Maybe you were lost, fell off a horse and broke bones, cut yourself very badly, in a snowstorm without the proper equipment, speared yourself with a sharp stick, no water etc...
We all put ourselves in dangerous situations, but how prepared and focused are we to get back out. Maybe someone will remember what they read here and it could save a life. Please share and safe hunting to all!
Seriously though, due to a tendency to be a risk taker and also having a tendency of making poor decisions, I've gotten myself into a few tough situations. There was the one when a couple friends, my brother, and I went into the ID wilderness with no food with the bright idea of living off the land for 10 days with elk/deer/bear tags, a pellet gun for squirrels, and some fishing poles. We would have made it had I not had a bad reaction to "edible" mushrooms and spent 48 hours with the worst hangover of my life.
Another time, the same crew -1 decided to do a through-hike on a mountain range that crested at 11k feet on halloween over a weekend. It was only supposed to snow a few inches. That turned into a blizzard at 9K feet with 2 feet of snow and temps around zero. The wind was so hard that it shattered every pole in the tent and ripped the zipper seam off of the tent. We had to staple it back together with the skin stapler in my 1st aid kit and cut our way out of the tent in the AM. We propped the tent up from the inside with trekking poles. I was fortunate enough to sleep in the center of the 3-man tent and my buddy and brother had their hair frozen to the tent in the AM so bad that I almost had to cut them loose.
I broke my ankle- shattered it actually- on the mtns here near my house and had to hobble down without freaking out my 8 yr old son, "Dad you are really white!" Yeah, no guff son...and my foot was dangling like a wind chime.
I've been stuck out in the elk mtns at night twice...it was back in the old days when we were bushwhacked into a nasty unfamiliar spot and we used to use those little mini maglights that would die on you without warning. It wasn't worth walking off a ledge or fighting through brush in the pitch black....so once solo and the other time with a buddy we just toughed it out- the one time it was rained all night. Now I carry a headlamp- 2 actually.
We did have one situation in Australia that was life threatening where we were searching for a bull my buddy wounded, it charged our guide and just about killed him [it would have if the brush didn't absorb some of the pounding he took- flat ground and he would have been a bag of bones] I hauled him out over my shoulder which wasn't ideal but better than having the bull finish him off. Too bad for him, it was 5 hrs on a dirt road just to get to Darwin....but I've told that story here before....
They got turned around and ended up having a bad turn or weather. By the time they got back up out of the canyon they had lost much of their gear, were suffering from hypothermia and were thoroughly disoriented.
Luckly my hunting buddies happened across them on the way back from an evening hunt, realized their level of distress (we knew the father from sharing the area in prior years) and brought them back to camp. They were about to head the exact wrong direction into more trouble as my buddies found them.
We got them warmed up, dried off, fed, and hydrated. It was very scary to think how closely they came to a real tragedy......all because of a book and a dream. I had tried bailing off into that same canyon once only to determine it was not worth it about 3/4's of the way down fueled by much the same.
Know your limits and plan, plan, plan for everything that can go wrong. Then be ready to call it and be smart when it goes south anyway. Lessons learned.
My hunting partner and I woke up early in the morning to hike into a far away hole up and over a saddle. He noticed his batteries were low and instead of unpacking the truck to get to the good Duracell batteries he took two of the four AA batteries out of a pre-packaged led lamp from Walmart. This was the first mistake of many that would haunt me in the hours and days to come.
The hike up was brutal as I was battling a bulged disc in my lower back. We made it up to the saddle and decided to drop into the hole in hopes of finding a bull or two. About two miles down into the dark timber a storm started to set in. I told my friend we should turn around and I would hike the trail back to the saddle if he would take the high side, but not get lost and wait for me at the saddle (second mistake). Well he shook his GPS at me and said, "I have a Billion dollars worth of Tech I'll be fine". I arrived at the saddle and waited and waited. The storm was really setting in on the Mountain and I knew it would soon be time to get back. After about an hour or so and the snow was getting deeper so I started my descent back to camp.
When I arrived at camp it was empty but I figured maybe my friend had cut a track and was on some ELk. I fixed lunch and took some pain pills for my back which in turn knocked me out. About 4:30 I awoke to notice I had missed a text. My excitement of thinking maybe there was an Elk down turned to straight fear. "LOST" was all I got. As I excited the tent it was dark almost black outside with about 15" of snow. I texted my friend that I would shoot my pistol off three times in succession and maybe he could hone in on camp. It didn't work. He was able to get another text out Call Search N Rescue. Well I did and for two days they looked for him.
I still to this day do not know what happened to him. I have know idea how he missed the saddle or if I was wrong for not waiting longer for him. I had a gut feeling to go look for him but the sheriffs officer would not allow it as he did not want two hunters lost. My last contact with him was to build a huge fire and when the sky cleared out we could find him. This was absolutely the worst feeling I have ever had. I felt I let my friend down, I felt I could go and find him thinking maybe he went to high and went to a saddle of a small peak and that is what had him turned around. To this day I still look at maps trying to figure out where he went and how he might have ended up.
