Devil's Canyon, Part 2

Of Wilderness and cat pee

I ended the previous post where I did because I have too many photos of this place for one post. These are from three trips up to Devil’s Canyon taken within a 2-week period.

Further up the canyon from the end of the previous post, the erosion from the canyon’s wash becomes prominent.

Desert wash from Devil’s Canyon

It was at about this point that I stopped and took another photosphere. As explained before, Substack can’t render photospheres, so here’s a link to it on Google Maps. You can scroll up, down, and all around using your mouse. You can also zoom in or out of a view using your mouse wheel:

Devil's Canyon, photosphere #2

Just up ahead, and just before the mouth of the canyon, the trail enters the Black Ridge Canyons Wilderness:

Devil’s Canyon trail, at the wilderness boundary

It’s a pleasant spot. There is vegetation, and Juniper trees that offer some shade. A nice place for a picnic.

At this juncture, you’re a little over a mile from the trail head. The mouth of the canyon is just ahead. Here’s a view from just inside the mouth of the canyon, looking back the way you came:

Devil’s Canyon, just inside the mouth

This bluff impressed me. So I pointed the camera up and took a wide-angle shot of it. And caught the distinct odor of cat pee.

Wide-angle shot of a bluff at the canyon mouth

Cat urine! That could mean one of only two things: a cougar nearby, or those Juniper trees that were all around me. Yes, Junipers put out an odor that smells like cat pee.

Now, I don’t ever want to mess with a cougar. Back in my former life in Indian Hills, that gulch was filled with them. One day on a hike, I came across a brutal death scene of a buck deer that used to hang out in my back yard (I recognized him from a distinctive curl in one of his antlers). His leg bones were broken, one of his antlers was broken, meat had been chewed out from inside of him — and cat tracks all over. It was a scene of incredible violence that shook me. Another time, one of my neighbors pulled into his garage one night to find a cougar IN the garage, between him and the door of the house.

And decades earlier, I met a hunter who’d been attacked by a cougar in Oregon, and got his story published in some hunting magazine (I think it was Outdoor Life). He survived because he heard the cat brush against a twig in mid-pounce, and whipped around to see what was behind him. The cat landed on his chest instead of his back, as it had intended. He dropped his gun, because it was useless, and pulled out his hunting knife and started stabbing the cat in its belly. He was still mangled pretty badly, but managed to make it back to town and the emergency room.

So I smelled cat pee. I got nervous. Looked all around, didn’t see anything. But they are very good at hiding.

Realizing I was probably smelling the Junipers, I decided to leave anyway. Checking back over my shoulder every few steps. Because my hunter friend had never heard the cat that pounced him until it was in mid-air and brushed against a twig.

I did not want a 100+ pound cat pouncing onto my back.

I did make one more hike to that spot, and a bit beyond, to get one last photosphere. Here is what I consider the best of the bunch. It is also on Google Maps, so everything I said above applies (i.e., you can zoom as well as pan):

Devil's Canyon photosphere #3

I took one last shot of that hoodoo on my way out. That thing fascinated me.