Snow Tracking

Winter’s wonderland remains austere as longer daylight hours invite more adventures back into the mountains where Val and I picked up some tracking dirt time in The Central Cascades. I’d not planned on tracking, but a fresh dusting of soft powder and the right afternoon light left incredible sign on the trail. The dog is not an easy tracking buddy, as she has no appreciation for the prints already placed on the ground for us to observe. She has learned, along with me over the years, that staying back behind the human staring strangely at the ground earns more reward and less correction. There were some wonderful stories left in the substrate for our learning pleasure, and I took time to observe and record, instead of getting somewhere further on. Since there was already so little snow, I could walk easily in snow boots without postholing. Quite a bit of the trail was actually melted off, showing glistening wet stone along the cliff edges of the mountainside. In direct sunlit areas, the sound of dripping water echoed through the groves of spruce and mountain hemlock as the last of the overnight snow melted away. Still, it was cold enough, and sheltered enough along my hike to catch a glimpse of what’s moving around these peaks.

Sometimes tracks form an individual set, and more often, they are scattered about in a collection of multiple species going about their day or night. Squirrel and snowshoe hare were two expected ground dwellers leaving a trail from burrows to larders, water sources, and easy track ways connecting these crucial resources. Between all the little scurrying creatures, a larger set of earlier tracks comes right through along the human trail. The larger set of tracks were confident, steady in direction and pace, assured of safe travel out in the open. These were the footprints of a predator. The size and spacing of each paw gave me a size estimate, and from a distance, the animal could easily be coyote or bobcat. At this elevation, a lone coyote would be a little surprising. As I looked closer at the tracks, other shapes and behaviors moved the mystery closer to feline origins.

The most obvious dimorphism helping me see the animal is a bobcat is the roundness of the track. Canines have much more oval shaped paw prints, and this animal’s feet are much more circular, like a cat’s. In multiple pictures above, you can look very closely and also see individual pads of the cat’s toes in the tracks, which are more teardrop shaped. A k9’s toes are oval shaped, and aligned in a symmetrical pattern, where a cat’s toes are asymmetrical. It’s very hard to show all this detail in the pictures above, but in person, the signs were clear, and I enjoyed trailing this animal for about half a mile on the trail I was hiking. It stopped to check a hollow log, crouched down between two young willows for a moment, maybe to watch potential prey without being seen. It also knew where it was going, and had probably traveled this trail many times before. It turned at intersections without hesitation, and moved to the edges with more cover effortlessly along it’s way. Reading the behavior of these wild creatures brings me great joy, and many lessons. I’m glad to share them with you, and perhaps inspire your own tracking adventure in the snow. You don’t have to be out in the wilds to follow some tracks, a park or backyard holds all sorts of nature mysteries in tracks and sign for you to see if you look. Gratitude to all the wildlife and wilderness available to learn from, and having access to it.