Eventually the skies cleared and SNR told me they were waiting on the plane to de-ice and go out again. While waiting at the trailhead two young men came up the road asking if my friend was still missing? I told them he was and they mentioned maybe seeing a fire from a certain view point. I asked them to show me and took out my spotting scope for a better look. The area was two maybe a mile or two in the another direction from where he was last seen. Through the spotting I could see the glow of embers and make out a person leaned up against log. I could tell it was my friend as he was wearing ASAT Camo and it stuck out like a sore thumb in the snow and beetle killed pines. Soon we had him back to camp still not knowing how he ever ended up all the way over there. A very sad story but he made it and has never really gotten over the experience.
Feel like I've had a few but nothing comes to mind other than dodging a tornado on a lake when I was a fishing guide. Stormy afternoon and we had just finished pounding across about a 3 mile stretch of water and needed to neck down between an island and mainland when this dang cyclone comes down the stretch of water we needed to get to sucking the lake up into the sky. Thankfully it went a little left pulling the trees up from the island and we managed to whip past it a couple hundred yards to the right and it continued on the way it was going.
People where I worked wanted to send in SAR, but my dad told them not to do that, that I could take care of myself. When the radio said the roads were finally open and we tried to get out, the snow was up to the bellies of the horses and I had to lead our pack horse. He was a good horse, so to go through the deep drifts I tied two lead ropes together and he dragged me on my belly.
I grew up in the Midwest and hunted a lot of wood lots. Most of those you could walk briskly for an hour and pop out near a road or a creek that would lead you down to railroad tracks or a fence to follow. Lots of gentle rolling hills. I was an Explorer Scout as a kid so as an adult had a high level of confidence in my sense of direction.
I ended up out West as an adult and picked up a buck deer tag. I drove up the Forest Road and parked. My buddy had asked me to take his handheld GPS with me and I smirked a bit but learned how to use it before heading off on my solo adventure. I turned on the GPS as I parked the truck and marked the location. I needed to hike about 2 miles through the woods to an area where I could bivvy camp away from roads. I step into the woods and before long the terrain cantered to the left then to the right and then some deadfall blocked my route so side-hilled and had to climb up a ridge. Was warm but could not see the sun due to the canopy.
At about 70 minutes of this maneuvering I expected must be close to reaching the camping destination. I could see a bit of sky above me so turned on the GPS. Said I was 150 yards from the truck. I laughed out loud and decided to hike using the GPS to lead me to the truck since obviously was a piece of technology crap. In about 10 minutes I could tell was approaching the edge of the timber and when I saw the red tailgate of the truck through the blackberry bushes I am sure I turned white. I dropped the tailgate, tossed my backpack in the truck bed and drank some water.
I used the GPS to reach the camp. No idea how I got so turned around so basically went in a multi-mile circle. Knocked my cockiness down a few notches so perhaps kept me from having a bad outcome on future hunts.
LOL Idyllwild! Gen X/Y will soon be the new "Greatest Generation"!
I was ice fishing in northern MN about 10 years ago and, while heading back after dark on an atv, I plunged through the ice. I was able to crawl back onto the ice, but broke through again, crawled out, and broke through yet again. I had been in the water for a long time by this point and had no strength left. I couldn't claw myself back out. I laid there in the water with my arms on the ice, and made peace with the situation. It was very cold and after a few minutes I realized my gloves were froze to the ice sheet. They held just enough to drag myself out of the lake one last time. I dragged myself onto safe ice and began the 2 mile walk back to shore. When I finally made it to a house with lights on I could hardly walk and was babbling incoherently. They offered me schnapps. What I needed were warm blankets. I now wear a flotation suit 100% of the time I am on the ice and have a pair of picks in my front pocket.
I've been out enough to know that I'm damn lucky that I got through so many situations WITHOUT them turning serious... Things like snow-shoeing solo for dozens of miles in lonely places where nobody goes on winter. 50-100 below-zero temps and wind-chills seem to keep most people pretty much at home.
One time up in northern MN, I got turned around a bit... Forest service road to the south; couple hundred miles to Canada going North. Then I heard an outboard on a lake which I knew was close by and south of the road... Now I carry not one compass, but two, even in familiar country... I'm ornery enough to argue with one, but not quite dumb enough to argue with two.
Another time in south-eastern MN, I was hunting rails in a WMU, getting close to sunset. I waded across a drainage ditch and got sucked right in, waist deep. Water was that deep, I should say. Mud was up knee-plus, and there was zero chance of just slighting my way out....
It was early enough on the season that rails were about all that it was legal to hunt, but also late enough to make overnight survival a statistical improbability for someone half-submerged in an area that's popular with trout fishermen.
So I unloaded my shotgun and tossed it onto the bank, along with my Single-Six. At which point I realized I was now out of reach of my only means of signaling for any help.... But I spent a lot of time in the muck as a kid and managed to belly-crawl to within reach of some grass.
Doesn't seem like such a big deal if you can't appreciate the threats posed by cold water and mud, but I'd have been sure-as-hell screwed if I had panicked, rather than acting like someone who had been there before....
But it's like John Geirach once said... there is something to be said for knowing how to take care of yourself in situations where some care must be taken....