I know it's a strange picture, but it's an imprint of four mountain lion tracks laid on top of each other. For reference the puukko knife is 8.5 inches overall.
I was out snowshoeing and searching for the tracks of a different animal when I came across these. I was on a steep, narrow ridge (near the bald spot on the ridge below) and the tracks came up out of a dense stand of fir trees and then just stopped.
I stared at that for a second, slowly realized what it might mean, and hesitantly looked into the trees above me. Nothing.
On closer examination (there's a lot of detail there that the pics don't show) I saw that the lion had come up onto the ridge, sensed something it didn't like (probably me), and backtracked. Lion tracks are overlapped...the rear foot falls into the front foots' track. It's one of the ways they walk so quietly, as it essentially halves the real estate they step on.
When the lion backtracked it walked in it's own footprints, thus the rather huge looking tracks. The individual rear tracks were closer to 4.75 inches across, which is still a mighty big kitty cat.
I always love finding cat tracks. They're such magnificent animals.
