Looking for tracks in the snow

[Okanagan]

My son and I got a day to cruise snow covered roads looking for tracks.  We found two cougar tracks but neither panned out enough to try a calling stand.  The first track was too old to bother with. 

The second one was maybe ten to 15 hours old, and though we found occasional widely spaced sections of tracks over nearly a mile of country, they were hard to figure out and we never did solve where the cat ended up.  Some of the tracks looked two hours old and some almost two days old.

The weird thing was that the farther we followed that cat, the older its tracks looked.    My son thinks that different temperatures from cold shade to warmer sections accounted for the differences in how much each track aged. Good time on a nice sunny day and hot coffee in our Yeti's.

The photo of the trail head sign below will give away where we were. 



Tried to post a pic of a cougar track but the photo software does not like that particular photo and won't let me do anything with it. 

[msmith]

Definitely in the middle of wilderness.

Tubal Cain "And as for Zillah, she also bore tubal Cain, and instructor of every craftsman in bronze and iron. And the sister of Tubal Cain was Naamah"

[Okanagan]

Definitely in the middle of wilderness.

Tubal Cain "And as for Zillah, she also bore tubal Cain, and instructor of every craftsman in bronze and iron. And the sister of Tubal Cain was Naamah"

You got it right! That's where the name came from, Genesis 4:22 in the Bible. Cool name for a copper mine!

The original Tubal Cain Trail was made for mule trains bringing ore out from the Tubal Cain mine.  I think the ore was mainly copper, with some gold and silver.  The mine shaft tunnels into the face of Iron Mountain.  The original trail was probably 25 miles long in 1902, maybe 40, to reach a road. About 1969 a logging road pushed to this spot, 3 ½ miles from the mine.  The miners lived at Tull City, a cluster of houses and maybe a store in a basin a mile from the mine.  It's all abandoned and rotted away in the rain to almost nothing visible left. 

  My first time to the mine there was an old ore cart that ran on rails back into the mine, with rusted gear all around.  I haven't hiked in to the mine in several years and I've heard people have carried off the old mining gear.

[nastygunz]

Interesting history!

[Okanagan]

Interesting history!

To add a bit more history:  in the middle of the old Tull City site sits the crashed remains of a B-25 WWII era bomber. It crashed after WWII, on a search and rescue mission I think.  It hit the ridge top of Iron Mountain in winter and slid at least a half mile down the steep mountainside into the Tull City basin.  Amazingly, several of the crew survived.  From the next mountain over, looking across the big canyon at Iron Mountain, in early morning a debris field shows up as shiny chunks of aluminum scattered from the ridge top all down the mountainside into the Tull City Basin in the bottom.  Some Internet sources say it is a B17 and some put the crash date into the 60's and give another name to the mountain, but my recall is of locals from the time. Would like to post a pic of the wrecked plane but am not hiking up there to get it!

[Okanagan]

Finally got a cougar track pic I took the other day to show up here.

It ain't much of a pic!  The track is about 4 inches across.  The most interesting thing about it, for me, is that the cat was walking in my cousin's boot prints made two days before.  The cousin and my son had hunted there a couple of days earlier and the cousin had walked up an unplowed road a couple of hundred yards to check a place where lions often cross the road.  This cat had walked in the cousin's tracks a day or so later.  Easier walking in snow almost belly deep to the cat. 

I can't get rid of the big empty spaces above and below the pic.

[nastygunz]

I tawt I taw a puddy tat.