Track age

[runninman]

Instead of asking wat the oldest track uve traild and caught I want to know wat was the longest time ur dogs trailed before treeing the lion. And how far did the dogs travel in the race your speaking of. Also wat kind of dogs. Only caught a couple handfuls in my short dog life so just wondern. Have my own opinins but this topic is to possibly learn somthn..

[houndnem]

I chased one for two full days right off a kill and never jumped him. it was a great big tom and he actually never took a bite of that deer. he just burried it and kept going. late in the second day we found where he had killed and ate quit a bit of another deer. pretty sure if we had fresh dogs and one more day we could have caught him. he made one hell of a loop through some rough canyons and I never did see him again.

[Rockydog]

today i ran a big lion track from 9:30 to 3:30, 7 hours straight. The country i hunt in western montana is really steep and the dogs were still on the track but they were just moving really slow so i got ahead of them with a snowmobile, caught them and went home. id run it again tommorrow but theres no snow. the dogs are also toasted.

my last 4 runs have been big lion tracks and all of them have been travelers that didnt tree or jumped tree. before that i had treed 4 in a row on easy chases. im really wondering what the hell is going on. do the cats possibly get harder to tree with wolves packing up for mating season, or possibly from getting chased by hounds?

[George Streepy]

7:30 in the morning till 3:45 in the afternoon. Covering over 15 miles as the crow flies. No Idea how many miles on track, it was before GPS. The dogs did an excellent job and moved along at a pretty good pace the whole day. No real bad loses just a lot of ground to cover. It was pretty much daylight to just before dark. We couldn't hunt in the dark so that is the longest for me. Grade Walkers for dogs.

[runninman]

Thanks, were u hunting in the snow, summer conditions, or just wet country

[Mike Leonard]

I think the furthest that I can remember was 18 miles by the GPS. The track was cut not long after daylight and it was a big traveling tom and he was out in the sage country changing ranges. the area he was crossing was closed roads so no chance to cut ahead and get him fresher so we just unloaded the horses and dumped the dogs and headed after him. It was a pretty cold track to start with and although we put 8 hounds down only 4 of them could work it. booger and gunner two grade jeff Allen walker males, Kate a grade Allen Walker/Majestic cross and Josie a grade redtick out of my own old line of Goswick dogs. The track headed into some bluffy rim country but the tom would just skirt the bad areas and keep going sometimes in a long trot by his track. Well as the dogs worked on and the miles went behind the speed picked up and at times we had to trot and gallup the horses where we could to keep them in earshot. Several times they really blew up and we just knew they had him jumped and we would soon be looking at him but most likley just fresh scrapes and they would go back to lining out and trailing again. I am not sure just how far the dogs really trailed but it had to be further than the 18 miles by the twists and turns and such where we couldn't ride right on their heels. About mid afternoon one of the visiting hunters from the mid west looked at me and said , I know why Jerry Lewis titles his book THE LONG WALKERS now. LOL! I would like to say we caught this tom but we didn't and just before dark I had to pull away from the other hunters and ride like heck to get around them hounds and get them caught up and pulled off, as he was heading into some really bad country and also crossing the stateline into Colorado. With the excitment of the hounds trailing the miles going in were not too bad but let me tell you riding back out in the dark for many many hours to get back to the trucks and trailers was no fun. Although we cut a straight line going back it still took us many hours of riding.

Sometimes it is amazing how far a traveling tom lion can move in a days travels.

[tod watterson]

