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From: Greg Reis
Sighting_Date: 11/2/03
Remote Name: 209.221.192.34
Date: 02 Nov 2003
Time: 14:52:57 -0500
This morning at about 10 am I rounded a corner on the Lee Vining Creek Trail (in the cottonwoods nourished by the sewage ponds) and a bobcat stood in the trail. I stopped running immediately and stood my ground. It started snarling and growling quietly at me. It was about 30 feet away, and it wouldn't budge, and kept looking uphill, as if there was something it was defending in the bushes. I just stood there admiring its beauty. It was the size of a small-medium sized dog, and had cool black and white patches at the tip of its tail and on the tips of its ears. It began to walk away, and I walked forward a couple of paces, but then it turned around and walked back toward me. I stopped. It growled, kind of like a housecat does when scared and cornered. I couldn't figure out why it wasn't running away, so I began talking to it. "Why are you here? You can't just claim this piece of the trail for yourself, people walk here all the time." It acknowledged my point with a snarl, seemingly saying that it could easily say the same thing about the presence of people in its habitat. I figured that if it wasn't scared of me, then maybe I should worry about it attacking (me or the next person to come down the trail). So I tried to look bigger, I bared my teeth, licked my lips, and growled back at it. It didn't move. So I picked up a couple of rocks and threw them in front of it--it just flinched a little, but still stood its ground. After a few minutes, I decided that our standoff was going to last all day if I didn't do something different, so I climbed the hill above it to go around it that way. I didn't see what it kept looking up at, but I caused it to go down the trail. As I returned to the trail, it ran down the hill into thick brush where I could hear it moving as I went by. An hour later as I passed by the spot again the only sign of it was its footprints.