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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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One time in Alaska, two wolves came trotting by me in the sparse black spruce forest close to the boreal tree line.
I let out a whistle, an old deer hunting trick to get them to freeze.
One of the wolves, a beautiful gray, trotted up and stood five yards in front of me for several minutes. I could have spit on him.
The story goes on, but that was cool. From all that time in the Arctic I had encounters with all of the wildlife. Griz, caribou, wolves, Fox, wolverine, musk ox.
The Arctic Refuge is an incredible place.
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hooblie
climber
from out where the anecdotes roam
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hitching across idaho in '69, i trudged out onto a lava flow to lose the hiway noise and find a suitable venue for a full moon rise rendezvous with three chewy allies, round and green, relieved of their fuzzy button centers. hard not to grimace with involuntary quivers, it was a taste only an intentional space traveler should acquire.
aeolian deposits, or windblown silts filled any depression so the terrain was a puzzle of stacked terraces, each flat as a pond and rimmed with jumbled basalt. widely scattered bushes and not much else set the stage as i assumed the position (lotus) facing the growing brightness to the east. peering though binoculars, the foreground and the distant serrated range were especially crisp. but i was not prepared for the defined craters that gave spherical relief to that alien surface as our globe rolled ahead for further revelation. the freshly illuminated earth that i magically adhered to seemed resoundingly planetary. i pledged allegiance to the physical laws of the universe, huge simpatico with the turner of the spheres. if your going to travel through cold dark space, how sweet to do it with buddy moon.
meanwhile, a different kind of drama was unfolding among us creatures. the sparse shadows of the occasional bush was the only cover for rabbits and it was comedic to watch them hastily exchange one shelter for another. oblivious to me, not even curious, it seemed i had more than my share of neighbors.
then the airshow began. nighthawks were bouncing through the kill zone on their erratic sorties. i've always admired the swift family aerialists, and you've gotta love the hapless br'er bunnies, so i was cheering for both sides in this arena and it made for a sporty night of high stakes entertainment.
sleep finally came to this longhair wayfarer, face down on a summer night, not exactly "in" an alpine bag.
SMACK, flap, flap, flap.
i sprang to all fours ready for war. straight ahead at 12 o'clock and climbing out, the sight of tail feathers and vigorous wing flaps, performing evasive maneuvers. i hadn't anticipated my colateral role in the administration of food chain supremacy but a stinging row of nail holes on each side of my head kept driving the point home, i had been engaged.
gradually a grin returned to my face, accompanied by a warm fuzzy to know that this special bird and i shared one thought in common at one instant in time. a profound sense of... WTF!
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the Fet
climber
Tu-Tok-A-Nu-La
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So many...
Gorilla Tracking in Uganda was probably #1
Snorkeling with dolphins in Hawaii is amazing.
[Click to View YouTube Video]
One of the most memorable was camping past Wapama falls in Hetch Hetchy. I was about to fall asleep in a bivy sack a few feet away from where we had a bear bag hanging. I heard my friend walking around me and thought "that's weird, I didn't hear him unzip his tent and get out". I sat up and a large bear about 6 feet away is checking out the bag, checking me out, checking out the bag. I jumped to my feet, raised my arms, and told him/her it was time to leave. I moved the bag to about 50 feet away from our campsite. Lesson learned.
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kpinwalla2
Social climber
WA
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Flying in a helicopter over the north slope in Alaska I saw a herd of musk oxen. As the helicopter approached, they formed a circle facing outward with the young ones in the center. Pretty cool.
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Minerals
Social climber
The Deli
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Well, certainly not the most memorable, but there are 16 wild horses in my backyard right now. They’ve been there all afternoon and show up on occasion during the winter, which I think is kinda cool. There were 20 or so out there at one point last winter.
Here are a few of them, from March, 2017.
