Well, I can`t match most of y’all, but I almost died while hiking once. Note to self: never go hiking alone. Note number two: don’t go hiking on thin mountain trails after a heavy rain.
So, I’m hiking in some small wooded mountains about 30 minutes south of Yokohama. I umm… didnt bring a map or GSP equipment, and I couldnt read the various signs posted, so I was basically lost. What a genius I was eh? Foolish as I was, I was no idiot and knew that because I was not so far from civilization in any one cardinal direction, as long as I did my best to stick to one single path, Id eventually be ok.
Well, I`m hiking along when I come to this ridge. To my right is a vertical cliff. To my left is a near-vertical drop of maybe 20 feet before it hits the tree-line. The path is maybe 2-3 feet wide. Scary but not too too bad. Well, this is where that ‘don’t hike after a heavy rain’ advice comes in. Halfway to safety, the muddy ground under my left foot gives way. Oh shit, I’m falling!
Pure instinct took over and with a surprising force and quickness I thrust my walking stick into the ground to my right. It held and I was able to pull myself up back from the brink. While it’s plausible I might have been able to pull myself up without it, or that the fall would not have killed me… in any case it was bad. Gosh, it took me another 6 hours of walking before I got back to a town that day.
When I was about 12 I had a bad fall and landed right on my chest without being able to cushion the fall with my arms. For a brief time, probably less than a minute, the muscles that allowed me to breathe were completely paralyzed. I tried again and again to breathe but I couldn’t. To this day I remember thinking, “I guess I’m going to die”, and I stopped struggling and relaxed. And then I could breathe again.
This was 40 years ago and the memory is still crystal clear. I truly believed I was about to die within seconds.
Oh yeah, falling off of my horse is up there. Falling under the hooves of the horse while it’s having a hissy fit…I had visions of my head being smashed like a watermelon were with me for a long time!
Look at this aerial photo (the markers are from Northeast to Southwest). Reaching point A from sea level involved some serious climbing that I wouldn’t have been able to if not a younger, more agile person had pulled me up. The stretch between A and B was along a narrow, sloping ledge with a vertical cliff face to the left and a, similarly vertical, 15-20 metre drop down to the rock strewn sea surface below. To get from B to C we had to get up and down across some slippery cliffs until we were down to seal level again. The last stretch to safety at D I had two options, rock climbing or wading in the water and I choose the latter. Had I been 20 years younger and 20 kilos lighter I don’t think I would have had any problems, but as it is I wasn’t sure I could get through without being rescued by a helicopter.
ETA The person who had set the trail was a mountain goat who had climbed in these cliffs since childhood and therefore had no mercy on us elderly gentlemen.
I hear you. Falling off is scary (and occasionally painful). Being under the hooves, whether you’ve fallen off or you’re standing and the horse is rearing over you - *that *will make you think you’re going to die.
I’ve been pretty lucky (knock on wood!) not to have many really scary situations in my life. I can only remember two, which don’t even hold a candle to some of the others in this thread:
When I was a teenager, my friend was into horses. She’d gotten herself an old buggy and taught her horse to pull it. She offered me a ride one day, and it looked like fun so I accepted. My friend was very good with horses, very conscientious and knowledgeable, so I wasn’t worried about anything going wrong. Unfortunately somebody forgot to tell the horse. We were clop-clopping down the side of the road when suddenly something spooked him. Suddenly he just took off running, and my friend couldn’t stop him. I was petrified. He just kept running, and eventually he left the road and hurtled down the grade into the underbrush, finally stopping near some trees and freaking out. The buggy was tilting to the side on two wheels. Did I mention I was petrified?
My friend jumped out of the buggy and told me to stay in, but I wasn’t having any of that so I jumped out after her. At that point, I told myself that I was either going to be petrified and useless, or act. I decided to act. “Tell me what to do,” I told her. She started yelling at me to help get the horse out of the harness (did I mention I was a horse newb?) so I flung myself against his side to get leverage and started undoing straps while he’s still going nuts and flailing around.
We got him out of the straps and she got him calmed down. I’m pretty sure after we waited a bit, she hooked him back up to the cart and we took it back to the stable. But man, that was scary when that thing was tilting over. Naturally in those days nobody wore helmets or anything.
I was kind of proud of the way I handled myself that time. I hope it’s an indication that I don’t freak out in crises, but I’m really hoping I never have to test that.
I was in my mid-teens. I might mention that I’m pretty much blind as a bat without my contact lenses, which I didn’t sleep in back in those days (I don’t think they had overnight contacts then). Anyway, I awoke in the middle of the night to a noise I couldn’t identify. I stayed silent, waiting for it again, and then heard my window slowly sliding open. Yikes! Again, petrified. Somebody was coming in my room, and I couldn’t see who they were, whether they were armed, etc. I was too scared to get out of bed and run for the door, since I had no idea if the person had a weapon. For a minute or two I just stayed still and listened as the window slid open and somebody pushed the curtain aside. Then I realized I had an aluminum baseball bat under my bed. Silently and carefully I leaned over and grabbed it, pulling it back up to me. And I waited.
