footprints were on top of the tail mark....and realized that the cougar I saw was the mama the the footprints he was looking at belonged to her offspring. He thinks the mama cougar was trying to get me to follow her to get me away from her cub which must have been somewhere between 6-8 months old. She obviously wasn''t intent on killing me because she could have done that very easily during the entire half mile that she followed me down the trail.
I was euphoric for about an hour until the adrenaline rush wore off and then I got a bit weak in the knees. SO is sooooo jealous that he didn''t get to see the cat but that''s what he gets for leaving me alone out in the middle of nowhere!
The whole event seemed to last minutes but it was only seconds. When my SO came down from the ridge, he didn''t believe he had missed such an opportunity until he checked out the area from which she appeared and he promply claimed that the cougar couldn''t possibly have been as large as I stated because the footprints were small.....then he noticed a large tail mark in the sand and that the footprints were on top of the tail mark....and realized that the cougar I saw was the mama the the footprints he was looking at belonged to her offspring. He thinks the mama cougar was trying to get me to follow her to get me away from her cub which must have been somewhere between 6-8 months old. She obviously wasn''t intent on killing me because she could have done that very easily during the entire half mile that she followed me down the trail.
I was euphoric for about an hour until the adrenaline rush wore off and then I got a bit weak in the knees. SO is sooooo jealous that he didn''t get to see the cat but that''s what he gets for leaving me alone out in the middle of nowhere!
300x240.png)