Sitting by the fire on a motorcycle camping trip, relaxing, when I start hearing an occasional crunch or rustle. I thought nothing of it until it didn’t sound like it was getting further away. Where I camp oftentimes has toads hoping around, or rodents, so I usually ignore anything that sounds lighter than a small dog, but this noise started to sound… Off, so after a while I grab my light and start sweeping it up the hill a bit to my left. As I’m sweeping up the hill, my light passes over feet, so I snap back and aim up and I’m now shining a light into the face of a black bear that was slowly walking towards where I was sitting. I had finished eating a while ago, and my food was already in a tree, my paper trash already burned up and hour ago, but some of the other sites had families with kids who were probably cooking hotdogs or something and I just happened to be down wind on the edge of the forest, so I was in it’s path. I jumped up and just started making all kinds of stupid caveman noises and it turned and ran so fast it kicked up dirt! I spent the night sleeping in my hammock holding my pistol to my chest (I did not have a round chambered, so it was safe, and it’s light was brighter than my flashlight).
Went back to that area in the fall and walked over to that site and found a big ol pile of bear shit right where I had hammocked earlier that year, so I guess it still lives in the area.
I don’t know about scariest but it is up there. Was trampling around a jungle like a moron in South East Asia when a lizard the size of a small dog just crossed my path. Something about it gave me the impression (probably wrong but fear is personal not always rational) that if I had been in its way it would have bitten me, I would die of sepsis in a few days, and that lizard would have forgotten about me 3 seconds after dooming me.
There is something about facing a danger with no intelligence behind it.
Out on a run, herd of heifers. Thought I could move them from a path they were blocking by making a loud noise, turns out that’s an extremely bad idea. There was a matriarch cow which took the lead and while they didn’t charge, this was mostly because I kept an obstacle between us at all times.
They were extremely persistent. At one point we were doing the full Benny Hill routine around a tiny shrub either of us could easily have walked through. In the end I had to jump in a river to escape. I’ve learned my lesson, cows are extremely dangerous and apparently kill loads of people every year.
I moved from CAL to East TN in my teens. We lived in the middle of nowhere, like garbage got picked up every 3 months, had to drive a mile to get our mail, that sort of thing. Anyway, we had a pit we threw garbage in that was about 200 or so ft from our back door. I was the oldest and so it was my job to take the trash to the pit after dinner every night. I had forgot that night, and around 1am decided to run it down. I have a 12guage that we took when we went down that way as it was on the outskirts of a thick wood. This night, my genius ass forgot the gun, but grabbed the bag and headed down to the pit. It was a full moon and very easy to see. I get down there and toss the bag into the pit, and hit a black bear right in the face. Realizing what I did, I haul ass back towards the house, the bear roars and gives chase. I could hear it pounding behind me but was too scared to look back to see how far it was behind me. I get into the house, slam the door, heart pounding in my chest. I look out the windows and the bear is about 5ft from the glaring at me through the window, it’s standing on its hind legs and I swear it was 12ft tall! (I know it wasn’t, but this is the memory of someone who was in total terror. Also, this is 25 years ago.) It paced back and forth a few times, I went and grabbed the gun, just in case it decided to try to break in. When I got back to the door it was gone. I never forgot to take out the trash, or to grab the gun again though, I can tell you that much.
Last Autumn I went on a month long road and hiking trip around the Tohoku region of Japan to climb as all of the 100 famous peaks of Japan in the area. I drove in a kei van from Kyoto to Tohoku and then went around all the mountains on my list, so I did an absolute fuck ton of driving (4400km total) and over 200km of hiking in just under a month.
While these are generally not challenging hikes, I didn’t really want to mess around camping, since I don’t have a lot of camping experience, and although I could stay in a mountain hut, I’d still need to take a setup for sleeping and extra food, so I just tried to make everything a day hike.
Mostly this was fine, but one of the last hikes I did was Mt. Iide, which was the longest of all the hikes, with about 22km of mountain trail and total ascent of around 2000m (not height, just sections where I was hiking up a hill).
I set off at 6am, slightly later than planned, but it wasn’t a big problem, and the first hour and a half was absolutely fine. The weather was cloudy with some light drizzle, but I was feeling good, and had reached a narrow rocky ridge after emerging from the forest. I scrambled up a few rocky sections of path, and was quite enjoying it, but at one point it felt a bit steep and as I pushed myself up what I thought was the trail I realised that I must have made a mistake as it had basically turned into light rock climbing, and the rocks didn’t seem especially firm either. I looked down and realised that if I fell I would fall quite a long way down into a valley, because the ledge I clambered up from was too narrow to stop me. I didn’t really want to risk backing down onto it either as I was nearly at the top of the short climb, so with some effort I managed to push myself up and back onto the next part of the trail and to relative safety.
