Poo Poo Point, Poo Poo Point - Chirico Trail & West Tiger 3 — Thursday, Apr. 7, 2022

I got turned around by a HUGE cougar at about 1:30 am Thursday morning on the Poo Poo Point high school trail! It didn’t show any signs of aggression, but still… 😳

I started at the Chirico trailhead at 9pm for a nice creepy slow meander in the woods. Up to 💩💩 Point, across and up to West Tiger #3, down Section Line to the high school trail, and intended to go back up the high school trail and over to my car at Chirico. I got turned around about 1.2 miles from the bottom of the high school trail, or about 0.4 miles up from the intersection of the Section Line trail, and ended up doing the road march hiker walk of shame back to my car. You can see where on the maps, it’ll be south of the lap 7 icon on my track map. 

I saw a light twinkling in and out of view ahead. At first assumed it was a city light, but stopped when it seemed too big and erratic. Turned my headlamp off and it disappeared. Turned it back on and it reappeared. Crap. Turned it on full blast and it shot to the side and was joined by another one just like it to make a pair. A pair of yellowish-gold, LARGE, and set wayyy too far apart eyes to be anything small like a bobcat. Then they did that dip low and juke side to side thing that cats do when they’re trying to figure out what they’re looking at. Crap crap. Based on eye size and distance apart it could only have been a fully grown mountain lion, roughly 50-70 yards down the trail. I made some manly noises to give it second thoughts about being too curious. It didn’t budge, just kept doing a 15:1 scale imitation of a house cat looking at something interesting. I found my nearest sharp emotional support rock and started getting disappeared the other way. It never got aggressive and didn’t show any indication of following, but I had my head on a swivel all the way down to the highway anyway. 

Still looking for info on if we’re supposed to report cougar sightings to the park service or not.