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There was that one time I woke up to find a grizzly bear sniffing around my tent in the middle of nowhere, 40km from our car. It was berry season and we were camped in the middle of a buffalo berry patch. Parks set up that campsite, good job. This photo was from the next morning, you can see it's def grizzly habitat.  For the record, this is what it looked like this past summer. It's a totally worthwhile place to go! Just be bear aware  There was another time I lost my footing while scrambling and almost fell to my death and had to be rescued by helicopter due to my injuries. Your feet will follow your eyes when you're walking, so if you're staring at a pretty lake in the distance, you might walk to close too the edge of the cliff band and end up tumbling over. I took this picture on the way up, I fell around here on the way down.  I also came face to face with a bull moose but he was cool and didn't stomp me to death. We only had our cell phones so the pictures were kind of bad.  I once took the wrong gully, likely never climbed by people before, while trying to scramble up a mountain with vertically tilted slabs and ended up on ~5.5 technical climbing covered in loose rubble for an hour and somehow made it to the top. Pretty sure I would have fallen all the way back down if I slipped, and those rocks would have done a lot of damage. I had a point and shoot camera in my pocket and stopped to take a few pics part way up the route.   Top of the gully was a dead end so we had to turn back and climb to the bottom. We found a much safer route but cause a lot of rockfall. It was also my first failed summit. I was pretty disappointed. 
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Dec 20, 2015 03:10
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If I was there, I would've called for Chuck Norris, and he woulda came and beat the poo poo out of that bear and saved the day.
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Dec 20, 2015 13:53
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Bears are actually cool and you shouldn't beat them up when they did nothing wrong hth
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Dec 20, 2015 21:46
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I've had malaria, dengue, typhoid, almost died of exhaustion, bribed federales to not to seize some hash and had someone I'd known for five hours hand me a pistol during a standoff with the Zetas traveling is hosed up sometimes i say swears online fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Dec 20, 2015 |
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Dec 20, 2015 22:16
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One time a hunter passed me on the trail and he had a shotgun and it was kinda like hey, what if he shot me. He didn't though. but for a second I guess it was kind of scary.
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Dec 21, 2015 00:16
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One time I was hiking in some mountains in Colorado and there were lots of cows around, my dog thought it would be funny to gently caress with the cows and they started chasing him around and after that he stayed close. Cows.
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Dec 21, 2015 00:31
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Retarded_Clown_ posted:One time a hunter passed me on the trail and he had a shotgun and it was kinda like hey, what if he shot me. He didn't though. but for a second I guess it was kind of scary. last trip I did this fall I started literally on opening day of the hunting season. Lotta goofy look dorks wearing cammo and carrying huge rifles mounted on the back of their trucks hanging around the trailhead areas. Heard a couple of rifle shots one morning but that was it but you never know one of them could have shot me because a guy with a backpack and orange hat hiking on a trail looks a lot like a deer
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Dec 21, 2015 02:09
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Butyraceous posted:Cows. I was doing some geologic mapping at field camp one day and a stray herd wandered into the area. We'd been told to avoid them, but it was late in the day, and the herd had wandered onto the road that was the shortest, easiest route back to the vans. gently caress it, I'll just walk around the edge of the herd, close to the road. What I didn't know was that the young bulls were just getting to that stage of adolescence where they were aggressively staking out their role in the herd. About halfway through my detour, I notice this bull tailing me. I stop. He stops. I start walking. He starts walking. Fuuuuuuuuck. Time to start eyeing escape routes. I've got two choices. I can run up a hill to a barbed wire fence and try to hop over before getting gored, or try to make it up to a fence a bit further up the road with a cow grate. Tough choice. I figure the gate is a bit safer choice, considering, but I still have to make it through the rest of the herd without attracting more attention. I start walking a little faster down the road, and the bull notices. He starts trotting along with me. I stop and turn and take a step towards him. Maybe that will get it to back up. Nope. Challenge accepted. So here I am, slightly clumsy, overweight geologist, cast in the role of matador. I guess threatening someone with death by impalement gives them magic powers or something, because somehow I managed to jump out of the way of the bull's charge, pick myself up and run the finest 100m dash of my life. I hope I've eaten that fucker by now. Venusian Weasel fucked around with this message at 02:58 on Dec 21, 2015 |
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Dec 21, 2015 02:55
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Levitate posted:last trip I did this fall I started literally on opening day of the hunting season. Lotta goofy look dorks wearing cammo and carrying huge rifles mounted on the back of their trucks hanging around the trailhead areas. Heard a couple of rifle shots one morning but that was it but you never know one of them could have shot me because a guy with a backpack and orange hat hiking on a trail looks a lot like a deer Orange means the hunters see it. Allot of hunting gear is orange for this reason.
