Mountain Lion Tracking (P18)

Today was a great day!!! I went with a national park service ranger to go track P18 a young male cougar. We started off the day checking a game camera where a road kill deer had been placed. There were coyote tracks everywhere and no signs of lion. As we checked the pictures there were plenty of pics of coyotes but no lion. Then we brought the roadkill deer back to a deer freezer for use another time.  As we hopped in the truck the ranger put the transmission of the cat on his radio, and we headed toward a spot where he had seen him just yestersday.As we got closer we could hear a faint beep and decided to hike in on a trail near a play park. While walking in the signal got stronger and stronger untill he made me stop. This is when the park ranger pulled out his wildlife pepper spray and he told me the mountain lion was very close probably about twenty feet away in a gully. Normaly (according to the ranger) he never moves in on a lion unless he has to capture it or find a kill sight. The ranger and I started to move off the trail towards the gully and just as we did the mountain lion sprung up from his resting place and bolted nto the gully. The cougar must have been 15 feet away. It amazed me that although we were looking where he was sitting we never saw him untill he jumped up and ran as his long tail swirled in the air.( the ranger told me that he has been out with film crews before for months at a time and they never saw a cougar even with a pinpoint location he said he still rarely sees them unless there on camera or he captures it with a snare) Anyway we moved on towards where the cat had ran and from the beeping on the transmitter we found a thick underbrush in the gully where the tranmitter said the cat was. As the ranger moved toward the brush I stayed up a little higher out of the gully to see where it went incase the cat ran. Just then I watched as a coyote moved slowly towards the underbrush, and then I heard a faint whistle! The park ranger spotted the cat in the brush laying down. The ranger and I must have been 5-10 feet away from the elusive cougar. But the cougar wasn't watching us his eyes were pinned on the coyote. The ranger and I hoped he would go after the coyote because it would help us trap the mountain lion. But the cougar never went after the coyote. So we decided to move closer to see if we could get the mountain lion with a blow dart but the brush was to thick. Our next approach was to try and tree him so we could get a better shot to tranquilize the cat. We attempted to tree him by barking like hound dogs and running at the cougar, but this did not outsmart the elusive cat and he ran off in the distance. The young mountain lion was in a larger male's territory and the ranger is hoping that the mountain lion crosses the freeway soon to a new territory because either P18 will run into another male and get killed or inbreeding will have such an effect on the cougars that there will be none left in the area. I had an amazing time with the nps ranger and hope to do it again not many get this oppportunity and I will cherish this day for my entire life. Sadly I did not get any pics, but it would probably have been impossible in the situation we were in.