Wow! You need to count your blessings man. Im glad you made it out. I bet you won't jump off that waterfall again. lol
[quote=Dogwood;924623]Pacific Tortuga, sure that was black bear? Grizzlies ar sometimes found up there.
Yes I'm sure. Would love to have seen a griz, the Forest Service had been asking for sightings and I had kept an eye out for almost two years up in that area.
Never saw one or any sign of them.
Forgot- in Canada I had a bear IN my tent. (I was with a group) I wasn't freaked out, but the group leaders sure were.
I was not in the tent at the time, by the way.
2010 AT NoBo Thru "attempt" (guess 1,700 miles didn't quite get me all the way through ;) )
Various adventures in Siberia 2016
Adventures past and present!
(and maybe 2018 PCT NoBo)
Dogwood, man that was some great stories. I feel like i was watching "Man VS Wild". AWESOME!!!
Originally Posted by Totem
Thanks for the laugh! Having been in Central America years ago in my stint in the US Army I had a really good laugh. We once had someone shooting into our compound in the middle of the night...not a nice way to wake up when the walls are tent canvas! Our biggest threat, however, was scorpions, snakes, rats, and ants...the ants were unbelievable.
Most of my near death experiences involve horses...generally parting company with them in some painful abrupt way.
My one hiking near miss was on a day hike in Utah years ago. We, several friends and I, were hiking along the side of a mountain on trail...some cliffs and overhanging rocks on one side and steep drop on the other side. There was a thunderstorm moving in and we were hurrying to get back to our car.
Suddenly the hair stood up on our heads...straight up...and there was a crackling noise. A bolt of lightning lifted off from the ground to the sky about 10 feet beside us. The pine needles were smoldering. All of us just stood there with this "huh...deer in the headlights" look for a second until someone said "did you all see that?" We made a quick decision to seek shelter and headed towards the cliffs post haste.
We found a small abri or rock overhang to sit under and we watched the storm safely from there. I remember looking up at the ceiling and seeing Indian paintings on the walls and had a weird deja vu flash...realized in kind of a overwhelming way that we were not the first people to shelter there imaging what it must have been like for the others before us. It was an eerie feeling sitting where someone had maybe thousands of years ago taking shelter from the elements.
Lightening- powerful stuff. I love lightening, but that is one thing that worries me on trail. On top of a bald, nowhere good to go, all you can do is cross your fingers not to get hit- I like lightening a whole lot more when I'm snug and in a shelter. Or even better yet- the Palmerton Jail Hostel. A concrete bunker is the place to be!!!
2010 AT NoBo Thru "attempt" (guess 1,700 miles didn't quite get me all the way through ;) )
Various adventures in Siberia 2016
Adventures past and present!
(and maybe 2018 PCT NoBo)
Hiking on AT this summer, first time using my MP3 player w/ earbuds. I got to the top of the mountain and heard a strange buzzing noise. I stopped walking and as I looked around, I popped out the earbuds. The noise was from the 4' timber rattler that I missed stepping on by 4 inches. It was stretched out along the trail and I stopped by the tail. One more step and my foot would have been in perfect distance for it to take a nip. I was 2 miles from the nearest road crossing but at least it would have been downhill.
In the Smokey's (Russell Field Shelter), a black bear (w/ two cubs) did a bluff charge. I yelled at it and she skidded to a stop about 25' from me. I was amazed at how fast she went from standing to running at me. Somewhere out there is a video of it that the kids shooting it promised to post .... still looking. Later that night she was up on her hind legs pounding the fence on the shelter trying to get in. She had to be content with gnawing the end of someone's hiking poles that were sticking through the wire.
chris
Chris "Flash" Gordon
LT -1987, 2012; West Highland Way & Cape Wrath Trail, Scotland - 2008; AT - 2009
To this day, I will not venture out of a building/shelter if there is lightning anywhere around. The craziest thing about that day we were nearly toasted was that the sun was shining and the storm was not that close yet. I think I read somewhere that there is more lightning on the leading edge of a storm than the middle or end so that may explain it.
