Close calls in the wilderness

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I thought it be neat to share any experineces people may of had while in the wilderness where primal urges of self-preservation went into high gear due to circumstance.

One experience I have was canoe camping with some friends on Lac Poisson Blanc on the Québec side about an hour and half north of Ottawa. It was a short long weekend trip in the summer time. This lake is huge, It’s about 30 km long and close 4km wide at its’ widest point, peppered with islands on Crown Land.

Anyways, we stayed on one site for a weekend, out of boredom we fashioned a sailing katamaran out of our two canoes and camping gear, tarp, metal ring from my hammock to raise and lower the sail. It sailed like a champ.

Unbenounced to us the day we left a wind storm had hit the area, while crossing in a large open area of the lake we saw white caps. We had no concerns of tipping. But what proved to be a problem was that our vessel was so wide and ladened it didn’t ride the waves, instead crashed through them.

It two waves to sink us. gulp, gulp, gulp… Suprisingly we remained calm, collected all of our gear, unlashed the bindings that held our canoes together. Meanwhile somepeople on shore was watching us cross when they saw us go down. The got in their motorboat to come out and help us.

They towed us back to their site. We started setting up our gear to dry and set up one tent away from their site thinking we’d have to spend another night there because of the weather. I was suprised even for mid-july to have hypothermia start kicking in because of the wind, even when sitting next to a camp fire. The nice folks there gave me some of their dry clothes to wear temporarily.

Another boat had seen us go done and had gone to the base camp to get help, A couple of hours later they showed up with a boat that could handle the weather to pick us up and bring us back to base camp. We had to go back the next day to retrieve the canoes.

As slightly terrifying as it was. It experiences like that taught me invaluable lessons. Like one never mess with rough water, two I know what to do if I take a dunk in a lake, not panicking is the first step. Learning how to right two canoes in the middle of the lake, thanks Discovery Channel. Dry matches ends up being the most important gear after an ordeal like that. Subsequent canoe trips I started tying all my gear down. Because it ended up floating rather quickly all over the place. The only gear lost was my friends tackle box with $200 worth of lures.

2

It’s not nearly as serious as yours, but this was my closest, most frightening wilderness moment.

I was out trail riding alone on my horse Star, gosh probably back around 1979. (yeah, I’m old.) I rode off the trail down to the edge of a good sized lake and we were walking around the edge. All of a sudden, it felt like he just dropped out from under me- we had hit a patch of mud that was like quicksand-it looked no different than the ground around it, but his front legs were straight out in front of him and his entire hindquarters were under- the mud came up all the way to the back of my saddle! He started to panic, thrashing about, and I dismounted, sinking to my knees. As soon as I came to his head, he stopped struggling-that horse trusted me like you would not believe, I could almost hear him thinking ‘I know you’ll get me out of this Mom’.

I had no idea what I was gonna do. I kept surprisingly calm and began gathering branches (there had recently been an ice storm, so plenty on the ground) and stuffing them under his front legs, and as he was able to raise up a little, under his belly. It took about an hour of hard work before Star was able to get ut of the mud. It wasn’t until he was safe that I realized how close I had come to losing him and broke down, hugging him and bawling like a baby.

See…I loved that horse more than life itself, and if he had broken a leg or I hadn’t been able to free him, I don’t know what I would have done. Thankfully he was unharmed, just muddy. He got a nice bath and extra sweetfeed when we got back to the barn.

God, I miss that horse.

3

I worked summers on a survey crew in Alaska while in college. After leaving our truck at the end of the road, three of us were hiking into an area near the Anchorage airport one day, carrying all the assorted gear such as transit, chain, range pole, stakes, hammers and machetes (for brush clearing).

Suddenly a moose calf stepped out onto the wide trail we were following. We stopped, as did the calf, and we stood there staring at each other for a few moments. Bored with us, the calf trotted off into the brush. We looked at each other with bemused expressions, and began to move forward, when out of the trees about 50 feet ahead of us charged one seriously large and upset cow moose, who had apparently misplaced her calf.

She glared at us, hackles raised, as we slowly backed away, and we would have been just fine except that our crew leader decided he wasn’t going to be run off by a moose, and shouted/loudly grunted at her in an attempt to scare her off. She dropped her head and charged. We all threw our gear in the air and bolted in the direction of the truck. At that time, I weighed about 125 pounds, but the 250-pound crew leader passed me like I was in reverse.

Luckily the truck wasn’t all that far away, and we scrambled up on top of it. Ms Moose stopped about 20 feet away, probably somewhat intimidated by the big orange animal that had suddenly appeared, snorted at us a bit, then trotted off to find her baby.

4

Ran into a bear.

Fell off a cliff.

Stuck under a waterfall.

5

A bunch of cows were running toward me while I was deer hunting in southern Ohio a few years ago. (It was 5:00 AM, and I didn’t know I was in a cow pasture.) Ran toward a fence as fast as I could and hopped over. Not sure what would have happened to me if the cows caught up with me.

6

They would have had their way with you in an udderly horrid reverse gang bang.

7

Probably horned in on his hunting party.

8

One time I was scrambling on Bearfence Rocks in the Shenandoah National Park when a squall came up really suddenly. It didn’t look like much of anything as I saw it approach, so I wasn’t too worried, but once it reached the ridge crest…POW! Lightning started striking, like within 100 yards or so. I had to climb down off the rocky part lickety split and ran my ass off down the maybe half mile of trail to Skyline Drive and my car. Scared the crap out of me.

9

All at the same time??? :eek:

10

12 hours up the Volcan caldera in Boquete, Panama my co-hiker and I were separated from the others in our group, under-dressed and soaking wet from 8 hours of constant drizzle, and huddled against driving winds in a ramshackle shelter that was nothing like what we’d imagined the top to be like when we’d heard people talking about it a day or two earlier.

