Harriest predicament you've ever found yourself in while in the woods?

[gtk]

. As soon as the butt made contact the gun went off. I was standing over the squirrel with the forearm of the .410 in both hands like I was tamping a fence post. And when it went off I felt the wad brush my face and couldn't hear anything for 2 to 3 seconds. Like time stopped. I don't know how it missed me. God was with me that day, and I learned an invaluable lesson

I've done similar. My first deer gun was a 30-30. About age 15, I went hunting one very cold morning with my uncle. we parked, got out, and loaded up. Put on some heavy gloves. If you remember those old 30-30's after you loaded them, you had to let the hammer down. Well evidently I had forgotten too, and as I was walking to my deer stand I put the gun over my shoulder and all I heard was "BOOOM" .. The blast knocked my hat off my head and couldn't hear for a while.. As you stated, God was with me that day (and every day).

 

[JCDEERMAN]

I posted this quite a while back in another thread. Please forgive me if you've read it before:


In 1988, the same year that 1/3 of Yellowstone burned we got trapped in Idaho by fire. There were four hunters, two cooks, two guides, one wrangler & about 20 head of livestock in camp. Hunt was a 10 day in Selway Bitteroot Wilderness. Knew we had fires in area when we packed in 10 hours but they were quite a way to west. Day 6 the wind shifted from NW & we were in trouble. We spent the next 5 days bushwhacking cross country to stay away from fires. When we finally made it to a Forest Service watch station the fire was headed due east & we were headed south down a canyon. We came within 200 yards of the fire & I can still hear the sap in spruce trees boiling before they exploded like a Roman candle into flames. Had to take our shirts & coats to blindfold the horses as they were panicking, the mules were fine & never missed a beat. I've got a couple of 110mm instamatic pics that I took as we escaped. Really thought that this was it and we were gonna be crispy critters. Scariest time for me in outdoors in 50+ years including getting caught in avalanche. We came out about 20 miles from where we packed in.
GOD is good!

Now that's scary. Fire can really test a man's abilities. I've hunted close to those wild fires out west, but nothing like this! Glad it all worked out for y'all!

 

[TNLynn]

Take to top for some more stories please!!!

 

[13pt]

Looking back on your life, you realize you had some really close calls between life and death, or at least severe injury. The closest calls of all are the ones that when you think about them, you get a little shiver that runs down your spine. For me, the train incident and the recent falling tree incident are the two I still have nightmares about (literally).

A close third would be an incident that occurred hunting that I'm sure I've mentioned before. It was just a few years ago on one of those days where the wind is absolutely howling and being in a stand is a bit frightening. Before a morning hunt, I was debating which of two stands to hunt, not far apart as the crow flies but on opposite parallel ridges. I finally decided to hunt one of them in the morning and the other on the afternoon hunt. During the morning hunt, with the wind roaring, a heard the distinctive "pop" of a tree breaking off and then almost felt the boom as the tree crashed to the ground on the parallel ridge. I remember thinking, "Wow that had to have been really close to the other stand I had been considering. I bet if I had been hunting that stand it would have been quite a scare!" That afternoon I went to hunt the other stand and found out just how close that tree had been to the stand. It was the top of the tree the stand was in, and the whole upper have of the huge oak had come straight down, butt first, and dead-centered the stand, crushing it and driving it into the ground. On that day, life and death came down to a 50-50 toss of a coin.

Those three incidents still give me the cold chills when I think about them.

Now dang that one gave me chills just reading it!!

 

[BuckWild]

That's a scary story BuckWild!

Don't know how familiar you are with the LoLo trail but that is the area of the Bitterroot mountains where the Lewis and Clark expedition almost starved to death. Rough terrain for this flatlander to be trying to traverse during a blizzard. I said we had a compass, lol, it was one of those quarter size compasses you clip on the zipper of your jacket. I put a lot of faith in that thing and it saved our asses.
I can laugh about it now, but it was a very serious situation.

 

[fairchaser]

You guys are cracking me up with these stories! They actually reminded me of a few incidents of my own that I had totally forgotten about. I'll try to give you folks the short version of probably my most memorable one.