I was caught out horseback riding once in a fast moving storm and I went into a thicket of trees, dismounted, tied the horse up and moved away to crouch and wait it out. I'd hate to see my horse struck and killed but worse with me on it...horses are natural lightning rods being grounded on four legs often with metal shoes on their hooves.
Uh, you weren't safe at all under a rock overhang, just lucky.
The trail was here before we arrived, and it will still be here when we are gone...enjoy it now, and preserve it for others that come after us
On a resupply day, I ate contaminated food and then spent 2 days purging myself. All I could do was lie naked in the shower. I guess that wasn't near death, but I wished for it.
Some knew me as Piper, others as just Diane.
I hiked the PCT: Mexico to Mt. Shasta, 2008. Santa Barbara to Canada, 2009.
I stayed a shelter in Maine with an AT Purist once. Wasn't sure I was going to make it till morning. He quizzed all other hikers in the area all night long--testing their purity against his. He was a real gem.
In the morning, glad to be alive and not guilty of a felony, I informed the purist of my dislike of the hard climbs ahead of us. I told him I had a helicopter scheduled to airlift me to the next resupply point. He laughed but looked suspiciously at me. He started one of his purist quizzes but I set off down trail during it, leaving him talking in the background.
Not a mile in, on the first climb of a day, a helicopter flew ahead. It's true. I laughed so hard imagining that guy's face that I didn't notice the difficulty of the climb.
When I was about 12 I led two younger children bushwacking throught the woods in Ontario. We came down the side of the mountain and one of the other kids stepped on a yellow jacket nest and got stung like 30 or 40 times. We had to flag a boat down to get back to our fishing camp. Both of the other Children were from Quebec and spoke little english. I was so sure that my life was going to end when my Dad found out.
My wife drove me from Lexington, KY to Amicalola. 6 nonstop hours in the car with her made death seem like the better option.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!My wife drove me from Lexington, KY to Amicalola. 6 nonstop hours in the car with her made death seem like the better option.
Whew, I wasn't drinking at my keyboard when I read that one.
i had my scoutmaster tell me about a time he was hiking in a storm near a low ridgeline. i guess one the trees closest to him must have gotten struck by lightning, he told us that when it was struck it literally popped and sprayed him with splinters and branches... i'd never seen the guys eyes well up like that before. i think it really rattled him.
Near Death Experience?? I had to move from the shelter to my tent, after 2 guys blew me out with a farting while they sleep contest. The odor was enough to make maggots gag...
It's not how you start your hike, it's how you finish.
This is an interesting little story depending on how you interpret the events.
Around 3 years ago, or so, two of my uncle and I were on our annual week long hike of the Appalachian Trail. We put in somewhere around muskrat and were headed to Springer.
A few days in, it began to rain buckets and did not stop for, like, three days. We stayed on top of Blood Mountain during the worst storm of the trip, (and incidentaly, the worst storm of my life). But man, let me tell you, that is the shelter to stay in when there is a terrible storm. It is made from rocks and huge timbers.
The next day we hiked to Gootch Gap shelter and a man was there who had claimed the entire top half of the shelter as his own. He had hung up a tarp in front like a wall and seemed to have been there for a while.
There was also a gentleman at the shelter of very slight stature from Austria. He did not speak English well, and for the most part just kept to himself.
Talking to the man who had been there for a while seemed to be revealing. Not of anything specifically about him, but that in general, everything he said was a lie. For instance, when asked how far he was going, of course his reply was "all the way. Full 2,000+ miles". This did not agree with the general state of his equipment. For one thing, he carried his water in a milk jug. Also, he claimed to be from New Jersey. Not being from the area, I would judge his accent as pure Northern Georgia or surrounding areas. Of course, he claimed to have just arrived at the shelter the previous day and was waiting out the storm. There was the smell of a skunk in the area and he said "that old skunk shows up day after day just looking for a free meal". That comment seemed out of place for someone who had been there less than 24 hours.
