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Hunter Comments

I hunted with Rick Crawford and had an unbelievable time. He is a very positive outfitter and even to the last second tried to get me a cat. The country is amazing and although we didn't harvest a cougar, Rick worked as hard as any outfitter I have hunted with. Everday we awoke at 6:30 and hit the road until dark. Although we cut alot of old tracks, the weather was warm during the day and freezing at night. No new snow fell while I was there and that really hurt us. I tried to draw a tag but did not and thus we hunted on a harvest objective permit. Rick has an excellent reputation and has harvested many trophy cats through the years and works extremely hard to get you your cat. I am going back next year!

Outfitter's Response

Often the biggest factor of success with lion hunting is the weather. Stable conditions with little variance between night and day tempertures makes for the best hunting conditions. Snow helps the guide establish the presence of a lion and the size and direction of travel. When day time tempertures are warm and it freezes hard at night the big cats travel on top the snow mud and ice then when the sun warms and melts things the next day the majority of scent left evaporates with the melting snow. At such a time it is critical to find a fresh track. With full snow cover and stable conditions the dogs can often run a 3 day old track and eventually catch up to the cat. With Eyads hunt it just seemed like we were always at the wrong place at the wrong time. Traveling miles of back roads we found many tracks and several fresh tracks but the fresh tracks we found were of smaller lions and we were trying to locate a large tom. We did cross several large tom tracks but they were 2 or 3 days old and conditions were not such that the dogs could follow the track very far before they would lose the scent when they hit south slopes where the sun had already destroyed the scent. We had a fun hunt and got plenty of exercise and tried to run two nice tracks. Rick Crawford