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Dec 21, 2015 04:22
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Retarded_Clown_ posted:Orange means the hunters see it. Allot of hunting gear is orange for this reason. except the guys who wear natural colored camo because they're hiding from other hunters I guess
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Dec 21, 2015 04:35
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A long time ago, I was almost killed while hiking, by my pack llama. It was a narrow path on a cliff edge, and the llama was getting surly, and shoved me from behind, I flopped halfway over the edge, probably didn't fall cause I had wrapped the lead around my arm. Well that's my story thanks for reading.
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Dec 21, 2015 07:17
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Crimson Harvest posted:A long time ago, I was almost killed while hiking, by my pack llama. Thank you for posting!
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Dec 21, 2015 07:33
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Went up one side of the mountain, and thought it'd be fun to go down the other side. Halfway down it cliffed out, but i refused to believe it at first so kept going. Then when I accepted it i almost couldn't get back up. I would say thank you mountain for releasing me but mountains don't talk.
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Dec 21, 2015 09:09
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I got really thirsty one time. Like, really really thirsty, and I drank up 2+ liters of water and still thirsty. I eventually made it into camp and drank some filtered water and felt better.
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Dec 21, 2015 19:39
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I almost got run over by an elk harem while bushwacking through the Valle Vidal. The bull saw me right away, but cows didn't until they got within 10 feet or so of me. It was pretty cool. That was the same summer I treed a yearling Black Bear because it got too close to a cabin. At least, I think it was a yearling. The mother didn't come tearing out of the woods and kill me so it must've been one  .
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Dec 21, 2015 19:48
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Went up the treadwell incline with about 25lbs of gear and almost tripped backwards on the broken stairs and died, instead I didn't and am alive,
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Dec 22, 2015 17:06
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Nothing like that nice tingling sensation along your spine to let you know you almost lost your balance and fell backwards on to a bunch of rocks
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Dec 22, 2015 19:26
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Aliquid posted:and had someone I'd known for five hours hand me a pistol during a standoff with the Zetas How did that one end and was it a good pistol? One of my friends was walking through a hiking trail on the southern edge of the Ocala National Forest about 6 or 7 years ago and suddenly felt something like a handful of gravel thrown very hard at his leather jacket. Turns out the trail was behind the brush backstop of a shotgun range, and the shot had lost so much velocity by that point that after crashing through the foliage it didn't even have enough energy to penetrate his jacket.
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Dec 22, 2015 22:56
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chitoryu12 posted:How did that one end and was it a good pistol? Some local yuppies I met in Acajutla bought my meal and drinks at a seafood restaurant so I felt obligated to go karaoke'ing with them at a place in the middle of nowhere. They got stupid drunk and picked a fight with a table full of dudes from Northern Mexico in wifebeaters and gold chains who sang a lot of El Komander. Everybody moved outside and the gangsters pulled out pistols. We hopped in our cars and ran to cede the territory and while peeling out one of them tossed a pistol into my lap "in case they follow". He was wasted, they didn't follow; they just wanted to sing narcocorridos without getting lip from locals. Pistol was a standard Glock, every single dude in El Salvador carries one.
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Dec 22, 2015 23:30
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Aliquid posted:Some local yuppies I met in Acajutla bought my meal and drinks at a seafood restaurant so I felt obligated to go karaoke'ing with them at a place in the middle of nowhere. They got stupid drunk and picked a fight with a table full of dudes from Northern Mexico in wifebeaters and gold chains who sang a lot of El Komander. Everybody moved outside and the gangsters pulled out pistols. We hopped in our cars and ran to cede the territory and while peeling out one of them tossed a pistol into my lap "in case they follow". He was wasted, they didn't follow; they just wanted to sing narcocorridos without getting lip from locals. Pistol was a standard Glock, every single dude in El Salvador carries one. Reminds me a little of a friend of a friend. Supposedly one of his friends ended up betting his finger in a drunken, high stakes card game with Vietnamese gangsters and lost. He got it reattached after they were done.
