Phil Pister

Maynard Morvay was on a roll. The Newport Beach fly fisherman, said by some of his eight fly fishing pals to be a novice, had just caught his third rainbow trout in a little over an hour on Crowley Lake. Let's hear it for Maynard. As a practitioner of the science of fly fishing, he wasn't in the same league with them, these guys said. Maynard's a nice guy, but he really doesn't know what he's doing, these guys said.

For more than 30 years, Phil Pister, a California Department of Fish and Game biologist, has been packing into the eastern Sierra Nevada wilderness and camping for weeks at a time. It is ideal mountain lion habitat, and scores of the big cats live there. So how many mountain lions has Pister seen in those 30 years? None, he said. "I've seen their tracks, but I've never personally seen a lion."