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LION MAGNETS-

I’m talking about places lion are drawn to. A place that if a lion is using a particular piece of country, they are drawn to these places and frequent them.

A good friend of mine who has been helping me along the way, encouraged me to find these magnets and hunt them. He told me many stories of such places.

One time, a friend of ours traveled to CA back when you could still hunt lions. There was an old lion hunter who was selling out and our friend went there to try out and maybe buy some dogs. There were two sets of mountains with a high valley between them. There was an exposed fault line running through the valley with a boulder pile on it. Every morning they rode the same circle out the fault line and to the boulder pile. After a few days of this, our friend began to suggest some of the surrounding mountains. The old man asked “you want to see these dogs catch a lion? Or go sight seeing?” They kept after it and a couple mornings later, he was there! They struck a fresh track of the boulder pile and caught the lion.

Probably 10 years ago, I found rocky point that jetted out into this canyon and the creek below made a sharp 180 turn. On that finger like point, there was a prominent juniper tree and one of my dogs rooted around in the debris under the tree and found a lion turd. I poked around in there and found several more of various ages. I couldn’t hunt it every day, but when I was down there, I would always try to check that spot. One morning Tom Bledsoe and I were walking dogs in there to check out the canyon and as we got close to that point, the dogs blew up, he was there! The dogs got the Tom lion stopped on the canyon wall, he jumped and they treed him in the bottom.

Anyway, I would love to hear about the places you guys have found that have been similar. I have found a few more since then and they really help, especially when there is no tracking snow.

I have found some places like this.
I also find that there are places that lions naturally travel through and it's not always the same lion. I quit lion hunting for almost 4 yrs and just got going again. Still finding tracks in the same old spots. I have also treed two different Tom's in the same exact tree 3 yrs apart from eachother. Both Tom's were harvested so I know it was 2 different lions.

From what I have seen, it varies from area to area. I know this sounds vague, but it usually has to do with certain box canyons, ridge lines, and saddles. At least when it comes to looking for toms. Google earth is a pretty cool ordeal, especially when it comes to hunting new country. When you look at the big picture of an area, it makes it a little easier to try and figure out good scratch areas and territorial boundaries. There are definitely certain places that just draw mature toms to them. I have a good friend of mine that catches a lot of lions. I told him about a set of mountains that for some reason lions tend to work roads a lot and they like to scratch in the bar-ditch on the sides of the road, he had a hard time believing that a lion would scratch there. It's definitely not an ideal place to scratch, but in that area it's just how they work. I know of another spot, it's a short ridge between 2 long ridges inside a big canyon. I've never been on that short ridge and not seen a scratch that was less than a week old.

With some of these places, it makes me wonder how many hundreds or thousands of years lions have been doing the same thing in the same place.

I have noticed most livestock,wild animals and people travel the same route and that route is usually the easiest way from point A to point B. These paths are traveled from generation to generation unless the land scape changes. If you hunt squirrels very much, they leave their den trees most every time traveling out on the same limb taking the same trees out through the woods.this is repeated with the new litter from year to year. When doves come in to feed they usually light in the same couple of trees before coming in to eat. Livestock will walk the same path through the pasture for years.the same with game trail through the woods. Where I hunt we have a lot of wet swampy game trails where you can see all type animal tracks year round. The coyotes in thesefox pens run the same trail over and over till it looks like a fire lane.

I’ve found they like to travel the same area on one ridge. It’s a finger off of a main ridge that connects two mountains, in the bend of the range. They travel east off a mountain, down through a saddle and up to a smaller mountain. From there, they head south, loop around the smaller mountain and then pass through another saddle on the south east side of that smaller mountain. From there, they head back north, side hilling and get back on the main ridge but stay on the south side of it.