By Mike Koshmrl
BRIDGER-TETON NATIONAL FOREST, Wyo. — After four days on the lion trail, houndsman Jason Reinhardt finally found a “smoking hot” set of tracks.
The cat, whose paw prints suggested a decent-sized tom, gave himself away by walking over fresh-fallen powder. He came out of the hills, headed down a road, then shot back into the aspen-studded foothills at the base of the Wyoming Range.
The stealthy apex feline had padded through the night before.
It was a warm, still, cloudy January morning in a remote corner of western Wyoming.
“If we have our way we’ll be running this cat today. If not it’ll be tomorrow,” the sturdy, red-headed 54-year-old Star Valley resident said. “I don’t want to toot my horn, but I’m feeling really good right now.”
That meant Reinhardt’s cooped-up hounds, relegated to a dog box for days, might finally get to do what they’d bred and trained for — run lions.
Rufus, a 3-year-old bluetick-English coonhound cross, and Smokey, a 7-year-old black and tan coonhound, didn’t seem to realize what was about to happen. But they live for these moments.
Reinhardt unloaded the two lion hounds from their metal dog box in the bed of his GMC Denali pickup. His good friend and right-hand man in the field, Joey Parker, hoisted them into a custom kennel built to run on tracks behind a snowmobile.
Before heading for the hills, Reinhardt, who calls himself a houndsman — not a mountain lion hunter — went to fetch his .243 rifle from his truck. He fussed with the sling on the gun, trying to get it over his helmet and snowmobile suit.
Then he stopped. Change of heart, apparently. He thrust the firearm back into the pickup.
“I ain’t gonna kill this damn cat,” he said. “What the hell am I bringing it for?”
Towing Rufus and Smokey, the houndsman snowmobiled away.
A young houndsman for hire
Reinhardt has watched many mountain lions die, both on the job and for play. He doesn’t keep a tally. The number his hounds have put up a tree, he knows exactly: 401.
The count is so high partly because Reinhardt worked for a decade as a lion-hunting guide for multiple Star Valley outfitters. He stayed with it until his last boss, Josh Roth, died in an avalanche in 2017.
The houndsman was never a bloodthirsty type who wanted to kill every treed lion, but he also wasn’t as protective of the species early on. “We did harvest some females and some subadults,” he recalls of his cat-hunting mentality in the early years.
As the years ticked by and he logged more time trailing his hounds, Reinhardt came to appreciate just how hard lions were to find. There just weren’t that many, he realized, certainly not as many of them out there as everybody was saying.
The commercial work made him increasingly “uncomfortable.”
“It was a numbers game,” Reinhardt said of working with clients. “It was, ‘Get him in, get him filled out and get him out the door,’ because that put more money in my outfitter’s pocket.”
To appease his outfitter bosses, he lowered his standards and accepted clients too poorly equipped to be choosy — clients who would shoot the first lion treed. “Here’s a 74-year-old dentist who couldn’t walk but 75 yards,” Reinhardt said, recalling the clientele. “Here’s a 300-pound Texas oil baron who had to walk downhill to a tree and was winded.”
The industry has an ugly side, and it changed Reinhardt. About a dozen years ago, he said, another guide’s client killed a female in the Hoback River basin that was temporarily separated from her two kittens. “They ended up having to be euthanized under a porch of a residence,” he said, “because they had lost their mother.”
The houndsman confronted his competitor, who was unsympathetic. “If I remember correctly, his words were: ‘As far as I’m concerned, Jason, you can go fuck yourself.’”
A different breed
Every year in Wyoming, thousands of hunters take to the mountains, high desert and plains in pursuit of elk. Last season some 29,000 of the hefty ungulates were killed, mostly by residents. A rifle, some gear and freezer space are about all it takes.
To run lions with hounds, the barriers to entry are steep. It starts with the dogs. Unlike a dedicated upland bird or waterfowl hunter who might possess one or two hunting dogs, a serious houndsman has a whole pack — typically three or more. And they’re pricey and need extensive training. Then there’s all the gear: telemetry equipment for the pack, snowmobiles, side-by-sides, trailers — the list goes on.
“I tried doing it on the cheap,” Reinhardt said. “Then I ran with a couple of guys who were seasoned, and I got my ass chewed.”
