Re: Yet Another Day on the Madera Sugar Pine Grades...

While I was trying to find a way through the dense thicket, I heard a faint "Rowr" noise uphill in the direction my wife had traveled. I immediately thought: "MOUNTAIN LION!!!". I quickly ran up to the the mainline and grabbed my bike and sped towards the noise (and my wife). It took me over 5 minutes from the time I heard the noise until I reached my wife. I found her pushing her bike around a fallen tree. I asked her if she was OK as I thought I had heard a mountain lion. She said she was fine and I had heard her yell when she had a fall off her bike. I replied it really sounded like a mountain lion by the time the noise got to me. Then she said she heard an echo of her yell a few seconds later. I thought to myself that the second noise quite possible was a mountain lion as there's no echoes in a forest, but decided not to push it.

After another uneventful 45 minutes of cycling, we reached my truck, loaded up the bikes and headed out.
We stopped at an area that had been burned extensively so my wife could collect some branches for an art project. Here's a view from behind the truck looking east:

This is where this logging branch made its easternmost point indicated on the Donald DeVere map.

Here's a view looking the opposite way to the west:

Chowchilla Mountain is in the background. Iron Creek is to our right...

When I stopped the truck, I happened to look over the edge of the grade and there was a piece of ubiquitous wire rope:

Any place you find this stuff in the Sierra mountains, there's a very good chance you are near (or on) a railroad grade...

Looking to the north was a nice view. Iron Mountain is behind the trees on the right, and some of the higher mountains north of Yosemite are in the center:

If the Depression had not intervened, Madera Sugar Pine had planned to extend their logging railroad past Iron Mountain...

We left the area around 3 pm and arrived home around 7 pm.

Here again is the map of the branch we explored:

I have penned in the two spurs I found: one at Granite Creek Saddle and one to the left of the long spur that headed northeast (the one that was blocked by brush).

This would be the end of the story, but around 10 pm, my wife suddenly said: "Oh, god, it WAS a Mountain Lion!!!" She said she had been in utter denial all day that the sound she had heard could possible be a mountain lion, and it wasn't until she got home and replayed the events in her head that she realized the sound she had heard had not been an echo as it occurred about 10 seconds after she fell off her bike and yelled. I got on Google Maps and showed her where I had been when I heard it and asked her to point where she had been and then to point which direction the sound came from. We both ended up point at each other's respective locations. The Mountain Lion had been directly between us! Since I had heard it muffled, but she had heard it loudly and clearly, I felt it was probably less than 100 feet from her when it had roared.

My take on the encounter was the Mountain Lion was probably a young lion, and her yell when she fell caused a response by it. It had probably taken a look at her and decided she was not a deer or other animal and had stayed away.

My wife told me she won't be accompanying me again on my treks to this part of the woods, but not to worry, I've got a friend with a Jeep who is itching to go out and see wildlife, so I presume my next trip will be with him...