Lion lessons

I was out postholing through the snow the other day with the boy in temperatures that were hovering right around zero.

It was kind of pleasant, actually. We were following a set of mountain lion tracks, which meant we really didn’t have to break trail much because the lion’s belly dragging already had.

Following lion tracks is always fun, namely because there’s the very slim outside chance that you might actually see the lion.

I have only seen two lions in the past 19 years. The one sighting was just a tail bouncing through the brush, the other was a cat that crossed the Sun Road in front of me. I’ve had better luck with lynx and bobcats, but not a whole lot. Wild cats are very elusive critters. The closest encounter I had with a cat I never saw was up at Bowman Lake in the winter. I went to get water out of the creek and when I turned around, there were fresh cat tracks in my tracks.

I’m sure there have been closer encounters that I don’t even know about. But such is life.

We never did see the cat, but we did see some scat. I picked it up, frozen like a rock and broke it in two to get a better idea of what it was eating, like any good biologist would do.

No big long hairs, so I assume its last meal may have been a smaller creature. But then I made the mistake of wiping my running nose with my glove that had just held the scat.

Scat doesn’t have much smell at zero degrees. But once it’s on a warm glove, wiped under a warm nose, it takes on a whole different olfactory meaning and it really sticks with you. Call it a lion lesson learned.

----

On Sunday, I helped out with the annual Christmas bird count in Glacier National Park. I volunteered to ski to Avalanche Creek, which is a long way to ski to see a chickadee.

This year I saw more golden-crowned kinglets and pine siskins than anything. Chickadees weren’t as a common as usual, though I did pick up a chestnut-backed chickadee, which isn’t as common. Their call sounds like a black-capped chickadee, but with a cold.

The snow was just about perfect for skiing. Nice and cold and no sticking like most years. The temps were in the single digits when I started out. I skied up to the gorge, expecting it to be half frozen, as every other water body in the park is right now, but it wasn’t.

It was snowy, for sure, but the water was flowing like it was summer.

I forgot there’s a huge spring just above the gorge, which keeps the water temperature fairly stable all year long. But it sure was cold in there.

I’m guessing 8 to 10 degrees colder than just a few hundred yards downstream. If you go, the round trip ski is about 15 miles to the gorge, but it’s a fast ski coming out.

Chris Peterson is the editor of the Hungry Horse News.