Craig's Report - October 25, 2006

Some forecasts have been predicting a few centimeters of snow up on the mountain, but so far all that has turned up have been skiffs. The first hints of snow encountered this afternoon were at about the top of Meadow, but even up at the bottom of Down Right in Currie, it still wasn�t close to sole deep. The trees on some aspects much farther up were a bit frosted looking, but nothing to suggest significant snow. Oh well, it is still October.

Even a tiny bit of snow does reveal animal tracks though and the ones I followed all the way across Megasaurus into Lizard Bowl, might well have been those of a cougar. I had heard of a couple of sightings on the hill around Thanksgiving, including the rather exciting incidents that a reader described in the following email excerpts:

�My 9 year old son and his friend were sitting on one of the chairs at the bottom of the Boomerang chair when a cougar wandered out of the bush and eventually walked right underneath their chair. The ended up climbing up and stayed there for about 20 minutes until a maintenance worker happened to drive by and picked them up.

Separately my wife and daughter were biking right nearby and came within about 2 metres of it. Apparently it was a rather large cougar. Our dog started barking at it and then the cougar chased the dog into the bush. My wife and daughter took off and luckily the dog managed to make his way back home unharmed.�

Since then I have been hoping I might spot it from a suitable distance, but have seen or heard nothing and indeed have never seen a cougar in the wild. Given my dubious talents as a tracker, it is quite possible that these tracks were from something else, but they do seem to fit the description in my track book quite well.

At 17:30 it is partially cloudy and 6 C at the house.