Updated on January 27, 2021 at 10:22 am
NPS / Jeff Sikich
A 90-pound male mountain lion was captured in the Santa Monica Mountains by wildlife officials, who conducted a health check and fitted a GPS collar on the young cat, park officials said Tuesday.
The mountain lion,
named P-95, was discovered Jan. 16 and is believed to be roughly a year and a half old, according to officials with the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.
He is one of 10 mountain lions being tracked by scientists with the National Parks Service seven in the Santa Monica Mountains, two in Simi Hills and one in Griffith Park, according to park officials.
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Welcome, readers of The Wild. Two words: uphill skiing. Sounds crazy, right? The sport, also known as skinning or ski mountaineering, has been around for awhile. Now it’s booming because it keeps skiers and boarders away from crowds and off ski lifts, ideal for these socially distant times.
Uphillers, as they’re sometimes called, use “skins” that cover the bottom of their skis to tromp up a slope a super-tough, lung-busting workout and then do a downhill run. Snowboarders do the same thing with split boards, which come apart to create mini-skis with skins for the uphill trudge.
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This is the Dec. 10, 2020, edition of Boiling Point, a weekly newsletter about climate change and the environment in California and the American West.
More than 111 million acres of U.S. wilderness have been designated since 1964, when the Wilderness Act was signed by President Johnson. It’s the highest level of protection the federal government offers, ensuring that wild lands remain free of permanent roads, motor vehicles, commercial enterprise and structures of any kind.
The law’s definition of wilderness is the stuff of legend: “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”