Sometimes when you go outside, things don’t go according to plan. The outdoors are full of wonders and marvels — and also holes you can fall in and mountains you can fall down and snakes you can step on and snowstorms you can get lost in and rocks you can trip over and bears who will eat your food, and oh, just all sorts of things that can cause mayhem. Here are a few of our biggest outdoor mishap and disaster stories.
Monday Roundtable: Survival Stories
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Is it bad that these stories make me sad I’ve never had a chance to try canoeing or kayaking and that kind of thing? I don’t think that was the message I was supposed to take from it.
I once set off for a short walk at a reservoir, intending to turn back after about half an hour so I didn’t bring food or anything to eat and wasn’t worried that my phone was nearly dead. Then for some reason I just carried on and eventually saw a sign saying that I’d walked 6 miles and it was another 3 back to my car so I had no choice but to carry on. By that time it was snowing and there was no one around and I felt pretty stupid because I’d normally only walk a couple of miles at that point in my life and my legs and feet were not prepared for 9 miles of walking up and down hills. I couldn’t even stop to rest because I knew it would hurt to keep on going. My muscles never hurt more than they did that evening and I’ve never been more grateful to finally reach my car and gulp down the water that I’d left in there instead of taking it with me like a sensible person. I still love walking there but these days I use my brain too.
heather why do so many of your stories have hedge clippers in them
“what are they gonna do, stab me??”– Heather, who was stabbed.
Ahahahaha! So valid!
I grew up in that same above mentioned Alaska, with spruce tree and salmon creeks as babysitters, but a big sensible yellow stripe on my spine. I’ve never broken anything or even gotten lost. In fact the only mistake I ever made was trusting a grown man to know where we were going. He thought the trail was a 7 mile circle, easy peasy, it turned out is was 7 miles in a straight line. I was 12, and my childhood Rottweiler who was with us was at least 8 and probably weighed as much as I did. Having to watch my poor baby be manhandled over rocks when his hips started bothering him probably made me gayer.
Thanks a lot, Rob.
ok so context for this story is that i have a high INT but v low WIS and thus stupid shit happens to me all the time:
when i was nine or so i was camping with my girl scout troop. as part of our service project, we were cleaning up the campsite and trails and i was put in charge of the rake. reader, this was a mistake. I left the rake on the ground tines up when i went to grab more brush, stepped on the rake tom-and-jerry style and got clonked on the head. it mildly concussed me but didn’t break my glasses, which was fortunate, because i’d just broken my glasses the summer before trying to do a fancy figure eight on my bike to impress a girl. she was not impressed by my broken nose and road rash.
that’s two stories for the price of one! lucky y’all!
I think the true mystery of this is how Heather just keeps. coming. back.
I’m pretty sure that round about the time of biting through my tongue I’d have course-corrected to embroidery and other less perilous indoor hobbies.
I admire your resilience, nature girl.
Many harrowing stories here and I thank you all for sharing them. My hiking stories are fairly tame, despite hiking dangers paths off the main trail, & a spot where a sword fight may have once taken place(so 3 broken swords and cans of beer everywhere).
I’ve had (benign) bear encounters, a capsized boat situation, a mysteriously disappearing trail that required a scramble up a steep cliff with full overnight gear, several rain disasters, two instances of injured leg joints with very long hikes back, that one hike where I walked into approximately one hundred giant spider webs, and that time we forgot a crucial ingredient for campstove curry and had to mix our chickpeas with powdered cream of broccoli soup mix instead, gag.
But I think my favourite story is from one night when my ex and I were hiking the High Rim Trail and had finally settled into our little tent for the night. We had just started to drift off when the peaceful dusk was rent by an unearthly shriek followed by what sounded like the cackles of a demented gremlin. We – two fairly wildlife-savvy people who know all the usual danger fluffs and what their vocalizations sound like – lay frozen and wide-eyed as it continued for about twenty minutes, maybe 100 metres away from our tent, wondering what the fuck it could be. A bird? A sasquatch?! A velociraptor?!? An extraterrestrial?!?!
Eventually it stopped, and we went fitfully to sleep, and had an uneventful hike home the next day. Several years later I came across a YouTube video clip of funny animal things and went HOLY SHIT THAT WAS THE SOUND!! A fox. It was a fox. We two intrepid and seasoned outdoorspeople had the living daylights scared out of us by… a fox.
I guess that’s the answer to “What does the fox say?”
Most of my outdoor adventures as a kid eventually ended in me lying on the bathroom floor screaming the house down while my mother extracted yet another tick from my body. I got used to that after a while though, so the most memorable Outdoor Misadventure from my childhood is when I went sledding on iced-over snow in the woods, lost control of the sled, hit a tree stump, and scratched the hell out of my face on the ice.
I also have a couple terrible injury stories from my high school’s biannual camping trips in Maine (one of my friends landed a jump badly and broke a bone in her foot, someone fell in the lake, someone else got attacked by a bat – you know, the usual assortment of things that happen when you turn a couple hundred teens loose in the woods for a weekend) but luckily nothing too awful happened to me except a couple of minor burns while cooking.
oof Riese w/ the relatable content re: disappearing
I wonder how Heather’s snakes reacted to being stepped on?
I have no traumatic outdoor adventure tales. Once, a bee flew into my mouth but it flew out and we were fine.
So we’re all just *very* intimidated by Heather now, right?