Hey guys, just wanted to share the story and pics from my first ever mt lion that I got here in Idaho yesterday. This was my 3rd day of cat hunting this winter and I feel so lucky and blessed to have gotten this warrior. We were hunting in an area where my buddy had taken another cat just last Tuesday. We hadn’t gone but 1/4 mile from the main highway when my buddies best dog let loose, at first we thought it might not be that fresh of a track as all of the dogs didn’t seem to be getting that excited and they were having a little trouble sorting it out but within a few moments it became apparent that this was a hot trail. We started following them up the ridge, my buddy had snowshoes but I was postholing a lot of the way. We were not very far up the ridge ourselves when Morgan said that the dogs had treed about 900 yds from our location. The only problem was we had about 1000 vertical feet to climb and by the time we had hit the top the dogs hadn’t moved but we had only cut the distance to 650 yards. We followed the ridge top for a very short distance before peeking over into the canyon where the dogs were treed. From about 600 yds away across the canyon we could see the dogs and a lot of blood in the snow. We quickly lost nearly all of that vertical gain and then climbed about halfway up the next canyon and when we got there this is what we found
We checked the dogs for injuries and decided that Egg must have caught up to the cat in the rocks by herself before the rest of the pack got there and she had some blood on her rear haunch and minor wounds to her tail but nothing major, after all she was still at the tree trying to get after that cat.
We leashed the dogs(including Morgan’s lab Anna who thinks she is a cat hound) and prepared for the shot. At the shot the cat leapt out of the tree and was out of sight behind some rocks in an instant. Also Anna slipped out of her collar and started chasing after the cat. Luckily the cat was stone dead a couple of hundred feet down the hill.
He’s a big tom that we guessed was about 160 lbs live weight but we may be a little low, for reference I’m 5’11” 180. Didn’t get any pictures of it but he is missing about half of his nose that is all scarred up. I owe all the thanks to my buddy Morgan and his dogs.
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