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EdBannister
Mountain climber
13,000 feet
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i had been to the restroom building, and was walking back to one of the since destroyed housekeeping cabins in the Giant Forest of Sequoia. I stopped and leaned against an oversized dog house that had a firehose inside, and gazed motionless for perhaps 5 minutes at the stars. even at age 7 i was entranced by the sky... but then the slightest puff of warm air on my neck... I rotated and leaned away as a large black nose at eye level came into view.. less than a foot away. A Bear was attached to the nose... somehow i had the control to deliberately back up three steps.. rotate with another step or so, then i bolted for the cabin perhaps touching the ground along the way.. i never looked back, but i think the bear had a good laugh.. probably the bear had no intent to get that close, i think i blended in with the little building.
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Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
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Okay here are two.
The first isn't mine. It comes from Wayne Merry (Fossil Climber here on ST), and isn't really his either, but it's a story he passed on to me last year. A friend of his was out for an easy day of skiing on Atlin Lake -- just a flat tour out across the lake, around an island, and back home...
Until, as he was skiing around the far end of the island, a pack of twelve wolves came out of the island's trees and straight for him.
Can you imagine that? Just you and twelve starving wolves in the middle of the arctic winter?
But they just trucked on by, paying him no attention. So, no problem, other than to figure out how to clean his underwear.
And a story of my own. Put up in a bear thread a three years ago, but maybe worth repeating here. Wayne had put up a post about "a funny bear story" on Baffin Island. Which inspired me to post my own, non-funny, Baffin bear story...
I have to include a funny polar bear story. Twenty-odd years ago I used to be the Asst. Regional Director for Renewable Resources of the Baffin Island district,
My story precedes Wayne’s by a decade or so, and is definitely not as funny. Thirty-odd years ago I spent a fair amount of time on Baffin Island, at first just as a climber/skier, but the second trip partly as a hired gun for the Canadian equivalent of the Park Service, employed to “find out if certain routes were suitable for ski traverses.”
Yeah, eat your hearts out. It was the ultimate ski-mountaineering wet dream made real. Except for the part that turned into the ultimate ski-mountaineering nightmare made real.
Paring it down for this Bear Thread, part of the deal involved the first traverse of the Penny Ice Cap (where the last Ice Age started). To get us to the starting point, at the head of the Coronation Glacier, a couple of the Auyuituq Park staff put our gear on komituks and towed us behind their snowmobiles from Pangnirtung, up the fjord, up Weasel Valley to Summit Lake (where we dropped a month’s supplies), then down Owl Valley, back onto the ocean, around the headland, and up Coronation Fjord.
The idea was that they’d drop us at the fjordhead, where it looked like there was a relatively low-angle moraine we could use to access the glacier. And once up on the glacier, well, theoretically at least, we’d be able to get to the icecap, and from the ice cap eventually back south to our cache at Summit Lake.
Things went relatively smoothly until we started up Coronation Fjord. It was early May, and the snow/ice situation was weird. Melt-out up there starts from the ice/snow boundary and works its way upward. Which is fine, because it doesn't snow all that much. But Coronation is what they call a "wind fjord," and a lot of snow gets blown onto it. At this early stage of the melt, we encountered about a meter of powder on top of about 20 cm of slush on top of the ice. The snow machines couldn’t deal with it. Their tails would plow down, sending a rooster-tail of freezing salt slush into our faces (we were riding the komituks), then up, then dig in again, then up, ad infinitum.
Which would have been fine anywhere else. We’d just have said: “park these beasts, and we’ll get off and ski from here.” But while Ryan and I were as brave as any two of you, we weren’t stupid. Who wants to get off and ski up a glacier that is so thick with polar bear tracks that there was hardly an undisturbed patch of snow? Our drivers were armed, and we were on noisy machines, so better to continue right to the fjord head before dismounting.
Alas, it was not to be. The machines simply couldn’t make way as the powder/slush mix got deeper, and there was no choice but to start the non-motorized part of the expedition from about two-thirds of the way up the fjord. But no problem, right? We’ll just borrow our drivers’ rifles, and if there are still any bears coming down from their winter sleep (which the drivers said there certainly wouldn’t be), we’ll be ready to deal with them.
