Any of y'all ever seen a mountain lion with your thermal while out?

No, but I've seen one with my eyeballs.

Shady as fuck.

Head always on a swivel when hiking alone in big cat country.

Refuse to let them use my thermal. If one wants to be the mountain lion with thermal, he needs to buy his own.

I've seen 3 with flashlights, their eyes glow bright orange/red.  Then I snuck up on two with my PVS-14's that looked like they were getting ready to hump.  Got within 40 yards or so then they bolted.  Their eyes reflected a large amount of the IR light from my DBAL D2.  Never seen one with thermal.

Beat me

Once, 3 years ago and with a handheld scanner.  We walked almost parallel for a quarter mile.  This is far northeast Texas.  We DO have cats, and I was even able to kill one in the early 90's about 15 miles away from where this occurred.  I had also spent 4 years running all over the Sierra Nevadas while stationed in California, so they weren't any particular mystery to me.

I had just purchased my first thermal unit.  I took it to a lease I had been on for several years (primarily deer and hogs).  The owner was a coworker I had known for 10+ years who SWORE there was a panther on the property.

Two other buddies and I had hunted it for a few years with ZERO indication of any cats beyond common bobcats, of which there were plenty.  I had quite a bit of doubt and had pretty much forgotten his claim of a large cat hanging around.  The area was heavily forested with maybe 3-5% of it available for rifle hunting due to visibility - aside from the access trails themselves (which were also fairly overgrown and TIGHT).

At any rate I had received my thermal that day and wanted to take it out.  I parked my Jeep on the main trail in, planning to walk around for a few and see what wildlife I could see and how it would appear in a wooded environment.  It was fall and the foliage wasn't as thick as summer.

I spotted a cottontail and followed him a bit, spooking him as I went along.  About 200 yds down the access trail, a second trail shot off to the right.  It led to an old clearcut which had grown up with briars and thigh high grass between the brushpiles the timber company had left behind.  This trail was maybe 175yds and went at a downward angle towards the bottoms.

About 2/3 of the way down the second trail, i started picking up white dots which I couldn't quite make sense of.  The scanner had a 4x native zoom, and I thought maybe I was seeing pigs moving through the brush at a distance.  I was carrying a glock 10mm with a white light, so I thought I'd sneak in a little closer before lighting up the area.  The closer I got, the less the thermal image made sense to me.  Once I made it to the bottom of the trail (maybe 30 yards closer) I  lit up the area and realized that I was seeing field mice moving along the briars.  I watched them for a bit and then decided to head back.

When I turned back up the trail, i glassed the area with the thermal and saw what I thought was a fairly close bobcat stepping across my return path.  I froze and watched for a few seconds as it stepped completely into the open and looked in my direction.  It stood broadside to me for a few seconds then continued on across.  It wasn't until the tail followed it into the trail that I realized this wasn't a near bobcat but a panther at a distance of about 50 yds.  It obviously knew I was there but disregarded me as being ignorant of its presence.  I knew the path was just wide enough for my jeep with brush scraping on both sides when I would drive down it, and the rear hips had just passed into the brush on the left side when the tail cleared the brush it was exiting on the right.  The 4x magnification and the thermal image (along with my preconceived notions of what I was looking at) had skewed my perception of what I was seeing.

My first thought was to freeze and let this critter get far away before I had to walk the trail it had just crossed.  That lasted about 2 seconds before I realized how stupid that was.  At the moment I knew it's location, in a few seconds more it could be anywhere.  So I walked the trail back with the thermal to my eyes and found that it was walking parallel to the trail and about 20 yards deep into the woods, same direction I was heading.  It wasn't "stalking" me, it was always ahead and for the most part ignored me.  We walked the entire way back to the intersection with the original trail in this fashion.  Just before reaching the intersection, it walked into a creekbed and out of view and I never saw it walk out.  I had no idea if it went to ground, traveled deeper into the woods, or crossed the main trail and continued on into other areas.  I DO know that I still had 200+ yards to walk back to the Jeep, directly past its last known location.  That was the longest 200yds in the woods of NE Texas I have EVER walked,  With the thermal in on hand and the glock in the other.  If a squirrel had farted I'd have probably thrown the thermal at it and emptied the mag.

They never spooked me much in California, but this one was kinda in my backyard and it seemed a little surreal.

I bought a DVR for the thermal that next day and went back out several times over the next couple of weeks, no sign of it.  I've hunted and stargazed there countless times over the years since and have never seen it since.  That being said, that lease backs up to some bottoms that go on for miles in several directions and I may well have just caught him roaming outside his normal range.

I've found sign of large cats on other places I hunt in the area, but have yet to put eyes on one.  I've considered hanging a pig out of coyote reach and sitting on it, but haven't gotten around to it yet.  I really have no interest in killing one, but one of my hunting areas backs up to the homestead of a family friend with young kids (one of whom is special needs) and I've decided that if I encounter one in that area I'll take him.  Almost ALL of my hunting nowadays is thermal/NV in the deep nights, so I know it's entirely plausible at some point.

I'd love to get some DVR footage from the REAP of a cat at night, maybe I'll get lucky.

*The one that was killed in the 90's was in a neighboring county, where I was living as a stay-on hand for a working cattle and horse ranch.  The rancher wanted it killed to protect the livestock and the neighbor kid and I camped out for three nights before catching it in the open with a 7mm mag from a raised dam around the pond.  The internet wasn't really a "thing" in common usage at the time, so we were a little fuzzy on the legality of the whole thing (turns out we were perfectly fine in killing it).  But, the situation being as it was, that cat ended up in a hole dug with a backhoe at 4am and never spoken of.

Reason I bring this up is we've had a lot of rain down here. So naturally, there's a lot more tracks to look at. Me and dad were out stalking pigs and we came across several big ass tracks. We've never seen tracks like that in the area. Sure there's coyotes, pigs, bobcats, all kinds of shit out there, but these we had never seen. I've spent a lot of time out there by myself in the middle of the night just stalking whatever I find, but to think that there could possibly be a damn mountain lion out there stalking me....I think I would piss myself if I ever saw one through the thermal.

I find tracks from time to time. One thing that has always stuck in my mind since California (where they're much more common encounters) is being told that for every one you've seen, ten have seen you.

I leave a LOT of pig and yote carcasses lying in my hunting areas.  I think the odds are in my favor to spot one again as time passes. I'd really like to get some clean thermal footage.

Lol