Lost items

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Gunplummer

New member
It is amazing what you find in the woods the first couple days of deer season, especially around the parking lots. I have found loaded ammo (Actually new, full boxes a few times), a couple thermoses, clothing, compasses, binoculars, boots(New looking), knives, drag ropes, calls...... It is like following a retreating army. My buddy found a rifle at the State Game Lands in PA. He turned it in to the Game Warden and was told if nobody claimed it in so many days, it was his. He has a new 30-06 he found leaning against a tree. The one thing that sticks in my mind is the .416 Rigby round I found near a parking lot in West Virginia when deer hunting.
 
Have you seen the cap for my thermos? I found a duck hunters whole bag once, complete with calls, head net, gloves, etc. I've even found a thermos with hot coffee floating in a river but the following story takes the prize.

I was trout fishing one morning and started to get hungry around 10. I hadn't packed anything to eat and the fishing was good so I didn't want to leave yet. Just then, I turned around and saw an undamaged pack of pop-tarts floating near the bank. After eating them, I felt a little thirsty. Low and behold, an unopened can of natural light came floating toward me. Breakfast of champions!
 
Gunplummer,

Yes, I know of what you speak, however I find most of mine while horseback.

Wyosmith,

To answer your questions the State land that's legal to hunt in Missouri has parking lots, most are not large lots.

I have about 3800 acres of State land by me but it's not all one continuous piece.

Best Regards
Bob Hunter
 
Wyosmith we have to many parking lots for hunting. Theres 1 on each side of my house within 5 miles. Every state game lands has parking lots.
 
I never have hunting in the eastern USA on any state lands.

So forgive my surprise. Out here in the west and in Alaska, you go to the field and hunt, but very few places do you park near a paved road, and any parking lot would be a long way from where you'd find legal game to hunt.

Just struck me as odd.....


Different kind of world I guess.
 
I live in the NW corner of GA. Twice in the last 15-20 years some pretty bad tornadoes have hit in Alabama and the remains of the storms have gone directly over where I live. Seems to always hit during turkey season.

After these storms the woods have been littered with building debris, and all sorts of papers. I found some guys W-2 forms from a town 70 miles away and mailed them back to him. I was hoping he'd contact me, but never did.

This is part of a metal storage building, from 70 miles away where the tornado hit.

 
jmr40,

We have the same thing with tornados in our part of the country.
That piece of metal looks like some I've found on State ground around me.

Over at one of the State parking lots there's an outhouse made from concrete blocks, tornado hit it, blew everything away except the stool.
I was going to have my wife take a picture of me sitting on the pot and put a caption on the picture that reads "boy them beans were good".

There's a lot things to be found on State ground besides the game you're hunting.

Best Regards
Bob Hunter
 
Wyosmith, what happens at lots of eastern public hunting areas is that you have sections of land that don't allow vehicle access. There are frequently old logging roads or emergency access trails that go into the land but the hunters aren't allowed to drive on them. So, the owning agency makes a small parking area where these logging roads meet up with a public road. Hunters have to park there and walk in to their hunting area.
 
Hunting paraphernalia. Not quite what I found left behind.

Public hunting land. Well if empty beer cans_ soda cans_lunch bags/plastic wrap_ candy wrappers _magazines _even a toilet left behind count. That's what I found more than once.

Years ago I cruised some State Public Hunting forest hoping to find a bucks bedroom to muzzle hunt. Taken place just after modern big game season had closed for the year. Mother Nature just the night before providing a inch or two of the white stuff creating some welcomed woodsy quietness and just enough white for tracking purposes.
Yup!! Found a patched work of junk boards nailed permanent on a tree. A stand built on a 75-80 ft straight as a arrow beautiful White Pine having cement reinforcing 1/2" rod spikes pounded 5-6" into the tree as a ladder. {Stand was: Higher than it should be. No doubt about that} and where its user must have suffered some sort of bowel syndrome problem. As I approached this stand the stench in the area was beyond mild smelling. The hunter had actually stacked and left 3-4 old tires not 25 feet from his tree that was used as a make-shift open air toilet and it was quite obvious he too drove ATV for transportation. The stand was built not more than a city block back in the woods off a county black top road and near a close for the season Drivers Rest Stop the stand occupant probably used for his parking of vehicle & trailer.
A 1/4 acre area around the stand was basically left trashed with litter hanging on bushes and covering the ground and too showing a well defined spoke wheel chainsawed shooting lane/s where it's cutting of by the individual/s left a few large tree's dangerously hung up. {and to think I walked under some of those tree's not knowing.} It truly was a depressing site to see. So much so. I just felt I had to remedy in some manor in my own way.

I walked out and drove home that mid-day really P-O. That night in bed was a sleepless one for me and too for the wife. Early the next morning I drove back to that ugly stand site on my ATV with a small limb'ing chainsaw_ wrecking bar _ 22 oz. framing hammer and a jug of fuel oil. I dismantled that stand and pulled all its nasty 16 & 20 penny nails and re-rod spikes out. Burned everything I could find including the toilet. Honestly I was hoping the guy/s would walk in and catch me at it.. During its clean up I tore a couple address labels from the girly magazines before there burning. A day of so later I drove to the address I found and left a letter in the guys mail box how disappointed (to say it mildly) I was in his behavior on prime deer hunting State forest Land.

