Mountain Lion

January 20, 2015: I needed ice walkers to move in the woods. There was a variety  of animal tracks: fox, rabbit, deer, and bobcat, frozen in place following heavy rains;  and a set of tracks left by something a whole lot larger, which curiousity required  I follow  to be sure of what I was seeing.

 I took  a couple of photos with a cell phone,  but didn't find the spot where the cat --yes  a BIG cat--had lain down in the snow, against a Hemlock tree,  until after the phone battery died.

While the rain had washed out the fine detail,  I'm posting this  photo,  to give a comparison between a deer track, on the lower left, and the cat track, going in the opposite direction,  at the upper middle.  The rear foot overlapped the forefoot, making it look like one elongated track.
Just  beyond this spot, the cat leapt at least 10-12  feet, coming down the other side of a blow-down.

          These mountain lion tracks were made sometime between January  17th and 18th,  2015.  If I wasn't an old grandmother trying to navigate a woodland  full of ice, and if my cell phone hadn't died,  I might  have followed them further.

I went back the next day with a charged battery in the iPhone,  to photograph the hemlock tree with scrapings and the melted area under the tree, but wouldn't you know it..I could NOT locate the tree with the scrapings again...not even  by following my own tracks...

May 2015 update: I found the tree with the scrapings! See my May 5 2015 posting.