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Dec 22, 2015 23:37
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I almost fell to my death canyoneering in Utah a few years back. We had split up the opening of the canyon (MMI, if anyone wants to know) into two rappels. The first rappel actually could easily have been downclimbed, but I at the time and the others were pretty inexperienced and wanted to be roped up. One person completed the second rappel which was from a chockstone platform and goes into a boulder room. She was waiting in the boulder room for me. One of the leaders was on the top of the second rappel, and I was getting ready to head into the boulder room. So I've got my (single line) rappel rigged up and the leader is lowering me (by hand, not rope) off the ledge to put my weight on the anchor. As soon as I put my weight on the anchor, I watched as the clove hitch (without enough tail) slithered off the (non-redundant) blocking carabiner and I managed to stem and grab the edges of the chockstone just as it came completely undone. Fortunately the rope was didn't fall through my ATC, and thus didn't fall into the boulder room, which would have been a bummer. We did lose the carabiner that was being used for the 'biner block. I'm really glad that I know a lot better now and choose better adventure partners. PS always make sure you have a sweet tail on your clove hitch and make all your anchors redundant.
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Dec 23, 2015 00:16
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Thankfully I've had no real negative experiences out hiking or camping. My friend Lacy and I went out to the Seminole State Forest in August and it was hot, but nothing Floridians aren't used to. She did find that she was constantly hassled by horseflies whenever she went outside, though. She later found out that horseflies are attracted to the color blue and her favorite hiking shirt is a blue one.
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Dec 23, 2015 00:18
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Retarded_Clown_ posted:One time a hunter passed me on the trail and he had a shotgun and it was kinda like hey, what if he shot me. He didn't though. but for a second I guess it was kind of scary. At least he was a hunter. What's with the gramps and his shiny handgun I see several miles deep in national forest (no hunting, to be clear) every now and then? All I have to contribute is attempting to climb Crater Rock on Mt Hood in late summer. No gear, no experience, no education, no clue, alone, near dark. I also have a phobia of volcanic activity I guess, and had no idea the mountain continually farts poison gasses through cracks in the ground until I noticed it in person on near vertical crumbly crap rock. Funny, I picked up a yellow stone on the way and was like "hmmn, this looks like sulfur", completely oblivious. The closest I've gotten to having a panic attack. I was shaking in fear for about an hour after I got down from the dangerous parts. No particularly shaky moments (or constant shaky moments, depending on how you look at it what with the breaking holds and rock avalanches), just an extended close call with winning a Darwin Award.
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Dec 23, 2015 04:30
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meselfs posted:At least he was a hunter. What's with the gramps and his shiny handgun I see several miles deep in national forest (no hunting, to be clear) every now and then? Extended close calls are the best. Plenty of time to savor your brush with mortality. Selfie vid i took after making it down from one like yours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTtYzpVpv7k
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Dec 23, 2015 05:33
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Thx for sharing that video 
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Dec 23, 2015 06:44
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Slipped and fell crossing a stream in Idaho. I looked down at my knee and saw plenty of nice white bone through a gash in my skin. After the feeling of shock passed I hobbled back to the trail and sat down taking stock of the situation. I was 2000 feet up from where I started, and about 4 miles of walking to do. The only other people I had seen on a neighboring mountain had already left so as far as I knew I was alone. Just then this couple walks up and they helped me get down the trail. They called search and rescue to wheel me out on a litter and I got stitched up that night at a nearby hospital.
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Dec 23, 2015 13:40
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The last time a bull got uppity with me I punched him in the nose a few times
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Dec 24, 2015 05:42
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Picnic Princess posted:There was another time I lost my footing while scrambling and almost fell to my death and had to be rescued by helicopter due to my injuries. Do they bill you when they send a helicopter to rescue you? How do you contact people to help, did you have climbing partners go get help or did you have a satellite phone or something?
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Jan 2, 2016 02:25
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an adult beverage posted:Do they bill you when they send a helicopter to rescue you? How do you contact people to help, did you have climbing partners go get help or did you have a satellite phone or something? It depends. The Canadian Rockies Parks System, which includes Banff, Jasper, and a bunch of provincial parks is all covered by the government. They increased park pass fees by $1 to fund it back in 2009 I think. They have a contract with a private helicopter company who pilots the rescue crew, who are government employees. The only time I've heard of someone having to pay was a guy who called in a rescue for his dog who got stuck on some cliffbands a couple years ago. I was lucky I was in an area with cell reception. We were actually in view of a town at the base of the mountain. Anyone outside and looking south would have seen the rescue hahaha. I was charged for the ambulance ride from the base of the mountain to the hospital, which was covered by work insurance except for a $25 admin fee. We didn't know at the time the heli-rescue was covered, but I was in bad enough shape in a dangerous enough place we went with it. We waited for weeks for a bill to show up in the mail, but all that came was a copy of the incident report. I'm not sure how it works for the rest of the country, though.