That met with a polite “No f*#king way we’re letting these rifles out of our hands.” Accompanied by “But no worries. These tracks are old. No way any more bears are coming down at this time of year.”
So we packed our loads, and skied off toward the ice-cliff that marked the point where the glacier ended and the ocean began. Too far to go without a camp, and we set up the tent in the midst of a zillion bear tracks, chanting over and over “The tracks are old. The bears are long gone” until eventually we fell asleep.
Waking up alive seemed to offer some proof that yes, the bears were indeed long gone, and we packed up and skied in much better spirits toward the point where the moraine came down the side of the ice cliff. It was a fine morning, and it looked like our guess that the moraine would be a straightforward avenue up onto the glacier was going to be proved right.
We skied right up to the ice cliff where the glacier fell into the ocean. Hundreds of feet high, and obviously impassible, but the moraine at its side looked relatively low angle.
But as we headed toward the moraine, we saw a pair of tracks leading down from somewhere up above, and ending just out of our sight at about the point we were headed for. “Hmmmm. Well, yeah, the bears are long gone, so these ones probably just wandered a little further seaward along the moraine, in a hollow out of our sight.”
Right. Onward. And then, when we were about 25 meters from the moraine, the cutest little polar bear cub imaginable stuck its head up and looked at us.
Kind of like lions. Or grizzlies. Or whatever deathdealers – if there’s a cub, then mama is somewhere nearby.
Up the moraine was out – that was straight into the jaws of death. Back down the fjord was out – that was straight into midst of about five million bears who clearly were not “long gone.” All that was left was to start skiing across the fjord, hoping that there would be a way up on the other side, and that mama wouldn’t show up until we were far enough away to be safe. A little over two km, on powder over slush, with 30 kg on our backs, and a top speed that wouldn’t scare a snail.
Still, since there wasn’t any choice, we turned and started slogging parallel to the ice cliff.
We made maybe 100 meters before mama popped up beside the cub, scoped us out, and started down the moraine.
Think about it. It had been months since she’d eaten, and not only was she ravenously hungry, but she probably saw us as a threat to her baby. If either of us had been religious, we’d probably just have knelt down right there and tried to become one with god, hoping that if we did that, being torn apart and eaten might not hurt too much. But since faith was in short supply, the only option was to keep on trucking and…
…and what? Postpone death by a minute or two?
I’d like to say that there is some useful material in this story that might help someone else in a polar bear confrontation, but I can’t. We didn’t decide to run, or to stand our ground, or to shout and wave our ski poles. We did the only thing we could, which was to slowly trudge through the slop toward the far shore as the bear quickly gained on us.
Fragile humans, about to enter the food chain from the very top.
But I’m here, writing this, and Ryan made it out with me. Why? Because, with mama bear only about twenty meters behind us, we passed a small berg, probably calved off the previous summer, and now frozen in the sea ice right at the base of the glacier. When we rounded it, we saw an opening in the glacier, guarded by a bunch of lumpy ice cubes – a crevasse, approached end-on rather than from above.
So we scrambled over the cubes, and into the crevasse, and then along its floor. Not thinking, just reacting. Same as you, or anyone would do. If you are being chased by a tiger, and see a door, you don’t ask what horror might lurk behind the door, do you?
Still on skis, we shuffled along a twisting path between walls of ice that grew higher and higher. Would the bear follow us? Had she lost interest when we turned out of sight behind the berg? We had no idea. All we knew was that there was no turning back, so we kept ski-trudging along the flat bottom of the crevasse.
Which may have some of you calling BS. Why kind of sh#t is this guy talking? Crevasses don’t have flat bottoms. How can he say they skied along a nice snow sidewalk two to three meters wide at the bottom of a crevasse?