It happened in 1984 while I was stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky shortly before my first tour of duty in Germany. While I was on leave before departing for Germany, my younger brother and I decided to bow hunt Fort Campbell during October 1984. Back then they allowed you to bow hunt the two patches of woods between the Air Assault School obstacle course and the small arms ranges on Mabry Road. At that time, I had one of the first commercially available climbing tree stands on the market, an early Baker kit that you had to add your own plywood base to. I also had the hand climber that was sold separately from the foot platform, and it could double as a makeshift seat.

Now, to fully appreciate the gravity (pun intended) of the situation I later found myself in, all of you younger fellows need to understand that 40 years ago, commercially made tree stands were just beginning to appear on the market. They were such a new concept that no manufacturer had yet accumulated the experience necessary to know to attach a tether between the foot platform and the upper seat section (or hand climber) of climbing tree stands. Nor were commercially manufactured safety harnesses yet available as they are now. Even crude waist belts long enough to attach to a tree didn't begin appearing in most areas until the early 1990s. In other words, tree stand hunting 40 years ago was relatively dangerous and was nowhere near as safe as it is today. In hindsight, it is truly amazing that there weren't even more injuries and deaths than there actually were from tree stand accidents back then.

I can already hear the older guys in this group laughing because they already KNOW where this is going and what happened to me that day! I picked a fairly limbless tree and climbed up about 23-25 feet and got settled in. It was a really warm afternoon and for several hours the only movement was from multiple squadrons of mosquitoes the size of 747s. About an hour before dark, I heard movement behind me and turned around to look behind the tree. Excited with the possibility of seeing a deer, when I turned, my weight shifted, putting pressure on the foot platform closest to the tree trunk which caused it to slip and fall down the tree. Now here I was 25 feet up a tree clinging to that hand climber for dear life and wondering how I was going to get down out of that tree without falling and breaking my neck in the process!

I grabbed my bow, the original Bear Whitetail Hunter 6-wheel compound, and dropped it down on a nearby bush as carefully as possible to minimize the damage to it. At first, I began to slowly bear hug my way down the tree - imagine a 180-pound inch worm moving in reverse - while wishing I had paid more attention in gym class when I was younger. How many of you older guys have ever hugged a white oak on an express elevator going down at 40 miles per hour?

Needless to say, the bark on white oak trees is nowhere near as soft as what I previously believed it to be. My shirt sleeves were totally destroyed, and the insides of my arms were shredded pretty good by the time I finally reached the ground. More of my skin was on that tree than on my forearms at that point, but fortunately, the only other injury was to my pride. Miraculously, there was considerably less damage to my bow and the only thing I had to replace was the 3-pin bow sight. Looking up the tree I wondered how on earth I was going to get my hand climber down. I eventually decided to just leave it, and that Baker foot platform was donated to a trash bin soon afterwards.

Ironically, after leaving Germany a little over three years later, I was reassigned to, of all places.......you guessed it....... Fort Campbell, Kentucky. One weekend when I was really bored and had nothing better to do, I went back to that same little patch of woods. I learned that hunting was no longer allowed in that area due to safety concerns, so I just walked around for a bit. While strolling through the woods, I remembered the incident from 1984 and started searching for the tree I had been in. It is surprising how much a woodlot can change in only three years. It took more than an hour, but I actually found the exact same tree and, amazingly, my hand climber was still in it. Unfortunately, the tree had grown around the metal frame of it but as I remembered the incident, I couldn't help but laugh at myself. Well, just like my granddaddy always told me, anything that doesn't kill you, only makes you stronger.

I fell out of a baker and broke my arm because the safety strap slipped open. That's before we learned to put a knot in the tag end. I converted that old stand into a lock on and it's been about 30 years ago. If that white oak is still there, I bet it's now part of the tree. I can relate!

 

[moondawg]

I remember scouting at Shelby Forest one time post deer season. I hadn't planned to be out very long, and just wanted to see what I could find. I was following a frozen slough to my right. I knew to just turn around and follow the slough on my left to the road. No big deal, right? It started snowing. I sat down on a fallen tree and rested a minute or two. The snow started to stick, and covered the ground AND the slough. I looked around and...where's the slough??? I had used the slough as a landmark, and it had disappeared under the snow. I basically walked in a general that-away direction (think Captain Jack Sparrow and his "compass"). I made it to the road, about a hundred yards or so from my truck.

 

[Hillbilly Hunter]

As would the Warren and Slip......I mean, Sweat.

I "upgraded my old baker to a warren and sweat. Not much of an upgrade.

