As luck would have it...

[Pulleye16]

The creepy thread had me thinking about other crazy stories you've encountered over the years.

So what's your "luck was on your side" story?

I was out in remote northern MN at our cabin, in early Jan, with a few friends, 60 miles from the nearest civilization. We had a fun filled week of fishing, shooting, cards and or course, drinking. On day two of the 5 day trip, I quickly jumped on a snowmobile to check on my buddies fishing far out on the lake. After I got back, I needed to move my truck for someone reason and couldn't find my keys. I searched high and low that day with no luck. Panic really settled in on day three and I became a mess on day four. And put in perspective, I'm the only one with a vehicle. I also have two friends that need to be at the airport later on day five. Day four, everyone is getting nervous and we tear up the cabin, the yard (which is covered in feet of snow, the truck, bags...EVERYTHING!

I get mild reception and get a hold of a Ford dealership some 2+ hours away to see what I can do. They said they could make a key (chip) but I'd need the title to show ownership. That ain't gonna happen. We decide our only option is to push the truck down the long minimum maintenance road, get a tow to the dealership, and plead like he!! to make a key.

This of course is all happening in sub zero temps and a good 2' of snow. The road was plowed as best it could for a minimally used route to the cabin. I remember getting to the bottom of the hill, all taking a break from pushing the truck around, and looking out towards the lake and seeing a glare on the snow. I say "what the heck, lets go check it out." As luck would have it, my key chain caught the sun just right and low and behold, my keys were right there, half sunken in the snow on the lake.

After some deep thought, I figured when I jumped on the sled to go check on my buddies out fishing, my keys fell out of my coat. I have no idea how I found them as just a small portion of a key was sticking out of the snow...absolute crazy luck!

I know keep a spare key hidden in or around my vehicle.

 

[MuleyFever]

I had a key scare on a hunt in ND one year. I parked my truck and went for a walk to see if I could get in on a deer I saw bedded. After hiking over to where the deer was I couldnt find him. I could see his bed but he was gone. I walked a bit looking for other deer then went back to the truck. Reached in my pocket and no keys. I was out there alone and of course some panik stared to set in. I figured I must have dropped them when I crossed one of the fences. I tried to retrace my steps but the tall grass made it hard. I ended up walking up and down the fence lines in the general areas I knew I was and got lucky and found them. Now my keys go in a zippered pocket either in my pant or my pack.

 

[grfox92]

My keys dont leave the truck when I'm out in the field or in the middle of no where. I hide them in the frame rail, gas door or under a rock

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[Wheels]

My key story happened several years ago. Was out bird hunting and got back to the truck and no keys, started re-tracing my route thinking it was a needle in a haystack. Noticed one of the dogs just standing by a fence crossing and wouldn’t move, walk over and she’s standing on my keys. She even pawed at them when I got by her. Amazing.

 

[grfox92]

My key story happened several years ago. Was out bird hunting and got back to the truck and no keys, started re-tracing my route thinking it was a needle in a haystack. Noticed one of the dogs just standing by a fence crossing and wouldn’t move, walk over and she’s standing on my keys. She even pawed at them when I got by her. Amazing.

Hope you gave that dog a steak.

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[Slickhill]

If I park on the road I’ll usually lock the truck and hide the key somewhere on the truck so I don’t lose it out of my pocket down on the creek or out in the pasture.

I set the key down right inside the lip of my front bumper one time and promptly heard it fall and rattle all the way down into the abyss behind the bumper. I figured I better retrieve it then instead of after dark when I got back so I started feeling around for it blindly inside the bumper. After rolling all over in the gravel under the truck for half an hour and cutting my arm a couple times while reaching into the grill and bumper I finally located the key, of course I could only barely touch it with a fingertip and not grab it. I ended up cutting a hole in a splash guard or something and getting it out the bottom.

Now I always have any empty shotgun shell box or coffee can or something in the bed that I can stash the keys in.

 

[H2PVon]

Keys make me paranoid. I'm hopefully always going to have a vehicle with a key code or fingerprint or something so I can leave the keys inside while I hunt.

 

[LongWayAround]

On keys... I just keep one zip-tied to my frame. It's never not been there. People have said that the zip-tie will fail, but I've never had that happen and replace it periodically.

I don't have any near miss stories at the moment.

