Far and away my favorite thread on RS.
While I didn't start seriously hunting until about 12 years ago, I have always been into backpacking and fly fishing high mountain lakes across ID, WY, UT, and CA, spending hundreds of nights in the woods without anything too crazy happening. I have had run ins with black and grizzly bears, an irate cow moose, and a few close encounters with fresh lion kills that made the hair stand up on my neck. Back in 2015 I was on a short backpacking trip in a remote area of the LPNF in central CA with a buddy (lifelong rural Maine kid, also super at home in the woods) scouting for the A-zone archery opener in early July. We hiked a quick 4.5-ish miles from a very remote trailhead just before dark into an area that I had been many times. We made camp in the pines on the backside of a ridge from where we hoped to be glassing for blacktails at daybreak overlooking the basin below us. The coastal fog rolled in right around dark and reduced the visibility to less than 50yds. Spooky, but still fairly common even at 7,000ft.
After a late dinner we were sitting around a small very well concealed fire at maybe 11pm, quietly shooting the shit when the most sickening feeling of dread came over me. Like turn your stomach inside out, get up and move NOW kind of dread. For no apparent reason that I could see, hear, or smell. I foolishly tried to ignore it and continued quietly chatting with my buddy while simultaneously trying to make sense of what I was feeling. From what I could tell nothing was out of the ordinary on his end... At the time I was approaching my mid 20's, running 30 miles a week, and 6 months into a predeployment workup that involved a whole lot of shooting so I was pretty confident in my ability to handle myself in just about any situation. Then my buddy got real quiet...
We exchanged a look, and his eyes told me that he was now feeling what I was feeling. We were both looking around trying to identify the source of this super uneasy feeling and after maybe another minute had passed, nothing had entered our little sphere of visibility around the fire. Wtf. My lizard brain is still telling me something is very wrong so I start scanning with the x300 white light on my g19. This didn't work as well as I had hoped in the fog but I could at least confirm that there wasn't a skinwalker behind the closest trees at 10yds. Now it has been several minutes waiting for the shoe to drop, but it hasn't so we collectively decide that now is a great time to break camp and GTFO. I continue scanning with the light as my buddy does not have a light on the sp101 that he was carrying at the time, while he packs up two tents and all our stuff in record time.
At this point nothing has happened, and we haven't died yet but SOMETHING is still telling us that we REALLY need to get off of that ridge so we start bombing downhill to the trail and pretty much don't slow down until I realize that we had completely missed the trail in the fog and have now lost way too much elevation to traverse back to the truck. Dang it, back uphill towards the devil still walking with pistols in hand until I cross our tracks from the walk in and we reorient ourselves, finally making the truck around 1am. During our scramble back to the vehicle the fog had gotten so thick I couldn't see 5ft past the hood of my truck, forcing us to descend the mountain at a walking pace for one final kick in the grapes.
To this day I have no idea what caused that feeling, but the fact that my buddy and I both arrived at it independently without ever saying a word to each other makes me very certain that leaving was the right call.
That's my story about the time I got scared off a mountain and I'm sticking to it!