 

[Lost Lake]

I "upgraded my old baker to a warren and sweat. Not much of an upgrade.

Those things were death traps!

 

[Tn_Va_Hunter]

No as scary as some of y'all's. But went hunting on a WMA with some buddies. That morning we ran into an old man. Said y'all be careful in that holler. You can get turned around easy. I still hunted most of the day. Before dark I figured I better start heading back. Didn't realize how many ridges I crossed. I found one I thought was it and down I went. An hour after dark I hit gravel road. Didn't know which way to go. So I started walking to where I thought my buddies was at. No cell service to be had. Heat comes a truck in truck. Great they found me. Nope. It was the old man. Said he had a feeling he'd be needed that evening. He was right. I was 4 miles from my guys. And walking the wrong direction. Thank God he puts ppl in our lives.

 

[7mm08]

Probably my second year of deer hunting, I must have been 17 or 18, I had been introduced to the permanent tree stand. You now, some 2x4s nailed up across a fork in a tree. So finding a spot I wanted to hunt, I drug some 2x4s, a saw, a hammer, and a fist full of 16-penny nails back to the spot. While up in the tree (and I was probably only 10 feet up) trying to nail the floor joist cross pieces across the fork of the tree, I lost my balance and fell. I remember trying to toss everything I had in my hands away so I wouldn't land on them, but a handful of nails goes everywhere. I landed flat on my stomach and chest, but surprisingly, no major injuries. At least I thought that until I got to my feet, looked down, and realized I had a 16-penny nail sticking straight out of my chest. Fear/terror have a way of just making you lock up. I honestly couldn't think of what to do. It wasn't bleeding much, BUT I'VE GOT A 16-PENNY NAIL STICKING OUT OF MY CHEST! I remembered that to prevent catastrophic blood loss, you're never supposed to pull out anything you've been impaled by. But I just kept staring at that nail. Eventually I had the wherewithal to pick up another nail and compare the length against the one in my chest to see how deep it was. Realizing it was only in about a half inch, I gave it a yank. It came out clean with very little bleeding. Apparently, it had gotten jammed into the cartilage of my sternum and hadn't penetrated anything important. No harm done, but wow, those kinds of close calls really give you the creeps, even thinking about them years later.

One more inch over you would have died even at that depth….. because you likely would have lacerated your INTERNAL MAMMARY ARTERY. They are on both sides of the breastbone and shallow. We used those for a bypass graft in heart surgery. Basically the first branch off your aorta and bleed like stink unless controlled.

 

[BSK]

One more inch over you would have died even at that depth….. because you likely would have lacerated your INTERNAL MAMMARY ARTERY. They are on both sides of the breastbone and shallow. We used those for a bypass graft in heart surgery. Basically the first branch off your aorta and bleed like stink unless controlled.

OK, so now that incident gives me even more creeps!

 

[DaveTN]

I wasn't in the field for this, but its impacted me all my life. I was probably 8 or 10 years old, I'm 67 now. I was visiting my Uncle and Aunt that were like 2nd​ parents to me. We were watching TV one night when the wife of one of my Uncles hunting buddies called. She told my uncle her husband had not come home from a Pheasant hunting trip. That wasn't like him. She had called the Police and they were looking for him.

My Uncle knew where he hunted and him and my Dad went to look for him. They found him..dead. He had been shot with his own gun. I remember hearing people talk about suicide, and I later asked my uncle about that. He said, no, he had a bad habit of leaving the safety off on his shotgun with a round chambered. My uncle said he had to remind him about it all the time. He said they found him at a fence. My uncle said he thinks his friend probably put his gun against a fence post to climb over the fence, and then either it fell, or he grabbed it wrong and it went off.

It was one of my first dealings with death and one of my first real world dealings with firearm safety that has stayed with me all my life.

 

[JeepKuntry]

First year they did the velvet hunt. I hear a noise behind me and expect to see a group of deer coming to my flat. Nope it's a black bear. My scent was blowing in that general direction. We he comes to investigate. Worked his way down the ridge to the base of my tree. Put his front paws on the tree to climb and I moved my xbow down to shoot. Thankfully it spooked off. I don't know who was more scared that morning. Next Saturday I was taking the handgun carry permit class and carry while hunting now.

