Grant man bags mountain lion in hunt of a lifetime

    Eighteen inches of snow in Nebraska’s Pine Ridge stacked the odds even higher against Travis Handy bagging the trophy of a lifetime—a mountain lion.
    Handy and Ben Polson, both of Grant, purchased a pair of the 400 licenses for this year’s mountain lion season available in the south unit of the Pine Ridge.
    The season opened Jan. 2 and Handy and Polson planned to stay in Chadron up to a week in search of a cat.
    Miraculously, the hunt ended just more than four hours after it began, Handy said.
    Handy beat the odds. He said less than 1% of hunters will ever bag a mountain lion. And of that 1%, less than 1% of those will be successful without using dogs to track the mountain lion down, he noted. But Handy did it.
    When he was a little kid, he said he watched a TV show where a hunter got a mountain lion without using dogs. That’s he wanted to as well.
    As a result, he’s been preparing for years—talking to all sorts of guys and biologists trying to learn about the traits of the mountain lion.
     He and his sister and dad went to the Pine Ridge last year, and while he didn’t see one, he got one to whistle back at him as dark was setting in.
    “And I was like, whoa” he said. And even though he never saw the mountain lion, “I totally considered my hunt 100% successful.”
    He said he and Polson began scouting areas in the national forest with Google maps, topography maps and other tools to pick out the best areas to hunt. But then, the Pine Ridge got 18 inches of snow just before the season opened, closing roads and in turn, ruining all their plans,  Handy said.

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