 

[Jimmy]

When I was just getting into hunting I stayed in a campground below the dam and spillway of a lake. Didn't think much of it. Later I heard that the following weekend the water came over the spillway and the guy in charge was asleep at the wheel, so to speak. In the middle of the night. No warning. So that campground was under 1-2 feet of moving water. People staying there had their belongings pushed down stream for miles. that would have sucked

 

[Justin (Raz) Rasmussen]

Hiked up to the rim of a bowl after some deer in Southeast AK, after all day of glorious sunshine (rare in those parts) I realized I was way farther than I'd made time for and was late meeting back up with my buddy for the hike down before dark. Decided to head down the face of the bowl instead of hoofing all the way back around to the saddle I'd come up. Promptly got cliffed out and attempted to shimmy down a waterfall... made it about three steps and head over heels I went crashing and tumbling down said waterfall. After a few summersaults and bouncing off rocks I landed on my feet at the bottom just like a dang cat. Few scratches and bruises but nothing major bleeding or broken. Good Lord was sure looking after me that day.

 

[bucksnbirds]

Not keys, but my buddies wallet.

Me and my buddy were elk hunting in colorado 3 years ago, about a week into the hunt, he can't find his wallet with his tag and all accessibility to his money, etc. After 3 days of looking for it, tearing up the country side, him driving back 2 hours to town to get a replacement tag, he's freaking out at this point. He is from Chicago and has no identification, money, tags. I look in my pack to get my water filtration out and see a brown wallet, which looks exactly like mine which is funny because I left my wallet in the truck. Turns out it was his and it was attached to me the whole time. I saw it sitting on a cooler, thought it was mine at first glance so I throw it in my bag. Needless to say he was a little pissed but reluctant

 

[NRA4LIFE]

Circa 1980 or 1981, up at our deer camp in Northern WI and one of our Patriarchs had passed away the day before the season started. His funeral was the day before Thanksgiving and all the older fellas left the night before, leaving 5 or 6 of us youngins alone (bad idea) at least one of them removed the beer tap from the keg and took it with them (not trusting us, heathen). We proceeded to shoot 4 bucks the next day. Later that night, I had the brilliant idea to knock the bung out of a half full keg. Bad, Bad idea. When that thing broke loose, it shot out of there, whizzed past my ear, millimeters from my skull and dented the metal roof on the porch. Beer everywhere. That thing may have killed me.

Lessoned learned: Don't try and knock the bung out of a pressurized keg of beer. I got lucky that night.

 

[Hoosker Doo]

When we were kids we were playing in some very old abandoned sheds alongside my friends farm. After an hour two of playing, we all got an eerie feeling and decided it was time to get out of there and go eat lunch. We ate lunch at the house and forgot all about it. We went back to the shed we'd been playing in and it was collapsed. We had some guardian angels for sure.

 

[SonnyDay]

Years ago when I was a younger, foolish man (also in better shape) I was doing a ski mountaineering ascent in the Chugach. It was a very long traverse across the flank of a mountain, crossing numerous steep chutes along the way. It was just me and my dog, who was still basically a puppy.

I was skinning up the mountain crossing these chutes, and on about the 10th one I got out into the middle of it, and the dog stayed back barking and whining at me—refusing to follow. I backed up a little to try to grab his collar and pull him, and he bit into my fancy ass North Face side zips and tried to drag me backwards out of the chute. Now I was pissed… I backed all the way out of the chute to give him a whoopin’, and WHOOSH! The entire thing let go and tumbled 2,000 feet down the mountain. It was about 8 feet thick, and every flake of it released all the way down to the tundra. It was a 40 degree slope and I would have been dead as fried chicken (or worse, horribly injured). There was no InReach or cell phones in those days…

We did summit the mountain and crossed several more chutes (I know, I know). About 7 or 8 chutes after this one, he again warned me off, and the chute slid just like the first one. By this point, I was watching him for clues, and had backed out of it with a little more margin.

That dog hated elevators, and in our first house (major termite damage) he refused to go into the master bathroom. He’d stand at the door barking and whining. When we finally demoed it to remodel, we realized that the vinyl flooring was all that was keeping the toilet from falling into the crawl space….

Good dog.

 

[Duckhunterbrad]

I was on a snow goose hunt in South Dakota one spring and lost my wallet. I tore apart my truck and the hotel room to no avail. It snowed about 6in that night and the next morning we had to brush snow off all the decoys. I picked up a full body decoy and under its foot base was my wallet! Incredibly lucky to have found it with the snow on the ground.