The quarry is exceedingly difficult to find. Wyoming doesn’t census its mountain lions, but hunters kill 300 to 400 in a typical year — and most areas have a hard ceiling on how many can be killed, creating an intensely competitive hunting environment. For Reinhardt, a morning can consist of waking at 2 a.m., parking at a trailhead and sleeping out the night in his truck just to stake a claim on choice cougar-running country. He’s felled trees across roads to stymy competitors. They’ve pulled the airstems out of his truck tires — all four of them.
Put it all together and for the niche group of hardcore hunters who claim the houndsman title, it’s an identity and way of life.
Reinhardt doesn’t vacation because of his hounds. He organizes his business to landscape in the summer and remove snow in the winter so he can essentially take off January through March: the prime season for running lions.
Being a houndsman in western Wyoming means waking well before dawn, often day after day. Those early starts can be exceptionally straining on human relationships in a houndsman’s life. During the winter of 2020-’21, Reinhardt once hunted for 21 straight days.
“I don’t know a single houndsman that is not on his second or third marriage,” Reinhardt said. “I left my pregnant wife at the airport — her best friend picked her up — so I could go run a cat for a guy.”
That marriage ended in divorce.
Thrill of the chase and a love of dogwork keep most houndsmen going.
“It’s an addiction that drugs cannot compare to,” Reinhardt said after snowmobiling — and not finding fresh tracks — for hours on an especially frigid January morning. There was no smile on his face.
Roots of an obsession
Some 27 years later, Reinhardt recalls his first lion hunt well.
His introduction to hound hunting came in the late 1990s while working in Casper. A taxidermist pointed the then-late 20-something carpenter toward a local houndsman, Burt Widmer, who’d take younger guys under his wing in exchange for help in the field.
On snowmobile and foot, they spent five days in the Casper Mountain area looking for fresh-enough cat tracks to turn out Widmer’s dogs. Success came after a big snowstorm on Super Bowl Sunday, when they encountered the imprints of a female lion near a fresh deer carcass.
“We turned the dogs loose on it, and caught it very quickly,” Reinhardt said. The lion treed up a big cedar. All these years later, he remembers looking up, seeing the cat’s eyes, and feeling awe. “It was so surreal to me that I could have sat there and looked at it all day.”
A shot from a pistol rang out. The cat fell stone-dead.
Killing a mountain lion had been a bucket-list objective. He thought he’d never do it again.
Reinhardt grew up in Lander, then moved to Jackson with his family during his junior year of high school. He caught the big game hunting bug early in life, attributing the affliction to his hunting-loving grandfather. His home outside of Afton is a testament to his obsession — mounted animals are everywhere — and he’s in the process of building a dedicated “trophy room.”
When snow started flying the fall after Reinhardt’s outing with Widmer, the broke carpenter who loved to hunt started looking at the landscape differently. The one-and-done sentiment about running lions subsided. He resolved to pick up a hound of his own. A competitive Casper coon hunter happened to have an 8-month-old bluetick puppy on his hands. “It didn’t matter what hound it was,” Reinhardt said, “I was going to buy it.”
He built up his own hound pack in 1998 and 1999: Kate the bluetick, Tess the treeing walker and Radish the redbone. New to training, Reinhardt and the team were spectacularly ineffective at first. “It took me almost two years to get traction,” he said.
In 2000, he killed his first mountain lion running behind his own dogs.
In those days, before the emergence of high-tech tracking collars, hound hunting was a vastly different affair. You had to follow dogs on foot, ideally staying within earshot of their barking and baying in order to read what was going on — and keep track of them. Pre-electronics, he’d write his name and number on a scrap of paper, put it in a plastic bag and tape it to the dog’s collar.
Lost dogs
Here’s another reality of being a houndsman: Sometimes dogs go missing.
“Some farmer or rancher would call me up,” Reinhardt recalled, “or some bleeding-heart jogger would call me and say, ‘Hey, picked your dog up, it’s got your name on it.’”
On a lion-less morning in January, Rufus and Smokey disappeared into the frozen foothills while they were just supposed to be taking a leak.
Reinhardt started multi-tasking mid-conversation as soon as he realized his dogs were missing, walking briskly down a national forest road toward where he last saw them.
