Reader Response: Mountain Lion Encounter in Griffith Park

I'm electric right now. 

My bestest L.A. pal Nare and I have become hiking enthusiasts in the last few months, and tonight we embarked on an impromptu full moon trek to the Griffith Park summit. It was a cold ride up, but you're always guaranteed a parking spot when your vehicle is a motorcycle. 

The moon was street-light bright, and the place was teeming with life: rabbits and more rabbits; the silhouette of a family of deer against the twilnkling (how Nare described it, anyway)  Los Angeles backdrop; several coyote; even a frog hopping along merrily. A little bluebird landed on my finger and we all burst into song ...

It had gotten late. Too late to legally be in the park, actually, and over a P.A. the park ranger informed us that we'd be cited for trespassing were we not out in 5 minutes. 

 We ran. 

 "Let me show you something." He said to me while I zipped up my motorcycle jacket. "I've been writing these all night."

 What Mr. Park Ranger was showing me was an $83 trespassing citation. Luckily, he likes motorcyclists or dudes with beards or the color yellow (or something), and wrote VOID on the ticket. 

 "You gotta be outta here by 10:30, OK?"

 OK.

 The road down from the Griffith Observatory is like any California mountain road: dramatic steep grades, windy s-curves with hillsides rising on one side and plummeting on the other. After a particularly tight turn I saw something in the road that took some convincing from my eyes before my brain would believe it. 

 A coyote? No, too small. 

 A wolf? No, wrong color ... and I don't think they live around here. 

 Is it? It is. It's a freaking mountain lion. 

 "It's a mountain lion!" I yelled to Nare. 

 Unmistakable, graceful and beautiful and directly in my headlight, the running lion played out before us in slow motion. I thought for a moment that we'd be the perfect prey item until she (I'm guessing) veered left and lept up the hillside in typical cat fashion before running along side us from above. I stopped for a moment to watch her watch us before she vanished from sight. 

 A few seconds later I saw Mr. Forgiving Park Ranger and pulled up alongside him. 

 "We just saw a mountain lion!"

 "Alright. I'll check it out."

 I spent the rest of the ride woo!ing and smiling and other things exclaiming my absolute delight. This is something I've wanted desperately to see since childhood; I Google things like best place to sight a mountain lion in California regularly, and to have such an unexpected encounter with such an amazing, rare, and magnificent creature in the city limits of Los Angeles  is a treat I will never forget. 

 I have had sharks swim under my raft in the ocean while loggerhead turtles breached nearby; I've been nearly trampled by wild horses in South Africa and seen whales breach in False Bay from Table Mountain; a cougar run alongside my motorcycle in Griffith Park ... these are the things I will smile about on my deathbed. 

Though, at this rate, my deathbed will probably be in the belly of a Great White, and I'm OK with that.