Given some later thought to my bad behavior shown in the (above) situation. Wife thought it best for me to look for some forest land. I eventually found a nice parcel of un-timbered for a Generation maybe two of privately owned land for-sale. And became its new a owner. Had one (40) of the 160 acres I bought clear cut of its Black Spruce early on and used that money to pay off the remaining loan balance owning. Best move in life I ever made. Well other than my marriage that is.
 
Back in 1975 or so I lost a box of 220 gr 30-06 Silvertips hunting a thicket funnel between two large swamps. Had only taken 5 out of the box to load the old M1917 Eddystone I used at the time. Never knew where they had fallen out of my pocket, but I had been sitting at the base of a birch tree when I shot a nice buck. The buck went down and then tried to get back up even tho it had a hole the size of a softball in it's chest. I jumped up to make sure it was down for good and between that excitement and the 1/2 mile drag out, it wasn't till I got back to the truck I discovered the box of ammo missing. Fast forward 20 years to a nice warm, late October day out woodcock hunting when I happened across one of my old favorite deer stands. The old birch tree I used to lean against was now dead and only a shoulder high stump remained to show where it once had so proudly grew amongst the alders. Sitting down against the stump, I petted the bird dog beside me and started to reminisce of the many opening mornings spent there. Pushing myself up, my hand found something hard and cold buried in the leaf litter and to my surprise it was a well tarnished 30-06 shell. Digging deeper I found 14 more cartridges and a very small scrap of weathered cardboard. Fast forward another 20 years and I still have those 15 tarnished shells in a old coffee can. I always figured there was a reason I found them.
 
Back in the pre-digital era, a friend was changing film in his camera in Colorado and lost the exposed roll somehow.
The next season he hunted the same area and found his film, which developed normally, showing him, his girlfriend, their camp, and their game.
 
The stuff I find is usually old Navy or USMC ww-2 leftovers (there was a lot of fighting on the Pacific isle I live on). I've found unexploded 5" artillery shells, piles of 1942-43 brass cases from a machine gun post, M1 magazines still filled with cartridges (well rusted) and unfired 30 caliber and Japanese bullets with no rifling marks. Every trip is an adventure.

best wishes- oldandslow
 
The number one thing I find in the woods during the gun deer season is those large, blaze orange seats, filled with Styrofoam beads, that generally clip on to your belt. You can literally see them for a quarter mile away in the woods and makes me realize why so many hunters claim they never see any deer, when they don't look behind themselves as they walk and cannot see a blaze orange bag that sticks out like a sore thumb in the deer woods.
 
stuff

Some of my finds:

-knife, a cheapee, good beater
-nice pelican flashlight, still works
-two sets of good shooting sticks
-2 portable walkie/talkies
-box call, weathered but a neat curiosity
-a fellow clubmembers bow, fell off his truck in the dark after loading a deer
-a case of 5 min fusee's (fell or was tossed from a freight train)
-a case of stainless steel creamer pitchers ( another train find)
-a D9 Cat 'dozer, fell off a flat car. Couldn't carry that home.
 
I found a ruger mark 2 stainless in a river near black mountain in Kentucky and still have it to this day. I also ran into a meth lab that was an old school bus that had all of the seats taken out but there was some really nice 3\4 inch brass slabs about 4 foot long that I didn't think that they would miss so I broke one of the windows and realized I couldn't fit through the windows so I called my buddy and he brought his angle grinder up to where I was at and grinded off the chain holding the door closed but on the way up there he got a fish hook stuck in his shoulder. I still have those brass slabs to this day lol.

I did report this to the authorities after I had gotten my fair share of the brass slabs. I was around 18 years old at this time so I was a bit dumb. I am currently using the slabs for various different things. I have a solid brass, topped table for what little gunsmithing that I do to my own or others firearms, I have a section of one that I use to measure drill bits, I made a adjustable square out of one, and sold the rest to a scrap yard for a whopping 107$.
 

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You can certainly find some amazing things in the woods after a holiday weekend, or when a front moves in and drives most folks back to town.

Tents, stoves, jackets, gloves, ski poles, cameras, sleeping bags, all kind of stuff. The oddest thing once was a mountain bike, hundreds of yards off a trail, next to a pair of climbing boots. We could see the climber's rockface while working that day, no one there, so we checked it out that afternoon and took it all down to the road and left it with the front desk at the Ranger Station when we got it that night.

I think the owner just got into his tennis shoes after the climb and walked off and left it.
 
Found and Lost !!!

The most expensive item I "found" in the woods was a RC-Airplane that had about a six-foot wingspan. Tried to locate the owner, to no avail. Sold it very reasonably. ..... ;)

The most expensive item I "lost" in the woods, was a .22 Derringer. Fell out of my pocket while being chased out by the landowner. ..... :eek:

Be Safe !!!
 
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