Lion Lake

We hiked up beyond the view of the road in search of a fabled lake as told by a photographer, where "the animals just come to you." We walked through grasslands and sagebrush, and amongst trembling aspen that stood in quiet isolated stands like self-contained nations in seas of grass. We reached a peak where small yellow and purple flowers proliferated in the spaces between beds of weathering rock that cracked and came off in shards, littering the ground with loose debris like bone fragments. And when we could not find the lake and turned around to head back to the car, we came upon another lake, which when we came around, emitted a gutteral and continuous growling from its vicinity. We were creeped out by the eerie noise, which was unlike anything we had heard before and would not stop. It was deep and seemed un-animal, like the noise of a straw that has reached the bottom of the cup, but much, much deeper. In amongst the trees behind the lake, we saw a black bear, but it didn't seem to be the source of the rumbling growls. There seemed to be two sources producing the noise. We decided it was mountain lions, angry at the intrusion by the bear, perhaps because of a nearby den. We named the lake Lion Lake.