Has anyone else been tracking the big cat sightings along the Appalachian Trail this summer?

Interesting thread but I'll be honest this feels more like a wildlife corridor problem than anything cryptozoological. Pumas have been expanding their range eastward for years and the trail runs through some serious remote terrain where dispersing males could go undetected for a long time.

That said I'm curious what the actual sightings are describing. Are we talking tracks, visual sightings, or both? Because if people are reporting animals significantly larger than a confirmed mountain lion that changes the conversation a bit.

I mostly follow the black-eyed children and abduction cases but I've started paying attention to cryptid animal reports more lately because the witness testimony patterns are surprisingly similar in terms of how people describe the encounter aftermath - that dissociated feeling, the sense of being watched before the sighting etc.

Anyone cross-referencing these with the BFRO database? Some of those trail corridors get a lot of overlap between big cat and Bigfoot reports which is either meaningful or just a coincidence of remote habitat.

@Dobbo17 fair point on the range expansion but you're underselling how many of these reports don't match puma behaviour at all. I'm over in Pendle so I can't speak to the AT specifically, but we've had big cat sightings here for decades and the same "escaped exotic" explanation gets trotted out every time. Some of these trail reports mention animals that witnesses describe as genuinely massive, well beyond what a dispersing mountain lion would be. And the track casts that came out of the Virginia section last month - have you actually looked at those? The toe spread alone doesn't fit puma. Could still be wildlife, could be misidentification, but just writing it off as range expansion feels like the easy answer rather than the right one.