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2008 Success Rates
On our 2007-2008 lion season, we had 9 hunters and killed 7 mountain lions.
The first hunt we had one hunter the end of November. I rode the 4 wheeler 400 yards and cut a decent tom track. We turned the dogs loose and 400 yards up the hill, they treed the cat. This was too easy but the next hunter made up for it.
We hunted hard on the second hunt. The wind blew a lot and wiped out the tracks of a big tom the first two days. The third day, I cut two tom tracks and turned loose on the biggest. We wound up treeing him close to the top of the ridge. I waited under the tree for 1.5 hours for the hunter to get there. When the hunter was about 400 yards from the tree, the big tom jumped out, got down into bare ground and got away. This is the first time that a cat has jumped tree and got away from my dogs. It was a very humbling experience. We did not tree another cat and the hunter went home without one.
On the third hunt, my hunter had to cancel out because of a funeral. Luckily, I was able to move two other hunters into his place and he came later. The two hunters killed a female and small tom on the first and third days of their hunts. Conditions were perfect and everything went great.
The fifth hunter wanted two lions. The weather was bad so we did not get into the wilderness on time. We hunted the front range the first day and he killed an old female. The second day we flew in and rode to base camp. I cleared off the runway and the plane flew in with groceries and another hound dog. By noon the plane was gone and we left to go hunting. We rode the horses up a side drainage and found where a large tom had killed a cow elk. It left a drag mark about 300 yards long. The cat had been sitting on the kill and treed about 300 yards up the other side. The cat did not make book but was the longest and heaviest cat I have ever taken. We rode out the next day.
The sixth hunter was the guy who did not make it in earlier. Because of prior commitments and his anniversary, he only had three days to hunt. We treed a female the first day and he passed it up because he shot a female with me last year. He left without a cat.
The seventh hunter was another return client. We had a lot of wind which made the hunting very tough. For three days, I ran all the roads that I could with the snowmobile and did not cut a cat track. My guide Harry started walking a draw that we figured may have a cat in it and he got lucky and caught a female lion that had just killed a Mule Deer doe. This cat treed about 500 yards from the highway. The snow was deep and it took us an hour just to get to the tree.
The last two hunters wanted to hunt in the wilderness. The first day they got there, the guides treed a huge cat. Both of these guides have seen hundreds of lions, bobcats and bears in trees. They both claimed that this was the biggest cat they had ever treed. Looking at the pictures of him, I would say that it is the biggest cat to come out of our area since I have been there. The skull measured 15 3/16 green. It should make book easily if the hunter enters it.
I felt very good about our cat hunting this year. We all worked hard and the dogs did really well. I am very pleased with the addition of our new hunting area for our mountain lion hunting.