I looked around and realised there was another route up, with a chain to climb, and that I’d just done something really stupid because I wasn’t paying attention. The drizzle had also wet the rocks, and everything felt super sketchy, but I continued up the trail crouched low to the ground in a state of fear, and eventually reached a hut and took a short break.
Then I took a wrong turn, walking for almost 40 minutes in the wrong direction. I jogged back to the hut and continued the hike along another ridge with a couple more short rocky sections, eventually managing to reach the summit, but I was absolutely drained of energy and it was also covered in snow, so wasn’t especially pleasant to be there, but I had to slow down and take frequent breaks to refuel.
On the way back I was dreading heading back down the first rocky section, and was in a rush to get there before dark, but when I got there and saw it from above without the drizzle it didn’t really phase me at all and I walked down it in maybe 15 minutes. I managed to get back to the van by around 4pm, so I didn’t have to use my headlight at all, let alone on the rocks. Thanks to my route-finding error, I ended up walking 26km :/
This trip really woke me up to the dangers of hiking, and the need to plan carefully. I’d literally been driving to each mountain, usually sleeping in the van at the trailhead and hiking up the next day, but this time was almost too much for me, and I was lucky I didn’t have even a minor accident and that I had packed just enough food. I know there are far more dangerous trails, both in Japan, and especially in other countries where mountains are larger, more remote and the likelihood of bumping into dangerous fauna is higher, but I’m glad I learned this lesson in Tohoku, and not on any of the properly terrifying in the Northern Japan Alps.
Oh no please anything but starting questions with Lemmings of Lemmy!
So I went hiking by myself on an old abandoned logging road once and got a little bit up there, pretty far away from the main road. I hadn’t noticed anything like bear poo but you have to always be on guard. Well eventually I got to a point where an animal didn’t like me being up there and started huffing and snorting at me. I turned and left because whatever it was, it was not happy. I never saw the animal but given the location and the noises I’m pretty sure it was a moose, and you definitely don’t want to get into it with an angry moose.
Working on a radio tower on a mountain between 2 stone quarries. One day we are working away and we hear an explosion and the radio tower starts vibrating.
Now being 30M above the ground and the only thing connecting you to the ground is vibrating like hell is a bit disconcerting.
Doing dumb shit training in the woods for the Army. My platoon finds an area, sets up perimeter, and I post up to my spot pulling security staring out into the woods. I start digging a fox hole to chill in. It’s about 105⁰, 100% humidity and tornado season.
God Bless America.
I spend a bit over an hour digging my shallow-as-shit hole before noticing there is a lot of ticks in it. Like a lot more than I’ve ever seen. I’m so God damn tired I about knock out anyway, fuck the ticks.
Some dickhead tells me that ticks hate sulfur.
“If you rub a bunch of sulfur on your body they won’t eat you.” ??? Okay you backwoods Hick bastard, you better not be lying to me. I spend the last of my energy putting a tarp above my hole, covering the tick ground with a towel, eating some matches, praying the ticks fuck off from my sulfury sweat, and waiting for it to get dark.
It starts thunderstorming.
Maybe it’s just because I grew up in the north, but there is something viscerally WRONG about it being a hundred degrees out and having this much rain coming down. Hot air and cold rain at the same time. I go to sleep in my foxhole, expecting to be woken up in a couple hours for fireguard and having contracted Lyme disease for Uncle Sam.
Just kidding. Big ole ugly Platoon Sarge sees my genius tarp protecting me from the rain and gets jealous of my galactic brain. Just cuts the corners off the tarp with his ten dollar PX Gerber knife and smokes me for showing the “enemy” where my foxhole is. Gonna love the fist fight I’ll have with CIF later when they ask where my tarp is. I go to sleep.
That stupid red tinted Vietnam-era flashlight hits me in the eyes.
“Hey, wake up, you’re on fire guard.” Wake up, it’s pitch black, and my hole is flooded with rain water. I’ve never felt colder and closer to death. Whole body was permanently tensed and shivering. I feel numb. Extra numb in my back though. I pull out my light and check. My back is COVERED in ticks. Dozens. Maybe even a hundreds.
They’re having a king-sized FEAST from my left ass cheek to center-back.
