Unpredictable Montana -Our First Cougar Sighting at Holland Lake

Good afternoon. Good afternoon. So we're here in Montana near Glacier National Park. Today we are at Holland Lake Trail right now and we're just gonna check out this beautiful hike around the lake down here. I read a lot of good reviews on it. We haven't been here before. It's not the least bit busy. Not at all. There's no one else here and we're in grizzly country. The bears are out of hibernation right now. It is warming up. We've got bear spray and we're gonna talk pretty loud and see what we can find out here. But yeah glad to be here. Come along with us. All right let's do this. So there is a variety of hikes you can do in this area and this is not busy. It's not like in Glacier National Park. We would prefer to have some company out here today but it's really just the two of us. You can go to Holland Falls. I believe that's approximately 1.6 miles from here. So it may still have a little ice and snow right now. I'm not sure of the conditions but yeah let's check out the lake. We can already see it coming up here in the distance. Hey bear! So this is the difference for me personally between hiking in grizzly country or any kind of bear country really versus you know places like where we live back home. We don't even have bears in Indiana other than every now and then one crosses over. But not very often does that happen so you don't really even have to look around when you're hiking. But yeah I feel a little bit on the edge out here. The lake is beautiful. It isn't very sunny today or otherwise the water would be even more turquoise in color. But it still looks absolutely amazing and there is a lodge here. It's not open right now. Like I said there's no one out here. But I'm sure they will open sometime soon and then you can, from what I see, you can kayak here too. That would be a lot of fun. So we are hiking up to the falls. We saw them from a distance. They look pretty awesome and I haven't seen one other person. But it's all good. It's warming up. So the hike to the waterfall is approximately 1.6 miles one way with I think it's at 600 feet elevation gain. Well we just saw a mountain lion off in the distance up high and it saw us and it appeared to be leaving. So that's why I say this is wild country out here when no one else is around you. Wow that was my first mountain lion sighting ever. But it left right off so I don't know should we turn around. What are we going to do now? Slowly I mean. If we do, I don't know. Yeah. So we are going back. We were approximately a mile in before we saw the mountain lion. I'm sorry I couldn't get footage of it. Playing it safe here. I mean so that was wow. I mean I kind of suspected that we could run into one one day because we do a lot of hiking all over the country and we're very aware of our surroundings. Yeah so sorry we didn't make it to the waterfall but we don't want to take any more chances and heading back. And also just by the way in previous trips out here we have seen lots of grizzlies on the trail at a distance but it wasn't even very far from the start of the trailhead. So this can happen to you anywhere and also in a parking area in Yellowstone. The grizzly just came really fast over the ridge into the parking area. So you always have to look around and you know be diligent out here and be very aware of your surroundings. We made it back safely. The mountain lion did not stalk us. I assume there are plenty of deer out here because we saw at least six deer. Yeah so that's good. Anyway we're heading back to the cabin for dinner. We are both pretty hungry right now.