Well, if we’d had functioning brains, we’d probably have asked the same question. But, believe me, being stalked by the greatest predator on earth turns off the analytical part of your mind.
At least for a while. Until, about ten or fifteen minutes past certain death, your ski pole punches a hole in the snow in front of you and you stare down through that hole into the great blue forever, and realize that you are on a sunken snow bridge, which is no doubt about to collapse under you and send you plummeting to your death.
F*#k.
Can’t go back. That way is guarded by a zillion hungry polar bears. Can’t stay here, cuz after the food is gone we'll die. So… onward.
“Should we rope up?”
“F*#ked if I know.”
We roped up, and trudged onward. Ice tools and crampons were in the cache at Summit Lake, so we couldn’t climb up out of the crevasse, but only go forward, and hope… Twice our hope seemed to shine, and we ascended low-angle ramps to the surface, but both times we found ourselves on a small isolated point, and had to head back down. But the third ramp led to the main glacier, and we…
It would be nice to say we bent down, kissed the snow and lived happily ever after, but the glacier was covered with bear tracks, and instead of worrying about dying when the snow beneath us collapsed, we were back to worrying about being eaten.
Fortunately, by this time we were both so physically and emotionally wasted that we didn’t care. We just set up the tent, hit the first aid kit for a couple of valiums, and passed out.
About ten hours later we woke up to a total whiteout. F*#king wonderful. We won’t even see the bear that kills us.
But what can you do? What we did was ski gently uphill for another two days of fear. Or, rather, about a day-and-a-half of fear, because at that point we realized we hadn’t seen any tracks for a couple of hours, and that we would probably live.
So, there's a polar bear story, from someone who, even thirty-five years later, has no idea why he survived.
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Spencer Lennard
Trad climber
Williams, Oregon
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I had the life changing opportunity to spend a half hour sitting in the woods with a horse-sized lion while doing a late day summer hike in my watershed in the early 90s. The horse size lion has curiously come up behind me to see what I was doing, and as I turned around to see who was there, he hid behind a log.....where he staried at me from behind a log in the waning light of dusk.
He was obviously just curious and meant me no harm (or I wouldn’t be here to write this). His head was twice as big as mine and his scat as big as a large bear’s.
Admittedly I was terrified so I picked up a big stick and spike loudly to him.
Finally I backed out of the woods terrified in the near darkness and hike home.
Every single hike and bike ride in lion habitat (the entire western US) hasn’t been the same since then.
I obviously love all big cats, particularly lions and hugely value that amazing inter-species bonding......that was truly “spiritual.”
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hooblie
climber
from out where the anecdotes roam
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i was all tucked in and ready for a BEDTIME story
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Inner City
Trad climber
Portland, OR
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Ghost that was an absolutely amazing story...woah. thanks!
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john hansen
climber
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Ok , nothing life threatening like all these other ones , but once around 76 or so my brother and I had a great encounter with some wild horses.
My dad liked to go out in the desert to known stops along the emigrant trails west. And look for artifacts like ox shoes and chains an stuff.
One time we stayed at Antelope Springs out side of Imlay Nevada. While our dad was trying to find old stuff me and my brother hiked up a hill behind camp.
As we came over the crest of the hill we saw a stallion with a mare and a colt about 50 yards away. The stallion reared up and whinnied just like in the movies before they all ran off.
My brother and I , 15 and 17 teen actually stood there and sang 'America for specious sky's " standing on top of that hill after seeing those horse's.
There was no one within 25 miles except our dad ,wandering around in the desert, a couple miles away, looking for ox shoe's,,and us with our voices ringing out over the desert.
Great stories everyone. Keep em coming.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Ghost, the shop steward would like to have a word with you.
I thought we had agreed on a bottle of Le Tâche?
