One Heck Of A Ride

69 Big tom mountain lion taken with outfitter Wade Lemon at Utah Range Creek on author’s sixth lion hunt. Utah 2002 Other North American Game happen, of course, but my experience was a lot different and probably typical of what many hunters experience when hunting these big cats. My first mountain lion hunt took place in the late 1980s, when Bud Dyer and I hunted in British Columbia with outfitter Leo Oelet. Bud and I flipped a coin to see who would shoot the first lion, and he won the toss. As fate would have it, he was in another canyon the second day of the hunt when Leo and I came upon the 200-pound tom lion the dogs had treed. I called Bud on a radio, and we waited for him to come over and shoot the lion. It was the only cat treed during that hunt. I returned to B.C. and hunted another week with Leo a year or so later, but without success. My next lion hunt was with Gene Coon in Arizona’s White Mountains. We hunted on horseback but tracking conditions were terrible because we didn’t have the right weather. I hunted with Gene again the next year, and again there was no snow -- and no lion. After hunting the best lion country and guides B.C. and Arizona had to offer, I turned to Colorado, where we actually treed two different lions. Unfortunately, someone else with a pack of hounds also was trailing the first lion and he reached the tree before us. A few days later, we had a good chase and treed a small female lion. I decided to end the hunt by not shooting her. My sixth hunt was in Utah with Wade Lemon in January 2002, and luck was with me the third day at a place called Utah Range Creek. An overnight snow provided excellent tracking conditions, and Wade had sent out a crew of men to look for tracks. As it turned out, my guide (a man named Art Lyon) and I were the first to cut the fresh tracks of a lion crossing the road and he released the hounds and unloaded our snow machines. Forty-five minutes later, we could take the machines no farther and went off on foot, following the dogs up a steep mountain to a pine tree where they were barking treed. Perched on a high limb on one of the tallest trees around was a big tom lion. I climbed a side hill until I was on the same level as the lion and was taking some great photos when the cat jumped out of the tree, ran up the canyon and was out of sight. “You needed to shoot that cat and not mess with photos,” the guide said as he grabbed my camera and stuffed it into his pack. He neglected to say that he had been taking photos, too. At any rate, the dogs treed the lion again, and I shot it. It was a big cat, close to 175 pounds, and well worth the wait and effort it took to collect it . I had driven virtually non-stop from my home in Lompoc to where I hooked up with Wade and his crew the previous day. I had thought about spending a couple of days hunting for a bobcat if I took a lion early in the hunt, but I changed my mind. After making arrangements for Wade to ship the lion’s skull and skin to a taxidermist in Colorado for a life-size mount, I climbed into my truck and drove straight home. I couldn’t take even a single whisker from my cat into California because state law prohibits mere possession of any part of a mountain lion, even those legally taken in other states. The taxidermist shipped the mount to my daughter’s home in Idaho, where it is on display in her living room along with the elk my grandson