Was supposed to meet the same friend from yesterday at 530 a.m and an old timer who has wanted to come along since last year.
Neither showed up
(my pet peeve)So off I went, checked a hill where I knew of a big cat from last year I couldnt catch with pups last year. Drove to the top and came back down and boom, there was HIS track. I was excited. 2 hours til day break and an absolute monsoon though
Finally it was light enough to see and leashed up the 2 dogs and started walking them on it. They could pick scent but the low brush salal and blow down coupled with conditions I didnt think they could get it done. Followed it for a mile, back down to the road, over my tire tracks and into a canyon. He was MOVING.
The quality of the track had deteriorated big time in the last 4 hours and it was tough (buddy calls, saw my text about the big track and shows up !?)
I let him join and away we went, often tieing dogs and nearly crawling looking for this track. Minimal snow in the timber now and he was going through blowdowns, creeks and bluffs I could barely get down.
An already long story short, 2-3 hours later we hit a south slope and all the snow was gone, coupled with thick thick trees we came to a dead end. However I noticed another track washed out from a smaller cat and one of my dogs was winding something and getting excited so I let him go, we'd come that far. My buddy let his old dog go and mine took him out of there pronto.
An hour later they were treed (garmin)
IT took 3 hours to get to where they were. We were on a whole different mountain and road network, 600 yards from the tree and they were hammering (4 hours since we let go)
We let the other dogs run ahead to join and the chaos surely meant a cat in the tree! 5 mins later they were moving again, it jumped ! Man was I choked, heading further away again.
Called for a friend to drive around and pick us up as we wouldnt be able to get to the trucks let alone navigate what we went through in the dark.
Took another hour to cut the dogs off and I tied the right away to make sure they werent trash running. Upon inspection there was tracks everywhere, big ones, small ones, every which way.
With scent at its worst I had had enough and called it a day, besides it wasnt the big one I had set after (I hope !)
Walking out we had to cross 2 rivers and one dog ran up above us 30 yards before the last one and exploded!
There was a cat hunkered down listening/watching us I guess.
It treed right away, a small 50-60lb tom. Kind of funny way to end the day but I won't complain.
Never been so tired, wet and cold in my life, Astro said we'd walked 14.8 miles since I left the truck (had one dog with me the whole time with collar on til I let go before the tree we never made)
9 degrees and pouring 40-50mm of rain in the forecast, thats it for a while it looks like
Who I was after
It was a real tough go, i cant believe how long we were able to follow him or the ground he covered considering he was only 3-4 hours ahead of me.
One of many bluffs he liked to go down