“COME-OOONNNNNNNNN,” he hollered toward the trees.
Rufus had been acquired just that morning. Reinhardt brought the trained hound for a handsome sum — $3,500 — to fortify his pack, which was on the mend from an illness and a nasty New Year’s Day run-in with a hunter-crippled cat.
Rufus’ tracking collar told Reinhardt the new pooch was 600 yards away. But Smokey, his most veteran dog in a sport where experience is everything, was up in the hills without electronics — just like the old days. Evidently, they caught a scent, let instinct get the best of them and bolted.
Reinhardt was getting a little worried. “I hope they’re both together,” he said quietly.
Hardships happen when hounds run free in the hills. Dealing with it is part of being a houndsman. Turning hounds out on fresh tracks too late in the day increases the odds of a dog being lost overnight. That’s when wolves especially become a source of worry — their canine cousins are larger, territorial and don’t hesitate to kill hounds.
“We used to just let the dogs go,” Reinhardt said, “but since the wolves occupied this country, the shorter the dogs can be on the ground the safer they are.”
Earlier in the winter, another Reinhardt hound, 1-year-old Philo, went missing for four days while chasing a big tom lion just a few miles away from where the houndsman stood while Rufus and Smokey were at large. From Philo’s GPS collar, Reinhardt could see he was “ledged out” in such treacherous terrain that the dog wouldn’t budge — at least until he did, making it back OK. (A few months later, Philo was out of commission again, this time from an abdominal infection.)
After a few minutes, Rufus and Smokey ran back without issue. As the two hounds approached, they faced their owner’s wrath.
In a high-pitched voice dog owners know, Reinhardt hit them with a loving: “What were you doing?”
Back on the hunt
A quarter century after getting into it, Reinhardt has the lion-chasing gig pretty dialed. On another January morning, days after Rufus and Smokey took their unwanted jaunt into the hills, Reinhardt bombed around the same western Wyoming valley on a snowmobile in search of cat tracks fresh enough to warrant unleashing the hounds.
“It’s time to start shaving these damn ridges,” Reinhardt told Parker, referring to the process of laying down snowmobile tracks that function as a point of reference in the search for paw prints.
Finding a fresh cat track is always the first order of business. In practice it means snowmobiling — lots of it, day after day — and constantly looking. No matter the temperature, Reinhardt never wears goggles or a helmet shield: he fears the lens could cause him to miss a track.
Many factors influence the meaning of a track, but the timing of the last snowfall and the time that’s lapsed since a houndsman was last in the same spot are top of the list.
Until there’s a hot track, the hounds’ job is patience. The pooches wait in a metal box in the back of a pickup, sometimes day after day.
Out with Reinhardt and Parker on their third January hunt accompanied by WyoFile, the pair finally cut the track of a good-sized male lion on a ridgeline. Snow filling the impressions suggested the tracks were a few days old. They tread into a square-mile-sized patch of timber as the day got late. Too risky to release the hounds.
A few days later, fortunes turned. Snowmobiling up into the same basin to check on the whereabouts of the same cat, Reinhardt stopped and then cut off his snowmobile. He hadn’t yet seen cat tracks, but he’d seen enough to know one was nearby. “We’ve got a kill here,” Reinhardt said. “We’ve crossed a dozen coyote tracks in the last half-mile. He must have knocked something down.”
Parker, who snowmobiled up a ridgeline directly above him, radioed in the same moment. “I’ve got him up here,” he told Reinhardt.
The big cat’s tracks pointed south, into the open. They headed back for their trucks to check a Bridger-Teton National Forest road where the tracks were headed. It didn’t take much effort to locate the lion’s path again — his tracks were right on the road.
“That is smoking hot,” Reinhardt said.
Soon thereafter, Reinhardt snowmobiled with Rufus and Smokey in tow. Parker found where the tom’s tracks disappeared into a patch of aspen. It wasn’t a particularly large treestand. A snowmachine track looped the outskirts revealing no more lion tracks. The big cat was somewhere inside.
The wheeze of Reinhardt and Parker’s snowmobiles cut out, giving way to the quiet of winter in a snow-covered world. It was time to release the hounds.