 

[Lost Lake]

I was a kid maybe 12 or 13 years old, I'm sitting in my stand in a big deep hollow. It's my first time hunting this property and I walked off the ridge where the road was. My dad walked opposite across the road in another hollow. I remember like it was yesterday, Tennessee was playing Georgia and I had a little radio with an ear piece listening to John ward call the game. Suddenly I could see a truck drive up the old road bed and can hear cussing and screaming from a ways off. I call dad on the Radio and tell him what I'm seeing. He says don't move, don't talk, take your orange off. A guy gets out screaming goes around the truck and grabs a woman by her hair and they fight for what seemed like a while. I hear and can see everything plain as day he goes back to the truck and grabs something. I'm watching through my binocs and see a gun she starts screaming don't kill me. I freak out lay the binocs down. Pull up the 3006, scope him and i yell as loud and manly as a kid can, if she dies you die. Talking about somebody freaked out he swung around looking everywhere. I never moved or said another word. He got in the truck and took off. She yelled thank you and walked out also. I feel like I would have watched a murder that day if I didn't say anything. I never hunted that place again.

Reading through all these again, this one still terrifies me the most. So many ways that could have gone wrong, but didn't. I'd like to think I have as much courage as you had at that time.

 

[Volbuck777]

Reading through all these again, this one still terrifies me the most. So many ways that could have gone wrong, but didn't. I'd like to think I have as much courage as you had at that time.

I put myself back in that time a lot and try to remember my exact thoughts. I can't remember what I was thinking except I was scared. I'm 32 now and don't know what I would've done if it happened now and not then. I feel that sometimes my younger self may have had more backbone than my today man. I sure hope I'm that courageous today but I pray I'm never faced with anything that makes me prove it. One time was enough for me.

 

[JJBraves]

This was years ago when I was in high school. Went on a duck hunting float trip with a buddy of mine on the French broad with our kayaks. It seemed like a great idea at the time to put in right below the Douglas dam in below 20 degree weather and float until we both shot our limits and get another one of our friends to pick us up...... boy was I wrong. We floated at the same pace with one of us on each side of the river that way we weren't shooting next to each other and could get birds on both sides. About 2-3 miles into our float, I came up on a little offshoot on my side that I decided to float through and come back out on the main river. The little finger was narrow and the water was moving faster than out on the main river. As soon as I got around the first bend, my eyes popped out of my head: seeing a downed tree all the way across a majority of the water except for maybe a 2 foot section where the limbs didn't quite make to the other end of the bank. I turned and paddled as hard as I could to get around the tree but was quickly pulled into the trunk of the tree sideways and was sucked under and spit back out. Luckily I was able to swim and recover my blind bag, gun, and kayak off of pure adrenaline and get to the bank. I quickly took off my waders and all of my clothes and dumped my blind bag out on the bank to find my lighter and matches that were soaked and useless. I tried attempting striking a match to make a fire but couldn't because my fingers were so numb and I was shaking so badly that I kept breaking the heads off. I then started digging through my pack looking for my phone but realized that I had it in a side pouch that was not zipped close and it was lost. I dumped out the water and put my gear in the kayak and floated out in hopes to catch up to my friend to get his attention. I I wasn't getting any where fast since ended up losing my paddle to I had to steer with the butt of my gun. When I made it out to the main river I saw that he was long gone, I ended up floating a couple more miles with no luck and started firing off warning shots in hopes that he would stay put or turn back around. At this point, I was exhausted, shivering uncontrollably and was starting to have my doubts of getting off of the river. I had floated a huge portion of the river before I ended up seeing a couple houses up on top of a steep cliff overlooking the water. With options down to 0, I managed to bear crawl my way up to the houses only wearing my soaking wet boxers and to my luck I saw an old lady walking her little "rat dog" in the neighborhood. As I approached her, she looked up at me like she saw a ghost and said "you look like you could use some help". She ended up bringing me in to her house and bundled me up next to her fire as she ran me a warm bath and made me some hot chocolate. She ended up giving me her phone to call for help, but I was so tired and then confused from how cold that I was that I couldn't remember my fiends number or my anybody's for that matter. I later came to my senses and came up with my mothers number which was not ideal because unlike my father, I knew she would overreact and not ever want me to duck hunt again; which was the case. I was as sick as a dog for about two weeks after that. Never in my life have I been that cold before in my life and I can honestly say that I have never felt that close to dying. I still duck hunt to this day but I have grown a lot smarter and safer since that incident.