 

[htlt_surfboards]

To all the fellas loosing and hiding keys. I’ve always been super paranoid about loosing them either surfing or out in the backcountry hunting. I use a realtor lock box that i hook onto the frame of my truck underneath. Surfers are notorious for hiding keys in all the places i see mentioned already and also notorious for getting their vehicles stolen. Also side note if you leave your keys with the truck and have a RF type key that only needs to be in the proximity of the car to unlock/start the car. I can’t speak to other makes but Toyota has a simple way to disengage that temporarily by pushing a combo of buttons on the key fob so if you leave it with the truck it wont just unlock and start.

Amazon.com

 

[Chris in TN]

November 1989 - mom and dad just got a divorce. Dad takes me deer hunting in CO. He borrowed mom's camera. Maybe the first day of hunting he loses the camera.

Maybe the third day, we're driving down a mountain past where he'd lost it (walking back to the truck) and he looks over and sees two hunters walking across the same area. One stops and picks something up and holds it up. Yep. The camera. He stops, runs over, identifies it, gives the kid who'd picked it up $20, and averted having to explain the loss to my mom.

 

[Coopsdaddy]

On keys... I just keep one zip-tied to my frame. It's never not been there. People have said that the zip-tie will fail, but I've never had that happen and replace it periodically.

I don't have any near miss stories at the moment.

Have done this and both my kids have it under both kids vehicle.
Luckily they have not lost keys but once and we used the spare set in the safe.
My sons was 19 and is a musician,he drove two hours to play a gig and locked his keys in truck while it was running.
I told him crawl under and look,he didn’t know anything about it because he would have screwed with it.
He said it wasn’t there.
He drove 4 hrs round trip with a buddy to get spare key out of safe while leaving it running.
When he got home I crawled under and found it in 10 seconds.

 

[MNGrouser]

My key story isn't mine, but my buddies. He was staying with his family at a resort on Rainy Lake, ties his boat to the dock and gets out lifting the giant cooler with him. The weight cooler rubbing against his (bigger) belly breaks the little chain holding the only boat key free from the emergency floaty and lanyard around his neck. Of course this happens when he is straddling from boat to dock and the little key goes plop, straight into the drink.

Rainy is a dark-water lake. This dock is in about 8 feet of water with another foot or so of muck when you hit "bottom". The key is brass so we can't use a magnet. I bring my mask and snorkel but they are next to worthless. As soon as you get within a foot of the bottom the silt and loon shit turn the whole world into inky blackness. I dive down a few dozen times jamming my arm into the muck. I fish up handfulls of debris. After decades of drunken resort goers stumbling onto those docks there are tons of bottle caps, broken chunks of tackle boxes, parts of fishing rods, you name it. I'm cold, tired and about to give up. Then on a dive, I feel the edge of the key. Rinse of the handful of muck as I surface and hold on to the edge of the dock.

I ask my buddy, "Can I be done? I'm sorry." He tells me its fine, he understands. "Great, hold this for me." and hand him the key. I proudly drank every beer he bought for me at the resort that night. I'm still amazed that I found that key in feet of loon-shit.

 

[EastHumboldt]

High school. 1975. Me and my older brother are driving into town in my dads ford galaxy wagon. We’ve got a beer in our hands, a case of beer open on the back seat and a big ole bag of weed on the seat between us, couple joints on the seat. Neither one of us is old enough to drink, and pot was ILLEGAL back then. Beer Cans all over the floor, smoke billowing out the windows. Doing about 85. Breakin as many laws as we can simultaneously.

( now to be honest this was 3.2 ABV beer, and I don’t think there was any detectable THC in that crappy pot we were smokin’, so we were not a serious threat to society just then. You can hardly drink that stuff fast enough to get drunk, and I think the only high we got off that pot was smoke inhalation. But we was sure nuff young outlaws).

A state trooper came up behind us unobserved, and if he had his window open he musta smelled that devils lettuce burning’. He was on the radio, and probably reaching for the switches to get the siren and gumball lights going. My brother uttered oh shit! Stow that reefer! Swallow that roach! Put your coat over the case of beer! CLEAN THIS MESS UP OR WELL ALL END UP IN JAIL!

So while I’m frantically doing all that while trying to loook casual, a little old lady runs a stop sign at about 30 miles an hour, and careens onto the four lane highway right smack dab in front of us.

My brother brakes and veers hard to the right, just missing her as we shoot past her like she’s parked. The trooper brakes hard and fishtails onto the shoulder on the other side of her. To her credit I don’t think she noticed any of us. Doot Dee doot dee do. She just keeps plodding along. The trooper decided she was the bigger threat to public safety, and pulled her over instead of us.

I’m not sure whether to credit that one to the lord or the devil.