Homo Sapiens at Whiting Ranch

Posted on February 12, 2004 in Biomes Neighborhood

I went down into Whiting Ranch Wilderness for the first time since they reopened the park after the incident of January 8, 2004. The only tracks I saw were those of deer, double-hooved imprints driven into the mud after last week’s rains. The ground was hard, except in a sandy spot at the very bottom of the trail where I saw the endless waffle cuts left by bikes, blurred deer track, and small footprints which timidly left the cover of the chaparral for a few steps before darting back into the protection of some buckwheat. They could have been bobcat track, but I am guessing that they were left by a ground squirrel.

Gophers had done their darndest to obliterate parts of the Edison Trail by mounding up the topsoil. I climbed as far as the first tower, just short of the site where I had had my encounter with the mountain lion last October. A barbed wire fence ran through the base of the skeletal steel pyramid. Here, I stopped, several paces clear of the laurel sumac and toyon bushes to gaze out over the Sleepy Hollow/Serrano arroyo and to listen.

The only sound I heard was the wind tumbling off the mountain, hustling through the chaparral, and rushing through the arroyos and the gleaming industrial park at the mouth of the canyon to make a date with the ocean. No shouts from bikers nor the whirr of their aluminum locusts competed for my ear. I saw no sign of animal life (the wind has a way of forcing all but the determined hiker into hiding) between my vantage point and the rim of the Portola Hills housing development. I took a few sucks from my CamelBak, then started down the hill again.

Not a single person crossed my path. I kept my voice to myself except to cluck at the densest bushes. When I reached the top, I paused to take a picture of the poster the rangers had left at the gate. A few mothers and fathers watched their children playing in Concourse Park. I saw a red head point to me and say to her shorter, dark-haired companion a sentence that included the phrase “mountain lion”. I ignored the talk and walked off, only to be called back by Bob Strickland, Whiting’s most durable trail docent. He’d cut back a few overhangs along the trails that he felt could offer cover to a predator. On the day of the incident, he’d been within a hundred yards of the kill. “I saw a disturbance in the upper pond,” he said. “I think that it must have been the lion taking a drink.” Within fifteen minutes of that, he said, the second attack on the two women happened. He talked to two bikers who had not seen the lion or the biker stranded by the side of the trail. It was at that time of the day, he said. Around four o’clock.

Hikers like the two of us, Bob averred, probably were at an advantage. Because we took the trail slowly, we saw everything and heard everything. Bikers and joggers just rushed on through. What they need to learn is the way the land works, to know the sign, and to be alert to the hazards that lurk in the sugar bushes.

Here are a few interesting links:

• Cat Attacks: True Stories and Hard Lessons from Cougar Country
• Photos of tracks, including mountain lion tracks seen along the Cactus Trail in Whiting Ranch Wilderness.
• Living with California Mountain Lions
• The California Mountain Lion Foundation