“Ready?” Reinhardt whooped at a bawling, amped-up Smokey. “Skin it, skin it, skin it!”
Up a tree
Slowed by the powder, the hounds bounded up an open slope, then slipped out of sight. Their bawls faded, then disappeared.
The long-awaited lion chase lasted 350 yards. Rufus and Smokey covered the ground in less than three minutes. Electronics told Reinhardt that his new bluetick-English mix was yapping out 80 barks a minute — a frenetic pace that suggested the lion was at bay or up a tree. “That was the shortest lion chase of my life, pretty sure,” Reinhardt said.
They remounted their snowmobiles and hurried toward the scene. The big cat could have been holding its ground and squaring up to the dogs — a dangerous scenario.
The tom had treed. But so had Rufus. Reinhardt learned his new hound was a climber, and the dog barked incessantly feet away from a toothy, clawed wild predator twice his size. “Get out of that tree, boy,” Reinhardt shouted. A shock from Rufus’ e-collar didn’t compel him to get down. A swipe from a mountain lion paw fully connected with the hound’s yapping snout. That did the trick.
Reinhardt and Parker relished the moment. Phones came out for photos and videos, and they hyped up the hounds to let them get their fix. Lion dogs never stop barking with a cat up a tree.
“Double trouble, double trouble!” Reinhardt roared at Rufus and Smokey. “WOOOOOOO-woo-woo-woo.”
A few minutes later they leashed the dogs, hiked out up a small hill, then headed out.
“We’ve harassed him enough,” Reinhardt said.
Earlier, Reinhardt called the treed cat a “beauty.” On the lion trail, they also go by “fucker” and “son of a bitch.”
It’s tough love. Reinhardt’s protective inclinations for mountain lions come from a belief that they’re unfairly scapegoated, especially for the effects of lion predation.
“Contrary to what everybody says, there is not a lion in every drainage,” the houndsman said. “They are not as renewable a resource as one might think.”
This mindset helps explain why Reinhardt disapproves of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department and its commission’s decision last year to target 50% more mountain lions in four hunt areas where mule deer got hit especially hard by a long-lasting winter. The houndsman is frustrated the agency bowed to big game outfitters’ lion-reduction desires without solid evidence it’ll help deer. He’s clear: It’s not the red-shirted staff at the agency’s local offices, nor those who work in the large carnivore shop that he blames for not giving mountain lions a fair shake.
“It’s these paper-pushing pansies on the eastern side of the state,” Reinhardt said. “I’m not afraid to go toe-to-toe with these guys at all.”
The agency’s Cheyenne leadership has defended increased predator killing — including coyotes — in the wake of the deadliest winter for mule deer on record. “I do believe that a potential exists to provide a more rapid rebound by targeting predator species. It’s certainly not absolute, but the potential exists,” Game and Fish Director Brian Nesvik told WyoFile in 2023.
Big cat advocates
State wildlife officials in Wyoming and other western states frequently face pressure to kill more lions, a predatory species that’s blamed — often without evidence — when populations of ungulates like mule deer decline, whether from disease, degraded habitat or an especially deadly winter.
Houndsman have long pushed back, advocating to follow the science, keep cougar quotas lower and regulate how the cats can be killed.
In 2016, then-state Rep. Jim Allen (R-Lander) pushed a bill that would have legalized trapping mountain lions. Houndsmen fought it off, recalled Mark Elbroch, a lion biologist who formerly led the now-defunct Teton Cougar Project.
“When they tried to pass trapping of mountain lions, [the houndsmen] were absolutely against it,” said Elbroch, who now directs the puma program for the international wild cat conservation group, Panthera. “Jason was one of them.”
Hound hunters are not uniformly lion advocates, Elbroch said. There are plenty of not-so-great ones. Still, they’re mostly effective — in many rural western states, more so than non-hunting activist groups, he said.
Elbroch shared his thoughts about the influence of houndsmen in his 2020 book, The Cougar Conundrum. “The conservation roles of hound hunters on behalf of mountain lions is actually quite remarkable, and may be distinctive around the world,” he wrote. “[E]very year, houndsmen across the West pit themselves against deer and elk hunters, and request lower mountain lion quotas, in an effort to see mountain lion populations grow.”
