Mountain Lion

Sugarloaf Ridge State Park, Sonoma County, CA

Sept 28, 2018 

Hiking a bit over six miles this morning I saw no other human on the trails save an AT&T worker in his truck. It was foggy and cool (in the 50s when I set out about 8:40, but clear on the hilltops and ridges I was walking on by 10:00). There was no notable wind, and the forest was largely quiet except for jays disputing territories and a weed-wacker buzzing in the valley below.

At 11:21 AM, walking east along the Grey Pine Trail roughly .3 miles from Bald Mountain, I came around a bend in the trail and simultaneously heard two loud noises from a low pile of logs and brush on the left (north) side of the trail about 40-50 feet from me. These were crashing and a scream, both from the same animal. The scream was a deep loud snarl or growl that instantly struck me as feline and made my heart jump in my chest. The crashing was that of a large animal emerging from the pile and plunging downhill into brush. I saw only the rear end of the animal (and for only an instant). It struck me as quite large (roughly the size and height of a large German Shepard's) with a long thickly furred tail. In the full mid-day sun, during the single bound that took it from the wood pile and into the thick vegetation, the fur on its rear looked rufous, almost brick red, while what I saw of the tail was black. After it disappeared into the brush (which just there looked like it had not been burned last year) I heard crashing moving down the northward slope for only a few seconds. It moved quite fast. I looked in the loosely organized wood pile but could not see any kill, den, fur, scat, etc. Listening, I could hear nothing else of it, but did hear a woman’s voice in the distance, back towards Bald Mt. On the road there were numerous deer tracks, tire tracks, and shoe tracks, but nothing else I could locate.

Without having ever seen a wild big cat before (I've seen plenty of bobcats, but they don't count as BIG) I can't be sure this was a mountain lion, but I can't think of anything else it could have been, and lions are relatively common on these mountains.