In general the guy just seemed weird and shifty, but hey, the way I see it, big deal. Nobody is perfect.
That night he did not sleep, but stayed awake rustling around up stairs, listening to the radio, brewing coffee and smoking some stinking cigars. (That in turn kept me awake!!)
Come morning, my uncles were suited up and off to the trail while I was still finishing breakfast sitting at the picnic table in front of the shelter.
I thought I heard someone jump behind me, so I stood up and there was ol' stinky cigar smoker standing, head cocked to the side and back, with a bowie knife in one hand and a frying pan in the other looking at me. He raised the knife pointing over my shoulder to my backpack hanging on a nail and said,
"That's a mighty nice pack ya got there."
"I like it" I replied while making the note not to turn my back on him.
He jestured again the knife toward the pack and asked, "Is that a Kelty?"
"No, it's a Gregory" Just like the emblem you can read from where your standing says, I thought to myself.
"Oh, Gregory. That is a nice pack" He took a step closer to me and struck with his knife the bottom of the pan he held in his other hand in a sharpening type of motion while he maintained direct eye contact with me. I thought to myself, "Man this is gonna hurt." I do not know any fighting skills and had no weapons near by.
He took another step and I heard over my left shoulder in the gruff voice of my uncle
"This is f#%king b#llsh#%t!" I turned to look and it was, indeed my uncle.
A little about this uncle of mine. Unlike me, he is a trained fighter. Skilled in several forms of martial arts, very large at around 230lb and of very imposing presence. Often times he's the one who scares the others away.
I then wipped back around just in time to see ol' stinky cigar smoker split and run off the other direction.
To my uncle, I was all like, "Oh dude, I am glad you came back! I was just..."
Mid sentence he cut me off and said "Yea, this is f#%cking b*ll*****. I put on all this rain gear, hit the trail and it stops raining. I figured I needed to reconfigure my pack anyway and this picnic table is here, so I came back to change out of my rain gear"
He had no idea what was going down at the moment he re-arrived at the shelter. It was shear "luck" that he was there when he was.
Once we regrouped and discussed the events, we remembered a few days before, when we dropped our car off at Amacalola, the park ranger had a police wanted poster and said to be on the look out for a guy who fit this description between Springer and Neal's Gap.
A couple of years later, I was shown a picture on the internet of a man and I said that it looked alot like the weathered man I ran into at Gooch Gap. Only this time it appeared he had shaved his head. I was then informed that that was the picture of a man from that area who was arrested for the murder of a girl in that area.
I have always wondered what ever became of the young man from Austria who we left behind.
just my take on the story...
Wow. You are lucky that your uncle came back man...
I wasn't hiking when this happened but its definitely scariest time I've ever had outdoors. I was out deer hunting in eastern W Va a few years back. After hiking about an hour to get to my stand I noticed to temperature was dropping quickly, extremely quickly! I was in the middle of a HUGE pine grove. As the temperature got lower and lower the sap in the pines began to freeze, as it froze it expanded. Every once in a while I would here snapping and popping from the sap exanping, it them became more frequent and much louder. After about two hours it sounded like gunshots going off all around me. Then all at once the tops of the pines began falling, everywhere around me trees were falling. I began to run to try to escape the falling trees, not long after I started running a large gust of wind came through and it sounded like every tree in the forest was getting blown over. I was lucky enough to find a huge boulder that I hunkered in close to until the storm blew thru. There was so much damage that it took me almost two and a half hours to get back to my truck.
I pray to God that nothing like that happens to me or anyone else ever again!!!!!
going up floyd mnt nobo this summer. buddy in front pissed off a rattler i was 10 feet behind him by the time i got to mr snake he was ready to strike.... 'bout 6 inches away from him. i jumped up 3 feet in the air and 4 feet backwards. screeeeeming like a little girl.....
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