Trent Hair of Hanford sent us this sighting: “My wife and I were driving north on Interstate 5 just past the Lebec Road overcrossing on Monday evening at about 8 p.m. when a mountain lion crossed the freeway. We were in the center lane traveling about 70 miles per hour and the cat leaped onto the road about 25 feet immediately in front of us, crossing west to east. There was no traffic behind us for a ways. It happened so fast that I had no reaction, and it appeared that the big cat moved so quickly that we didn’t come close to hitting it. It was very surreal, and it was a very large cat.”

On Saturday, Maggie Van Ostrand of the Pine Mountain community sent us photos of this bear and a note:
“Check out the one where the bear is trying to get a date with a carved wooden bear by my front steps. He then started to climb up.

I yelled, “Don’t you dare go up those stairs!” so it turned and walked across the front of the garage and then around toward the back, which is fenced. Thank God [my dog] Cejas was sleeping in another room and didn’t see the bear as he strolled past the window that is above my computer. I made a mad dash for the camera…”

On Tuesday, Gorman School teacher Michi Knight was taking care of a garden at the school: “I turned on the hose to water an apple tree. The snake was about a foot away. I think I splashed it with the hose. It didn’t rattle, just slithered off into a bush on the other side of a fence. I thought it was a gopher snake until I saw the rattles on the end. It was about 3-feet long. Eek!”

Save the date: ‘Keep Me Wild’ Town Hall is May 21, 7 p.m. at the Frazier Park Library.

This is part of the May 9, 2014 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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