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Jan 2, 2016 07:17
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So this is actually a story from someone else. Long story short, she's an insane harpy of a businesswoman with a long reputation of doing blatant unethical and illegal poo poo to get kickbacks and more power in every job she's taken, the latest of which was her working for a company I work for and trying to intentionally create drama to destroy it from within and let her husband's business take the customers. There's a ton of bad blood between her and us for obvious reasons. Anyways, we got word that she suffered a slight accident while trail riding in Tennessee. While riding down a muddy, narrow path her horse threw her (not even the horse wanted her)....downhill. I can't recall how far she tumbled, I think something like 50 feet. The only thing that stopped her from going down a 100 foot sheer drop at the end of the hill was her neck being broken against a tree. She also landed in a hornet's nest, which she's allergic to. "Miraculously", she avoided getting stung even once. She also came close to dying yet again from her broken vertebrae impacting her breathing, and was once again "miraculously" saved by a helicopter rescue. The only possible explanation we can think of is that neither Heaven nor Hell wants to take her.
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Jan 2, 2016 09:05
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Picnic Princess posted:It depends. The Canadian Rockies Parks System, which includes Banff, Jasper, and a bunch of provincial parks is all covered by the government. They increased park pass fees by $1 to fund it back in 2009 I think. They have a contract with a private helicopter company who pilots the rescue crew, who are government employees. The only time I've heard of someone having to pay was a guy who called in a rescue for his dog who got stuck on some cliffbands a couple years ago. What happened, what was your injury, how did it occur?
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Jan 2, 2016 09:18
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One time I got poison ivy or something on my arm. It started off as a penny sized rash, then it took over my entire forearm in about three days because I scratched it constantly. Wish I had pictures, it was gnarly. Constantly weeping out this clear liquid, if it dried it turned yellow, but literally day and night it burned and itched like hell and I clawed it raw during the night. Had to wear long sleeves to work in the middle of summer which was hell. It turned purple in some spots and I could see my veins get a little dark after a week and that was when I was dead set on going to the hospital, then the next day it all scabbed over and healed. Watch out for poisonous plants!
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Jan 2, 2016 13:12
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The ghost story thread reminded me of another one: the time I saw will of the wisp. I was biking, and buddies called about going for morels. I was as close to the spot as to town, so I figured why not bike there and catch a ride home. Then it started getting late, so I just pulled off to hunt while I covered the last distance to them. Of course then I got into mushrooms, so I kept my nose to the ground till dusk. Ok, too dark to hunt, time to rendezvous. I hopped on a logging road and jogged a bit. Uh oh, shouldn't I be back to the main road by now? poo poo... jog a bit faster (in spd cleats). Jesus, if I get lost I'm wearing one tiny layer and a thunder storm is inc... Called a hasher (good navigator) to see if he could find me on a map... ok here's a junction, left should take me back... right? Getting to the edge of my sanity when I hit the main road. At the same time i see a light, the other direction from that junction. Oh that's probably them. Wait, no, they couldn't be over there... what is that? gently caress me... Finally they pull up and my link to civilization is restored, and i get to sit and ponder what are ghosts and madness and doom.
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Jan 2, 2016 23:37
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Hey that's awesome (but glad you found your way)! I never seen one, but they sound like this apparently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9o0f0hU2YrU
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Jan 3, 2016 00:01
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an adult beverage posted:What happened, what was your injury, how did it occur? There was an approaching thunderstorm only one range over and I was still in the high alpine on descent. I was trying to hurry, but got distracted by a pretty lake in the distance and stepped too close to the edge of the cliffband and it crumbled out from under my foot. I went over and bounced down the bedrock for only about 15 feet, but it sliced my head open and scraped up everywhere, some rock stabbed my shin and ground the bone pretty good. Couldn't bend my right knee at all and was in shock so trying to do the backwards downclimbs I would have had to do later was scary. The rescuers were actually pissed that we had moved me from where I landed because they thought I had neck injuries since I hit my head so many times on rock. I ended up with 13 stitches, ten of them in my head. I couldn't walk for 4 days even though nothing broke. I did chip my jawbone and the chunk came out 8 months later, which was neat. It was like wet chalk, it was nearly dissolved but worked it's way out to the surface first. My body was just covered in tons of black, black bruises and scrapes and skinned patches. I have a bunch of scars now, pretty cool. I wish I had pictures of myself up there though, I was just drenched in blood from the head wound, must have looked like a badass even though I was rescued. SulfurMonoxideCute fucked around with this message at 07:30 on Jan 3, 2016 |
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Jan 3, 2016 07:27
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Jeez Picnic. Glad you're still with us and thanks for the story.