 

[Bucket]

This was years ago when I was in high school. Went on a duck hunting float trip with a buddy of mine on the French broad with our kayaks. It seemed like a great idea at the time to put in right below the Douglas dam in below 20 degree weather and float until we both shot our limits and get another one of our friends to pick us up...... boy was I wrong. We floated at the same pace with one of us on each side of the river that way we weren't shooting next to each other and could get birds on both sides. About 2-3 miles into our float, I came up on a little offshoot on my side that I decided to float through and come back out on the main river. The little finger was narrow and the water was moving faster than out on the main river. As soon as I got around the first bend, my eyes popped out of my head: seeing a downed tree all the way across a majority of the water except for maybe a 2 foot section where the limbs didn't quite make to the other end of the bank. I turned and paddled as hard as I could to get around the tree but was quickly pulled into the trunk of the tree sideways and was sucked under and spit back out. Luckily I was able to swim and recover my blind bag, gun, and kayak off of pure adrenaline and get to the bank. I quickly took off my waders and all of my clothes and dumped my blind bag out on the bank to find my lighter and matches that were soaked and useless. I tried attempting striking a match to make a fire but couldn't because my fingers were so numb and I was shaking so badly that I kept breaking the heads off. I then started digging through my pack looking for my phone but realized that I had it in a side pouch that was not zipped close and it was lost. I dumped out the water and put my gear in the kayak and floated out in hopes to catch up to my friend to get his attention. I I wasn't getting any where fast since ended up losing my paddle to I had to steer with the butt of my gun. When I made it out to the main river I saw that he was long gone, I ended up floating a couple more miles with no luck and started firing off warning shots in hopes that he would stay put or turn back around. At this point, I was exhausted, shivering uncontrollably and was starting to have my doubts of getting off of the river. I had floated a huge portion of the river before I ended up seeing a couple houses up on top of a steep cliff overlooking the water. With options down to 0, I managed to bear crawl my way up to the houses only wearing my soaking wet boxers and to my luck I saw an old lady walking her little "rat dog" in the neighborhood. As I approached her, she looked up at me like she saw a ghost and said "you look like you could use some help". She ended up bringing me in to her house and bundled me up next to her fire as she ran me a warm bath and made me some hot chocolate. She ended up giving me her phone to call for help, but I was so tired and then confused from how cold that I was that I couldn't remember my fiends number or my anybody's for that matter. I later came to my senses and came up with my mothers number which was not ideal because unlike my father, I knew she would overreact and not ever want me to duck hunt again; which was the case. I was as sick as a dog for about two weeks after that. Never in my life have I been that cold before in my life and I can honestly say that I have never felt that close to dying. I still duck hunt to this day but I have grown a lot smarter and safer since that incident.

Amazing first post!

 

[Headhunter]

Maybe the dumbest one, fishing, a friend in myself were in my aluminum boat and we were catching hybrids. Bunches of them and large ones, all of them over 10 lbs. each. It was raining, actually raining so hard that at noon, lunchtime, it appeared as if it was getting dark. You couldn't see a bright colored topwater lure more than 15 or 20' from the boat. We were sitting in a cove "under powerlines". Til this time, it was just rain and a heavy downpour, never shut the bilge pump off. Suddenly the entire cove lit up from a bolt of lightning, I mean like a giant spotlight and right after a loud clap of thunder. I yelled at my friend, Marvin, and said we are going to die. He set the hook and yelled back "Well I will die happy". We should have left immediately, but we kept on fishing. I won't do that again. It kept on "storming" and we kept on catching fish.

 

[SC Manimal]

After H. S. I took a 2nd shift factory job. My buddy bought a boat and we fished most nights from about 3am till after sun up. He didn't have a spot light on the front of his boat and ALWAYS drove too fast. I didn't want to tell him how to drive his own boat and I was also a dumb teenager so I just went with it. I always sat center bow but one night I felt like we needed more light up front. All I had was my headlamp but it was better than the little blinky light that was on it. Anyways, we were rolling 50+mph when I saw something big in front of us. Some how I was able to yell loud enough and he turned. We were within feet of plowing through the middle of a small canoe with 1 passenger and NO lights. The wake flipped the canoe but no one was injured. No doubt God saved that man that night and taught me a valuable lesson to boot.