I forget that I’m frozen solid, full fucking sprint to the least wet ground, stop drop and roll, sprint to the other guy on fireguard, and tell this man in the loudest whisper possible to just SMASH everything on my back. I guess that spot is about where your kidneys are, huh. My retarded 19 year old self didn’t really know what a kidney punch felt like, but then the fireguard homie saw the ticks and bashed my shit in with the stock of his M4.
I couldn’t even make a sound. The pain was crazy. It was probably about 2am in a forest, I am about one degree from my brain freezing solid, missing half of my blood and back flesh to this God damn tick egg colony, might have just lost one of my kidneys, and didn’t even have live ammunition to blow my brains out and end it all. And this fucking guy I barely knew was just slapping away at my bare back with his hands like I was some whore he picked up at the bar.
Anyways, turns out whatever the hell super soldier serum they shoot in your ass when you join was good enough to keep me alive that night. Definitely didn’t guard any fires like I was supposed to. I pissed blood for a bit and have a huge ugly scar on my back, but amazingly didn’t get any diseases. Even got to keep the kidney, woo.
Eating the matchstick didn’t help, -1/10 do not recommend. Kinda feel bad for giving the kid that bashed me some tick-PTSD too.
and yet, my bro does a full commitment in the wilds of Ontario - Canuck troopies would guess it in one - no tick bites. Goes camping with his 6yo kid once, BAM, lyme disease and clots. Warfarin fo’ lyfe, and the super-serum didn’t do shit.
The universe has a sick sense of humour. Glad you survived hyperthermic tick hell, but one can’t but feel like you bogarted everyone’s luck that day :-D
All of my outdoor horror stories involve moving or driving. I find being out in the wild quite relaxing, particularly crisp autumn or late spring/early summer before the bugs are out of control.
Was camping in central east Texas once and I woke up around 2 am to my dog growling softly, I petted her to calm her down and noticed light foot steps outside the tent.
I looked through a tiny gap in the zipper and could only see some sort of very large wide animal rummaging around the campsite.
Now bear wouldn’t be impossible but also isn’t super common in that area. My biggest worry was some sort of feral hog because if my dog barked and startled the hog it would trample us. A bear would more than likely run away.
All I could do was sit there and pet my girl to keep her calm and keep her from barking until the animal passed.
When I was 15, I went walking up trail with my family in Chimborazo (a really big volcano in Ecuador) with lots of tourists and a guide. The walk is long and its windy as fuck with tiny tiny rocks and sand hitting your face/eyes but man seeing that mountain in front of you is amazing. It was tiring so I sat down to regain my breath while everyone kept moving on. I kept sitting and walking until I had enough and decided to walk down alone back to camp. Of course I told my family that I was heading down.
The thing is, it was real faraway or maybe it was that I couldn’t see that well with all the wind and sand so I felt disoriented, but I kept descending. I was feeling lost. I just saw ground all around me all alone with the wind hitting my ears loudly. I was getting a lil bit desperate but kept walking downwards to the left. Then I thought maybe it’s a bad idea to keep walking to the left, so I went to the right, and a few minutes later I arrived to the camp. I kept thinking to myself what would have happen if just kept walking to the left.
Years ago, I was into Geocaching. For the uninitiated, users hide small caches around the world, and the cache usually includes at least a log where people who find the cache can mark their visit. The coordinates of the cache are marked on the Geocaching website and people use GPS to locate it.
I thought it was finally time I’d put one of my own caches out for people to find, so I went to scout out possible locations for it. It was late autumn and was still light out. I knew that I wanted to put it on a nature trail I liked to walk so I went there.
One thing to know about late autumn up here in the Nordics is that it gets really dark really fast, meaning I was enveloped by a dark forest pretty quickly after making it to the trail. No matter, I thought, I had my phone and it had a flashlight, so I kept going, despite it having low battery (which, in hindsight, was a mistake).
I found a spot for the cache at about the halfway point of the trail and made a mental note of it, planning to come put it there during the limited daylight hours.
And soon after… Lights out. Phone was dead and I was in total darkness. Ambient light was close to non-existent due to how cloudy it was. I felt a bit panicked about the situation but kept going, feeling around with my feet to make sure I wouldn’t walk off the trail.
Lucky for me, I was quite familiar with the trail and eventually managed to come out the other end on a gravel road that was also unlit but at least easier to traverse and eventually got back home.
Not the scariest possible experience, but you can imagine how it feels to walk through a silent, damp forest in pitch black darkness while trying to feel your way out. Not sure I would have fared this well if the trail was unfamiliar.
I did get the Geocache out there the next day, and it remained there until I moved out of the area.
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