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Jan 3, 2016 19:02
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few years ago i flew into boulder for a little climbing trip with a buddy that had just moved there. flight got in early in the day so we decided to go scramble up freeway, a classic 5.0 on the 2nd flatiron as we were hiking up the trail to the rock, i was painfully reminded how much altitude matters in any outdoor pursuit. the hike to the rock is pedestrian, but i was totally steamrolled, head pounding, doubled over, needing to rest every few hundred feet. took an extended rest at the base of the climb and then started soloing up it in our trail shoes. felt a bit better on the rock, and was having a blast. there was really only one move that felt 5th class to me, getting over a little bulge a couple hundred feet up using some frictiony feet. took a moment to summon the trust in my trail shoes not to skate off the rock, but it was fine. after that, pretty much just had to cruise up some more pleasant scrambling to the summit. that's when the storm moved in. luckily it started off pretty light, just a little drizzle, but it was getting steadily more intense and sleetier with every falling drop. what should have been a few hundred feet more of mindless scrambling turned into a terrifying balance of moving fast enough to summit before the storm got really bad and moving slow enough to not slip on the increasingly slick rock. this was by far the most 'in the zone' and focused i've ever felt in my life, and a surge of adrenaline erased any residual hesitation or wooziness from the altitude sickness. every neuron in my brain was working toward the same goal, to place my hands and feet precisely where they needed to be on the rock, at the exact speed needed to get me safely to top as quickly as possible. in that perfect flow state, it really felt like we were sprinting up the rock, like that video of dan osman soloing in lover's leap, though i'm sure we were probably going 1/10th that fast in reality. we actually didn't need to make it the whole way to the summit; after another hundred feet or two we found an escape off to the right of the rock where we could do a little 10-15 foot downclimb to get onto the descent trail. this was probably the hardest actual climbing of the day, maybe 5.7 or so, but in the circumstances it felt like it was either do this downclimb or lose a race against time to the summit and get washed down the flatiron to our deaths. easiest 5.7 of my life, in other words. we galloped down the trail and it really did start coming down hard -- we were lucky that we were able to exit early, and that we'd already passed the technical crux of the climb before it started raining. eventually the rain turned to snow and i believe it dumped about 12 inches over the course of the next 12 hours. in retrospect, it's kind of a non-story: we soloed an easy climb, it started raining, we bailed early and were fine. it still feels like a close call, though, in that all it would have taken for us to topple down hundreds of feet would have been a little footslip, which was not hard to imagine at the time. if we had been just a little less lucky with the timing and intensity of the storm, it would have been even easier to imagine. since then, i've pretty much avoided free soloing!
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Jan 3, 2016 20:23
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Save me jeebus posted:I almost fell to my death canyoneering in Utah a few years back. We had split up the opening of the canyon (MMI, if anyone wants to know) into two rappels. The first rappel actually could easily have been downclimbed, but I at the time and the others were pretty inexperienced and wanted to be roped up. One person completed the second rappel which was from a chockstone platform and goes into a boulder room. She was waiting in the boulder room for me. One of the leaders was on the top of the second rappel, and I was getting ready to head into the boulder room. So I've got my (single line) rappel rigged up and the leader is lowering me (by hand, not rope) off the ledge to put my weight on the anchor. As soon as I put my weight on the anchor, I watched as the clove hitch (without enough tail) slithered off the (non-redundant) blocking carabiner and I managed to stem and grab the edges of the chockstone just as it came completely undone. Fortunately the rope was didn't fall through my ATC, and thus didn't fall into the boulder room, which would have been a bummer. We did lose the carabiner that was being used for the 'biner block. I had an experience that made me come up with a rule for myself: new canyons are OK, new partners are OK, but never new canyons and new partners at the same time.
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Jan 3, 2016 20:38
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:few years ago i flew into boulder for a little climbing trip with a buddy that had just moved there. flight got in early in the day so we decided to go scramble up freeway, a classic 5.0 on the 2nd flatiron A near-miss is still a major story, just because there's no injuries doesn't make it any less serious IMO. This is the kind of thing we would have used as a case study for my risk management course in university.
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Jan 4, 2016 01:42
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| # ? May 6, 2024 13:53 |
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Can y'all see this? Coahuila at 80m: https://www.facebook.com/1691149518/videos/10201339889294492/
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Jan 13, 2016 09:27
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