Me and my huntin buddy started a melted out lion in 1998 in a skiff of snow on a road .Couldn"t tell where he got off , or which way he was going but the dogs lined it out pretty good . About 4 that afternoon we got higher and into some snow and found we were running him backwards .Gathered up the dogs came back the next morning and ran him the right way about 3 miles till we lost him in the dirt .Went back the next day and he"d crossed a road , started him there , and trailed him till dark .My wife had a tag and we were gettin caught up to him pretty good but it was christmas eve so we left him again without catching him . Well i couldn't talk her into going on christmas day so we ended up startin him on the 26th , a day behind again.Had patchey snow but alotta bare ground . I spent a couple hours trying to freshin him up before startin him but he went in a big nastey canyon i couldn"t circle . Turned the dogs loose about 9am, they trailed on the other side of the canyon till about 4 in the afternoon .We were able to sit in the truck , drive along , and watch them the whole time . They only trailed him about two miles in the whole day . So it was late in the day and i decided i better hike over and get them, I"d only walked about two hundred yards when i heard them jump him . He ran down across the canyon and treed about 300 yards from the truck .My two kids were there 9 and 3 yrs old . Packed my youngest in on my back and killed him .Just an average tom . Ended up trailing him 4 days in a 5 day streach , never had a track that was a " last nights track" . Only time we ever had him fresh or jumped was ten minutes before he treed . All told he probably traveled 15 miles . My buddey was with me every day but the last . We ran the same 3 or 4 dogs every day .

[runninman]

thanks for the stories. my next question is y wouldnt you drive around till u found a good hot track. is it harder to find a lion track where u are. if so then trying every track would b the only way a guy could catch.. now if there are alot of lions in your area y not just drive around and cut a fresh track every day or so and catch more lions and dont have to listen day after day to boring trailing. also, how many lions can a guy get on in a season since you have to spend a week to catch 1

[Mike Leonard]

In my area you can drive all day every day for a week at times and not find a track so we have to work with what we find. The state Game and Fish think lions in this area are running over each other there are so many of them and they again upped the quota but if they happen to stumble on one lion track a year they talk about it for weeks. but those of us who are out there all the time looking can tell you for sure that we don't have nearly the lions in this area we had 15-20 years ago. And as long as they keep killing every female and sub they tree it won't get any better soon.

[David_Heimann]

...

[hunt-em-up]

I my self have trailed a small tom for nine hours strait in the worst country. What pissed me off was i was in dry dirt and i was chasing to make sure dogs wouldn't get hung up, chased in a complete circle and treed about two hundred yards from the truck. It was brutal.

[Brent Sinclair]

do the cats possibly get harder to tree with wolves packing up for mating season, or possibly from getting chased by hounds?

Yes, I think those vermin wolves are affecting the cats too. I know my good friend was running a lion last winter and half way through the race he found wolf tracks chasing the lion tracks and come to a treed lion with wolf tracks all around the base of the tree.

Where were the hounds when your friend got to the treed lion??

[AZDOGMAN]

Todd. Cool story.

Runinman. "listening to boring trailing". To me that's the best part. I love it. Better than a bunch of loud ass treeing.

[tod watterson]

Runninman , The year i caught that lion for my wife , me and my huntin partner caught between 30 and 40 lions like we did every year in late 80s and 90s . The reason we didn"t drive around and cut a track was cause there was practically no snow when we cut that tom .Back then we had probably the best dogs we've ever had and probably a lot of the reason i stayed after that one was just to prove i could catch him .We didn't do much bare ground hunting back then so that made it even more challenging. Since then my style of hunting has changed because i'd much rather hunt bare ground now.I still hunt off sleds and wheelers but i'd bout as soon hunt off horseback or hike .My catch rate isn't as high but we don't have as many lions anymore either .The dogs we had back then caught damn near everything we dumped them on in about an eight year stretch . I don't think those dogs would have been near as succesfull if we had hunted them in the same conditions i prefer to hunt today .

[nait hadya]

approximately 25-30 miles, i cut an old track and let my female work it,i could almost keep up with her at the start as she cold trailed it up the mountain. released my male after a mile or so. i was able to circle up ahead of them on the snow machine and listen to them work the track past me and then out of sight and sound. drove the machine as close as i thought i could get and walked till dark. i took a bearing with the tracker and based on the strenght of the signal i was still miles away so i back tracked to the truck. i was able to triangulate the signal and had a pretty good idea where they were treed. waited all night in the truck for them to return,they didn't. next morning i drove in on a different route and started to trail them. hadn't gotten very far when i heard them walking back on their trail. they look like they been starved. if that old lion was in a tree he must a been some stiff and sore when they left him. approx time on trail/tree 26 hours. couple of walkers.