Eventually, the curtain slid closed again and there was silence. I think I stayed there for twenty minutes or so, stock-still, until I got brave enough to leave the room and tell my parents what had happened. They called the police (who of course chided me for not calling sooner). Eventually they caught the guy–it was the disturbed twentysomething son of some family in the neighborhood, and he’d done this before. Never anything dangerous, beyond sneaking into people’s bedrooms and watching them…but who knows if that would have escalated?
I have no idea what I would have done if I could have seen better–been more scared or less? Again, I hope I never find out.
Thermals are very turbulent when near the ground. Kind of like a lava lamp. Higher up, they get more organized and smooth out.
I had a fun time at Miriam in strong wind on a low performance hang glider with not much air time in my log book. Full forward, hands on the uprights one foot on the crossbar (couldn’t get my bad knee to bend far enough) and I still had negative ground speed.
I had lots of “this is not good, and I am a fool for getting myself into this” situations hang gliding, but never really thought I was about to buy the farm.
This wasn’t Miriam Crater, but the terrain is similar. Cinder Butte, a few miles south & east of Boise, ID.
To this day I don’t know what happened. I was going horizontal, and then went vertical…sorta like a giant hand reached out and swatted me to the ground. Probably just turbulence, as you suggested. I suspect if I’d hit on flat ground it would have been one giant splat, but landing with the steep slope lessened the impact. Although it did result in that interesing high-speed slide to the bottom…
SS
Two that come immediately to mind (not counting the moment when my oncologist gave my cancer treatment a 50/50 chance of success):
We were selling our ranch, and had already moved out. I wanted it to look neat and tidy, of course, so I loaded my riding lawnmower in the back of the pickup and drove back out to the ranch to mow the lawns. I had a ramp from my quad ATV that worked fine for loading and unloading the mower. I parked the truck in front of the garage, not realizing that it would increase the slope of the ramp. When I finished up, I drove the mower up the ramp. Unfortunately for me, the blade caught on the edge of the tailgate and the front end lifted.
In hideous slow motion, the mower–with me on it–went over backward, off the ramp, and onto the gravel driveway. The engine was running and I was pinned underneath. Since the mower was upside-down, gas was leaking out onto my leg, and the engine was hot from several hours of mowing. I was stunned for a moment, and then realized that I needed to turn the engine off and get out from underneath ASAP.
The nearest human being was close to half a mile away, and there was no cellphone service out there. I was sure I was going to turn into a ball of flame at any moment. It took several minutes of struggling to free a leg, and then I rolled it over far enough to get the other leg out.
I was alone on horseback riding along the top of a ridgeline in the front range of the Colorado Rockies. It was very rocky and narrow, with dropoffs to both sides and scattered trees all along the ridge. One of those famous “no notice” thunderstorms blew in and I turned around and headed for home. Just a few minutes after the first raindrops fell, the lightning struck. It was probably 30 yards away, but it felt like 30 inches. I was half-deafened by the thunder, and my hair (and the horse’s) were standing on end.
The horse freaked. He exploded into a dead panic run, and I didn’t have any room on that narrow ridgeline to try to turn him or rein him in, so I just grabbed on and waited for him to misstep and kill us both. He didn’t slow down for miles.
When I was about 12, jumped on a moving train with a buddy of mine and his brother. About an hour later, we were joined by a couple bums. One kept threatening us with an old pocket knife. Some time later he was sitting in the open door smoking a cigarette when my buddy’s brother snuck up behind him and pushed him out of the moving train. We were going pretty fast at the time. We ended up about 100 miles from home. My buddy’s dad drove down and picked us up. Quietest car ride I ever had. His dad scared me more than the bum.
Told a guy holding a gun on me and a couple buddies to go ahead and shoot us. His confusion about that gave us enough time to jump and disarm the guy. When the cop came he checked the gun. It was loaded with a bullet in the chamber.
Drove an AMC Javelin into a corn field doing about 80 mph. My head left a dent in the roof of the car.
Broadsided by a Cadillac with riding in an early 70’s Datsun pickup. We were hit on the passenger side just behind the cab. I suffered some internal injuries and a broken tooth, the driver broke both legs, some ribs, internal injuries and from what I could tell at the trial over this about a year later, some kind of brain injury.
Tried to perform a thrill show stunt at a race track. Stacked 3 vehicles and tried to take out the middle one after driving off a ramp. It did not work as planned. I wasn’t going fast enough, hit between the bottom and middle vehicles, this made the one on top land on the car I was driving. I still don’t remember what happened the next hour or so.