Creepy experiences in the backcountry

[The Harbor Master]

I found an ID once that had the same first and last name as me. What are the chances, and no I don't have a name like Bill Smith.

That's wild. You glitched into a parallel reality.

 

[AK Troutbum]

I found an ID once that had the same first and last name as me. What are the chances, and no I don't have a name like Bill Smith.

My buddy and I were on a remote, fly-out, sheep hunt in northeastern AK, and he found a wallet half buried in the silt in a drainage we were hunting. Inside was a $20 bill, some papers that were unidentifiable (but one looked like it was a hunting license), and a driver’s license that expired 14 years prior to him finding it. The date of birth on the license was the exact DOB of my buddy who found it. It was very disappointing to find out that someone else had been in there hunting before us…probably spooked all the sheep too!


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[betelgeuse]

My buddy and I were on a remote, fly-out, sheep hunt in northeastern AK, and he found a wallet half buried in the silt in a drainage we were hunting. Inside was a $20 bill, some papers that were unidentifiable (but one looked like it was a hunting license), and a driver’s license that expired 14 years prior to him finding it. The date of birth on the license was the exact DOB of my buddy who found it. It was very disappointing to find out that someone else had been in there hunting before us…probably spooked all the sheep too!


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Wow, crazy same bday

 

[KurtR]

I found an ID once that had the same first and last name as me. What are the chances, and no I don't have a name like Bill Smith.

better than having just one name.

 

[Chris in TN]

I was out pulling mink traps the other day on a tiny little creek that's about 1' wide and a car door slams loud, like it's right next to me. I whipped my head up thinking how the heck did they pull up and I not hear them. Then I realized, I'm like a 1/2 mile from the road, it sounded like it was right there next to me.

Speaking of deceptive road noise - there's a place I sometimes squirrel hunt a few miles from home. You park on a frontage road that parallels the interstate and walk more or less perpendicular away from the interstate.

I learned - the hard way - that for reasons I still don't understand, it's common to hear road noise more clearly from the south, in this spot.

To back up a bit - the interstate (it's I-65, FWIW) runs almost straight north/south here. The land in question is east of the interstate. So you can be, say, half a mile to the east of the interstate, in the woods, and if you try to walk back towards the road based on sound (not a compass or the sun) you'll head south when you should be going west. I did this *twice* thinking I could easily walk back to the car when I first started hunting this spot. I eventually figured it out well enough that on my next trip there, I sat in the woods in several places and noted that in every instance, the road noise sounded like it was strongest towards the south of me, even though the interstate was almost straight west of me. I assume it's something about the way tires make road noise, makes the noise most intense in front of the car, so you hear the road most intensely in the direction traffic is coming from (south) not the direction the road passes by you (west). I don't know. Maybe someone else has some insight into the science of tire sounds. It's totally out of my wheelhouse to speculate on this. But I learned that I had to either use my compass or the sun or at least ignore road noise in order to get in/out of this spot without walking in circles.

Now, the closest thing I have to a creepy public land story:

Circa 1996(?). We used to go fish on some land adjacent to a lake here in the southeast. There was a creek we'd also fish, on some land that TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority, the southeast's government-backed electric power generating company) owned next to the lake. One weekend a buddy of mine decide to go camp on this land. Back then nobody cared - we didn't have permission to be there, but everyone treated the land as if it was open to public access. We'd go in via 4x4 or ATV fairly often. Everyone did it - on a busy summer weekend you might see dozens of ATVs riding through the area in a day.

So he asks me to go too, and we took his boat and he and his wife and I set up a camp in a place we fished often. We boated across the lake, beached the boat, and set up camp maybe 50' up the shore. The plan was to fish that night in the lake, maybe fish the adjacent creek the next morning, then go back home the next day.

That night we've caught some fish and we're grilling them over the campfire. Where we were camped, we were on a point, surrounded by lake on three sides, and the land on the fourth side, led straight to a steep hill, the only way to get there by land. It's quiet and we hear a vehicle stop near the top of the hill. Then we hear a 4-wheeler stop somewhere in the same vicinity. Then the 4-wheeler cranks up and heads slowly down the steep road down the hill, that leads to our camp. The driver parks, gets off, and stumbles over towards us. He's obviously drinking or something. He starts asking us questions about where we came from and how long we'd been there and he tells us he's lost and looking for his buddies and wondering if we'd seen their car. Along the way he mentions that he'd looked all over and hadn't seen anyone (when we knew he'd drove past, and stopped near, a car up on the hilltop). He seems really interested in how we were camped and if it was just the three of us. We're adamant that we hadn't seen his friends. He's really close to us - within a few feet of us.

All of this time we're cooking and eating and my buddy had made it a point to get between the guy and my buddy's wife. For my part, I'm fiddling with the fish over the fire left-handed and my right hand is glued to my waistline at my 5 o'clock. The guy can't see what I'm doing, but I think he eventually noticed that my right hand wasn't visible, and hadn't been for a long time. Once that sank into his brain, he suddenly remembered some reason that he needed to leave, and off he went, back towards his friends(?) parked at the top of the hill.

It was well after dark when this happened, so we had to pack camp into the boat in the dark, but we did so lickety-split and within a few minutes the boat is headed back across the lake to civilization.

I have no idea what he wanted but it looked for all the world like he was sizing us up to come back later that night. We could have stayed but we wouldn't have slept at all. I'd camped there many times but never did so again after that.

 

[Thinkingman]

Cut out Athen's city and all those college kids. It's a great rural area.

OU was a great place to be in the mid-eighties.
We had so much fun.
My uncle from SW Ohio hunted Athens County for years and always had a booner buck on opening day.
In the spirit of the thread, I cannot watch Blair Witch Project(filmed not too far away) and not think of the times I spent in those hardwood forests and the semi-locals that would appear during the Halloween festivities.