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AKDOG
Mountain climber
Anchorage, AK
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rottingjohnny
Sport climber
Sands Motel , Las Vegas
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They are all memorable...climbing the left ski track on tahquitz looking up and seeing a golden eagle circling over head was a bit distracting....Riding the mt. bike east of 120 in the adobe valley and getting caught in a mustang stampede...watching a sprinting grizzly chase rodents in denali park....
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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RJ, surely you saw the excavations made by the Grizzlies there to get at a marmot?
Perhaps you mistook them for the work of some crankloon backhoe operator?
They move a hell of a lot of hard rocky earth to come at a marginal meal.
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rottingjohnny
Sport climber
Sands Motel , Las Vegas
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Luckily i was a safe distance from the grizzly so i didn't see the excavations or any crankloons...
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tradmanclimbs
Ice climber
Pomfert VT
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Holy smokes Ghost. had me on the edge of my seat and I read it last time you posted it... pretty shure I am rocking the same skis from the 2nd hand store.
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mongrel
Trad climber
Truckee, CA
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Like anyone who spends time outdoors - lots of great wildlife sightings. Thanks to all for the ones posted upthread. Ghost for the win though, that's a great story.
Once you have encountered a handful of large or highly venomous snakes in the tropics (or anywhere), they're not very remarkable anymore. Likewise mountain lions and bears unless they're alarmingly close (like opening my eyes after a bivy in the Sierra seeing large bear prints with smaller ones inside, a couple feet from my head). My most memorable wildlife have mostly been large and/or highly venomous invertebrates: a giant centipede in Indonesia which we did a lot of dancing around to corral it long enough to get photos without being bitten; a huge ctenid spider ambling slowly over my leg at night in Colombia (that's the family of "Brazilian wandering spiders", the worst ones to get bitten by in the New World tropics, and very damaging or fatal bites are plenty common where I was). I'd love to see a velvet worm someday, one of the most ancient and weirdest organisms on the planet; dating back 500 million years. That's amazing. Most of our climbing areas are made of rock that doesn't even go back that far.
Best one in California was driving north on 395 near Mammoth in late November, first really pounding snowstorm of the winter, snow falling at 2"/hour or so. Mule deer, which usually hang only in small groups, typically fewer than 12 or so, herd up in good fall migration stopover habitat eating everything they can get, then when the first big snowstorm hits, they flood down into the lowlands and to the east in huge numbers. This one night, a herd of hundreds of them all crossed the highway at once, totally ignoring approaching cars, we all had to just stop and wait as the herd flowed across and between the cars, so close that some of them bumped your car as they passed. It was a great 10 or 20 minutes until they all moved on.
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tradmanclimbs
Ice climber
Pomfert VT
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My very first trip out west in May of 1981 a few weeks before my 19th birthday. Obviously there was no such thing as the internet and I grew up without TV. The massive amount of information we are exposed to and take for granted now simply was not a part of life back then. I was fairly well read but had no idea that Buffalo still existed. I was under the impression that they were extinct or only lived on farms somewhere.. More likely I had simply not even thought of Buffalo. I had read about them in history books and westerns but had never seen a photo of a live one in the wild. Anyways I crashed an hour or so after dark, the last thing I remember seeing was a killer sunset in St Paul. So far other than the inside of the jail house in Sault St Marie I had not seen anything too crazy different than what my previous life in the East had shown me. When Scott pulled in for gas and a piss at 4am I woke up in the middle of North Dakota. It was like waking up on a different planet. Another day of sheer wonder at the changing landscape as we wandered through ND and Montana discovering somehow that Red lodge pass was closed so had to head down to Cody and into Yellowstone from there. As we reached the top of the pass the snow banks were monstrous and the road down to a single lane. At the absolute crest of the pass completely blocking the road was a monstrous buffalo. That sight completely blew me away. There were many more firsts for me in wildlife encounters that summer but certainly that buffalo was the most wonderous.
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psykokid
Mountain climber
Pasadena
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Spotted this badger up at Coyote Flats a few years ago. Didnt realize at the time this was actually part of their range.
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