Carbon County is small compared to others in the state, making its high number of B&C entries that much more impressive. Surrounding the city of Price, the county includes the foothills of the Manti La Sal National Forest on the west, and the Roan Cliffs and West Tavaputs Plateau on the east. It varies from oak and cedar mountains to sage desert and canyon lands.

Lion hunting is more tightly controlled in Utah than many other Western states. Licenses are available only through a drawing.

The varied terrain allows hunters to hunt from 4-wd trucks, cruising high country during early portions of the season and lower elevations as winter snows arrive. This not only becomes a practical means of avoiding getting a vehicle stuck but also for following deer herds as snow forces them into lower country as the season progresses. Cats are where their food is, and that food means mule deer.

This is New Mexico's best trophy mule deer territory, and also home to the famous Jicarilla Apache Reservation, where some of the nation's biggest mulies come from each year. It varies from some of New Mexico's most lush high alpine habitat, to roughly beautiful sage desert and canyon badlands. Much of it is crisscrossed by abundant oil and natural gas maintenance roads, so it is normally easy to cover a great deal of ground looking for trophy-sized pugmarks on which to turn hounds loose.

Yellowstone National Park acts as a buffer against the state's aggressive lion control. Hunters do get a crack at game and the lions that feed on those prey animals as they spill out of the adjacent park and into state and non-park federal lands. The Shoshone National Forest and Absaroka Range to the south are also some of the roughest country in the state, offering difficult access, especially during winter months. This area of the state offers unlimited deer, elk and sheep feed for hunting lions, and recent listings suggest lion hunting should continue to get better in seasons to come.

The Silver State is a tough place to make a living hunting, and with this in mind it is no wonder that Elko County, one of the state's best deer-hunting areas, has produced six of Nevada's Top 10 lions. Pope & Young cats (13.5-inch minimum) are much more common.

Elko County is a huge chunk of real estate, larger than some eastern states, occupying the entire northeast corner of the state. In addition to deer there are good numbers of elk here as well. It is made of an endless series of north-south running mountains, narrow but rough ranges such as the Pequip Mountains to the east, East Humboldt Range, Independence Mountains, Tuscarora Mountains to the west, and Jarbidge Range to the north.

Game managers have suggested that many big cats are taken in this area that are never entered in record books, and that they believe that 20 total B&C cats seems low in an area with mountain ranges that may not be hunted for years at a time. Too, Nevada, like Arizona, often means hunting on dry ground, and this could provide much of the discrepancy in the numbers. Any decent hound can catch a lion in snow. It takes a real dog to do so on bare earth.

Gila County comprises most of Arizona's most productive game country, including a goodly portion of the game-rich White Mountain Apache Reservation and the Natanes Plateau portion of the San Carlos Apache Reservation, the Sierra Ancha Mountains on the U.S. Forest Service side, Mazatzal Mountains and the base of the Mogollon Plateau near Pine. My good friend Tom David of Summit Outfitting hunts Fort Apache, and says every mature tom he has taken over the years scores well into P&Y records.

Lion hunting is like baseball. Not every turn at the plate results in a home run, but we keep on trying. When all the hard work, fruitless days and lost hope finally result in success is when we best understand what it is to be a hunter.