After deciding that staying to try to dry off wasn’t going to end well, we hurriedly used styrofoam cups as insulation and spare socks as gloves before limping back down to warmer altitudes as fast as we possibly could. The decision on whether to stay or not was fairly serious, as at that point we could barely operate the zippers on our backpacks, and left some supplies behind strewn around as we couldn’t actually put them back in the bags.

I have to say it’s probably the only time I’ve been seriously worried, though on other occasions I maybe should have been. One time I ended up starting the solo return from the top of the Whistlers in Jasper at 5:30pm (despite leaving a note on my car with the ridiculous estimate of being at the bottom 1/2 an hour earlier than that).
On another I had a flat on my cross-country bike 1/2 way down a trip up the Hoodoos outside of Invermere, which left me philosophical about the wisdom of taking a solo trip in the country which might leave a Dollar store bicycle pump making the difference between getting back to the car in daylight or not. (I’ve upgraded my bike pump and haven’t hiked any mountains by myself since these. :wink: )

11

Nope.

Ran into the bear while running across a beaver dam. I was looking at my feet to avoid tripping on the sticks that were pointing up. Bears don’t see too well. I ran into it. A bit of a WTF moment for both of us. I walked backwards and it walked forwards until we were both off the dam, then after about a minute of looking at me (as I continued to walk backwards through the woods) the bear grunted and walked off in another direction.

Fell off a cliff on Maple Mountain in the fog. I made a wrong turn while hiking up to a fire tower. It occurred in the middle of a week-long canoe trip, leaving me with a divot/scar on my leg forty years later.

Got stuck under the Island Falls, and was blacking out when a friend snagged me with his throw rope. (The fellow standing in the fifth pic, and paddling in the last eight pics are him. Have a look at pic nine – when I did it, I didn’t surface.)

12

Yikes.

I never liked rapids. My close friends mother died in one and I was shot down a set of rapids once on a spring white water rafting trip . They found me about four rapids down ghastly white out of fear sitting on a tiny rock island waiting in the middle of the river.

I should of known something was up when I was asked to sign a waiver.

13

Come to think of it, I had another close call on Island Falls. While front-ferrying across the top of the falls, the hull of my kayak split in two and flipped me when it suddenly filled with water. I rolled up and completed the ferry, but I didn’t have time to pivot around to face downstream, so I made the run backwards. The line I took was “Side-of-Fries”, where I braced on the pillow piling up on the rock at far river left of the drop in pics 3, 4 and 5 (the fellow in the pics took the “Triple-Cheese-Burger” route in River Centre).

A few hundred yards downstream, on another occasion, I was flipped and my paddle was ripped out of my hands on “Double-Drop”, forcing me to hand-roll up immediately before being pinned on a truck sized boulder. Had I not rolled up before pinning, it would have been game over.Here are pics of “Double-Drop” being run by the fellow who saved me at Island Falls. On an occasion when I was not with the crew, one of the guys broke his neck on “Double-Drop”, and had to be helicoptered out. He recovered fully (no paralysis).

14

Moose can be nuts, and from what I’ve read the male Moose is thee most dangerous animal out there in the fall during rutting season.
I like Les Stroud’s story about his moose encounter.

15

Which river/rapid?

16

Rouge river, QC.

17

While canoeing, one of my friends and his brother were chased about 10 kilometers down Quetico’s Pickerel Lake by a swimming moose after my friend’s brother made a moose call during moose mating season. Fortunately, my friend was a sprint canoe racer, so they were able to avoid a fate worse than death (or a gay zoophile’s terminal desire, depending on one’s orientation and preference).

18

A truly delightful river! Sorry you had such a rough time of it. Let me guess – the raft was a foot or two too far to the right at the “Washing-Machine”?

19

I had a face-to-face encounter with an elephant at a distance of about 30 feet while I was on foot when I was working in Gabon. I and my Gabonese assistant were walking along a road looking for birds when he urgently whispered, “M’sieur George, elephant!” I turned to see that on the other side of the road an elephant had silently materialized out of the forest. We dove into the bushes and hid until it went away. A few days earlier one of my co-workers had been charged by a mother elephant with two calves, and a week earlier a couple of young bulls had chased our minibus down the road.

I’ve had close encounters with big cats, but without actually seeing them. Once I was camped in Samburu National Park in Kenya when, a couple of hours after dark, a battle royal between a pride of lions and a pack of hyenas broke out a few hundred feet off in the scrub. I’ve also had a jaguar circle my tent at night grunting about 20 feet away in the Darien in Panama, and in Gabon I woke up one morning to see leopard tracks only a few dozen feet from my tent.

The worst weather experience I ever had was while backpacking on Mt. Tongariro in New Zealand when a sudden snowstorm came up. I and my friend had a tough slog to the nearest cabin for shelter; we might have been in trouble if it had been farther away.

The worst I’ve been hurt was when I fell off a mule and broke four ribs in a remote area in Panama. I had to climb back on and ride for another couple of hours to get to where we had left the cars.

I had my porters mutiny on me once on an expedition in Panama, but that was pretty easily fixed by agreeing to pay them an extra $2 a day.

A few years ago I was camped well up on Volcan Baru with a couple of friends when a group of hikers came by dressed in shorts and t-shirts, and with no water left. We gave them water and told them to be very cautious about the weather. People don’t realize how easily hypothermia can hit in bad weather on a tropical mountain.

20

Moose kill or injure more people than any other animal in Alaska. Bull moose are ill-tempered at pretty much anytime of year, cows usually only when with young (which is much of the time). They’re best avoided.