I love reading/hearing about cougar encounters. I have seen them out hunting but only for a very brief glimpse before they vanished into brush or rocks.
I believe it was 1988/89 I was hunting in Beaver Utah with my ex-Father in Law (Great guy). He took me up a hill with big rocks on the sides. It ended overlooking a valley. You could tell where the deer were coming down when looking across. He left me there and moved to another spot we had passed heading up. After awhile I heard snow crunching thinking he got cold and wanted to head back early. I turned slowly to look behind me but nobody/nothing was there. Later just before dark I heard it again, and turned slowly to see him standing there with a big smile. He said "you had a visitor". I told him I heard another hunter come up but must have seen me and left. He said "it was definitely a hunter and you are lucky it left" as he continued laughing. I walked up to him, a bit confused what was so funny. He said "look, here's your visitor" as he pointed at cat tracks over top of our tracks. It gave me a bit of an uneasy feeling for sure. He said they just appeared out of nowhere close to the trails end as he was heading up to me. That cat was maybe 12-15 feet behind me at one point. It just seemed to appear and vanish. The tracks anyway, never saw the cat.
Another time we were on a ground squirrel shoot in a valley in Ramona California. The rancher loved that we were interested in this as he had livestock that grazed in the valley and squirrel holes are a problem, like groundhog holes are here in the east. We walked to an area that had a bunch of trees to get out of the sun for a bit. A friend of mine sat down and leaned up against a tree. He looked up, and noticed a clump of hair and legs in the tree. Turned out to be a goat. We showed the rancher and he said he had been losing goats to cougars. We never saw one there before, and we hunted that place a ton for dove, deer, quail, coyotes. We also camped out there a lot with our families. We had been all over the valley, hills, boulders, you name it. Never saw a cougar or sign. About a year after I transferred back east my friend sent me photos of cougars in the valley that he saw when hunting deer and coyotes.
You never know out there. If you get the sense you are being watched you probably are being watched....
In PA people have been saying for years that there are cougars here....possible I guess, but all the predator hunting I've done a cougar has never been called in or seen. If they are here, why haven't they been caught on trail cams? PGC denies any confirmed sightings.