Of course, houndsmen’s advocacy role is partly in their own self-interest to preserve populations of their preferred quarry.
“It’s just like any other sportsperson’s group,” said Dan Thompson, who leads the large carnivore section at Wyoming Game and Fish. “It’s just like Muley Fanatics and mule deer hunting and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, with elk.”
There are few enough houndsmen, Thompson said, that the grassroots organizations uniting them in Wyoming have “ebbed and flowed.” The Wyoming Federation of Houndsmen was active at one point, and now there’s a new group that’s starting so that the houndsmen and houndswomen have a voice when the topic of mountain lion management comes up.
In public meetings and the press, Reinhardt has been vocal in his displeasure for how the big cats have been recently managed in western Wyoming. He’s not shy about butting heads with the commercial hunting businessmen for whom he once worked. “The outfitters around here make me sick,” he said from his living room. “It goes back to them being coerced and believing that the lions are the reason why the deer populations are failing. It’s small-minded BS.”
Reinhardt’s criticisms were shaped by his own decade-long stint guiding lion hunters. “It’s what has made me so driven to keep these lions around,” he said. “Harvesting young lions and females, I saw how detrimental it was to the numbers.”
A last lion?
In Wyoming, mountain lion hunters can kill up to one cat a year.
Going into 2024, Reinhardt had pulled the trigger on a cougar three times in his life. “Over my 28 years of doing this,” he said, “I’ve kept 25 licenses and made it for tag soup.”
The 2023-’24 mountain lion season was the first year with higher lion quotas in Reinhardt’s most-hunted zone, area 29, which sprawls out south of Jackson Hole. The new limit was nine cats, a quota that was filled completely by season’s end. For now, the Star Valley houndsman is still seeing plenty of lions. “We could have filled the quota three times, with the number of cats we treed,” he said.
As February bled into March, there was one remarkable stretch of cat-treeing luck. “I’ve been out eight times in the last two weeks, and every time I’ve caught a lion,” Reinhardt said at the time. “I’m feeling blessed and lucky, because I have spent tens of thousands of dollars on fuel over the years, sometimes riding for 20 days before I even cut a track.”
Reinhardt and his friends and family also contributed significantly to filling the updated, higher quota, killing a handful of mature toms in one of his most successful seasons to date. “Catching five males over 150 pounds in one year, that’s unheard of,” he said.
Very selectively, Reinhardt still hunts himself, too. “I’ve killed a number of decent toms, but I’ve never pulled the trigger on one that went over 170,” he said. “They’re very, very hard to find.”
Out of 400-plus treed lions on the houndsman’s tally board, he’s only ever seen five cats that approached or exceeded the 200-pound mark. Early in the winter, Reinhardt spoke of a decade-long personal quest to kill one of those trophy-sized cats. If he did, “I would probably never pull the trigger on one again,” the houndsman said.
Weeks later, Reinhard squeezed the trigger on the fourth lion in his life — one of the three largest males he’d ever seen. He discovered the 190-pound tom’s oversized tracks while catching up with his hounds, which had run a different lion over 8 miles into the mountains. Two days later they snowmobiled back in and rediscovered him, cutting fresh tracks more than 15 miles from the truck in the “seventh circle of hell” near an avalanche chute.
Reinhardt and Parker towed Smokey, Rufus and Philo that entire distance into the backcountry off-trail, longer than he ever had snowmobiled his hounds before. In under five minutes, they had the big male treed, but it didn’t last. “The cat took one look at us, and he bailed,” the houndsman recalled.
A few minutes later the brawny lion treed again. Quickly, Reinhardt tied his dogs up and pulled out his gun, not even risking a photo. “This was the one I was waiting my whole life on, I’ll look at him when he’s on the ground,” Reinhardt said. “Clean kill.”
The completion of his long-held goal didn’t diminish the desire to keep on with the houndsman life. If anything it had the opposite effect. Even if it’s unlikely he’ll kill another cat, Reinhardt will always keep a tag in his pocket, he said. This spring he brought on three new pups, growing his pack to seven — his largest yet.
“Just when I thought I was gonna slow down,” the houndsman said, “I hit another gear.”
This article was originally published by WyoFile and is republished here with permission. WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.
