The “this is mountain lion country”. Just where the hell is that? A trail cam got a picture of a cougar in central Missouri last year. This is about 110 miles northwest of St Louis. When you go out in the woods it ain’t a petting zoo. Act acordingly. We have them coming into the city limits in Idaho. We still hunt them and they are not comfortable with us and we are cautious with them.
In the article it gave the location of the forest roads. I think most of them up there have gates so cars can’t go on them (other than loggers, forest service, property owners, etc.) But it isn’t out in the “wilderness” by any means. And hikers/bikers/etc. are free to use them.
We get our Christmas tree every year from a tree farm about 1.5 miles from the road intersection commented on from the article. I did field work for a week up in the woods near Hancock Lake, also about a mile away. (Lucky for me I don’t work too fast - so I don’t look like a deer running along the trail!).
Heck - even at our house in a city east of Seattle, 5 years ago there were reports of a cougar that probably followed a powerline east out of the mountains, and then the pipeline that runs through my area. Of course the farther east suburbs that are right up against the foothills - bears and cougars are fairly common. We do have lots of coyotes though - owing to the pipeline open-space and a large forested park nearby.