This past Saturday I have an area staked out in the Sierras, up about 8200 foot elevation. I'm hiding in some boulders watching an area of part clearing, part redwoods, and about 4:30pm or so I hear behind me some sounds of small rocks getting kicked around, then they fade away quickly. I turn slowly, hoping to see a deer, but see nothing. About half a minute or so later, I catch a strong scent, that I would describe as a little like manure, but musky as well. I don't ever recall smelling it before.

I recall hearing that the male lions tend to be pretty smelly critters, spraying urine and scent onto their hindquarters to mark territory. One friend I asked, who has more woods time than I do, thought it also may have been a bear. Both are found in that area. If it was a lion, no harm done, he cleared out as soon as he knew I was there. In any case, a .44 or .45 is indicated on the next trip!

Cats don't have a lot of smell until you poke a hole in em. Coyotes are bad enough, but there's something about decomposing deer meat, that will gag ya.

maybe the skunk ape left fla. and went out west for a little r&r

You almost got to see a real live BIGFOOT!

Yup............. bigfoot!

Most cougars I've smelled - they smelled like White Diamonds and baby powder but you describe something else...

Nope! couldn't be bigfoot..I seen her at the Tamarack in Conconully,Wa this past weekend.
probley 6'2" 320-350lbs with yuck written all over it

Elk have a musky-manure smell. Mountain Lions have a musky-cat smell.

It dose not sound like a lion to sneak up to you just to mark it's spot, their a little more shy then that.

Could have been Lindsay Lohan

ewww...I'd rather deal with a lion

They smell just like the Valley lions,

except a bit higher ?

GTC

What do mountain lions smell like?

They wrinkle that black thing a little just before they bite you...

They smell like tempurpedic mattresses.

Oh, man..... I just ain't going there!

Didn't you have a rifle?

"Didn't you have a real gun? "

Fixed it for you, Mike.

Thanks, buddy!

Depends, I s'pose.

My dogs, for example, have always had a repertoire of odors, depending on what they'd been eating and what they'd been rolling in or sprayed with. Skunks, alive or rotting, come vividly to mind.

After most baths, they usually smelled like Lifebuoy or Ivory � occasionally like Palmolive.

Cougars probably don't take many baths, so I can't imagine how they smell.

Late one summer night in 1956, on a logging road 'way back high in the Cabinets, a new-born fawn blocked my way. I stopped, got out of the pick-up, and lifted it onto the high cut bank where Mama Doe was snorting.

I was sorely tempted to keep it, especially after it quit struggling and settled-down in my arms as if it belonged there.

As I scrambled up the cut bank with it, I remembered what I'd so often read � that when they'd just been born, they had no odor. I thust my schnozz deep into that warm, soft flank and sniffed.

And smelled a very faint, very clean, very pleasant woodsy odor.

Reminded me of when my partner killed a hawk and told me to smell its body feathers � very faint, pleasant odor � not the same as the fawn, of course, but very much like it.

I counted birds for some years on an army base that was known to habor a lion or two. On maybe two or three occasions in ten years I came across what seemed to me to be lion odors. Once associated with a dead raccoon backed into a hole with four long parallel gouges down its side, and once where my wife and I had heard guttural growling from not far off the night before.

Ya ever go to the big cat house at the zoo? A real heavy musky smell, definitly cat-like.

Birdwatcher

"Chicken"

More than likely it was a Detroit Lion. They really stink.

best joke on here in a long time.

Smell just like your stinking house cat pee.

That was no mountian lion, that was El Chupacabra!!!

It's been many years since I went to a zoo with an enclosed big cat house, but yes I remember them being pretty odorous. In my incident there was no ammonia smell like you get with a neglected litter box. Also, I did find what looked like lion scats, about a 1/2 mile from the spot, with deer hair in them.

Yes I did have a .308 bolt action with me, but in the unlikely event I tangle with one, a big bore pistol seems like it would be more practical at close range, since you can work it with one hand.

Maybe next trip I'll also take some Jack Links, and make friends with a Sasquatch

Ain't no joke.

Mtn. Lions smell like Mtn. Lions...What else would they smell like>

There is a reason they call them "Pusey Cats"

There for a minute I thought you were going to say the Detroit Lions.

They smell like wet beavers.

in other words fishy???

LMAO -

I hope you meant to say that. either way that made my day.

"Speedy," my friend Set's ocelot,* wasn't ordinarilly stinky enough to be memorable, but his farts were horrible enough to rate a special note in the Guinness book of records.

Indescribable

Unforgettable

It's also memorable that he peed straight to the rear.

*wild, spotted Central American cat similar to a leopard