Strange finds/experiences in the outdoors?

My friend and I were set up in a kind of hide once getting ready to shoot a deer outside of Blue Lake CA. We were discussing if I should take the shot or not, as it was his turn but the deer was around 165 yards out and he a pretty poor shot, I was trying to sell him on letting me shoot the deer since he would likely miss it.

While we were watching the deer and whispering to each other a mountain lion came out of a dry creek bed and tackled the deer! It was an amazing thing to watch. Also made our argument about who was gonna get the deer kind of pointless.
 
The best I have found while hunting was a tree stand that someone had put up on my Grandma's property without permission. I used it for a few days then my uncle and I moved it. We never took it down because we didn't have a dime in it. It's been a little over ten years, the tree has grown around the stand a bit.



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Not hunting related but I found a single shot 12 gauge that had been sawed off and a white canvas bank bag when I was in the 6th grade. The grips were broken off of the gun. The barrel and receiver were broken apart, it had deep groves in it like it had been beaten with an ax. The bank bag was from somewhere in Kentucky. I took it to my mom and she took it to the Sheriff's dept.
 
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I've hunted some national forest land for years. Once about 12 years ago I walked up on a very old stone fireplace out in the middle of the woods - about 150 yards from a huge bluff. There was a stone foundation in front of the fireplace, making the cabin about 12' x 14' roughly. There was also another stone foundation off to the right, but no fireplace for it. I thought it would be really cool to come back there one day and do some metal detecting - provided I got permission.

Three years ago my son bought a metal detector, and I got the bright idea to go out there. I called up the ranger in charge of that area, and believe it or not he gave us permission to go out there. I told him I'd swing by and show him what we found, but he said he didn't want to know. LOL He did tell me that the area was an old settlement back in the 1880's called Bluff City. He thought the cabin area in question was an old camp for loggers - turns out he knew exactly where I was talking about, because he had walked past the chimney many times himself. Turns out he was right - see the last pic - we found two crosscut saw blades that were covered in rust - they were about three inches below the surface. We also found a ton of nails (as you would expect), and various pieces of metal - not sure what most of it was for.

Remember --- we had permission to be there and dig.........

I imagine that fireplace won't last another ten years or so. If that place could talk I imagine it would tell some woeful stories of people who worked super hard to just try and scrape by.





 
I hunted the Sierra's for a lot of my life and have come across old narrow gauge railways, mines and mine shafts. The most curious was a steel pipe that had been wedged between two trees and over a long period of time the trees grew around the pipe. It was also about 12 feet off the ground. I imagine it went up in height as the trees grew. The area around the trees looked like it had been a campsite at one time. Maybe an old sheepherders camp. Great location for a camp. Little brook very close by and sheltered, but access was difficult.
 
Friend and I were deer hunting in one of the more remote canyons in northern NV and came across an abandoned car from the 30's. No side windows, body had a rust patina, but it still had the wooden floorboards inside the car - dried and weathered, but still there after at least 50 years, If we weren't so far from any form of a road, we would have towed that out of there. Have come across many unusual artifacts out in that high country desert - the dry climate seems to preserve just about anything........
 
Hunting up near Buffalo Pass Colorado one year when I
came to a clearing not too far from the road. There was a keg
leaning up against a tree and looked to be a makeshift
ping pong table from an old piece of plywood. Nearby was a
fire pit and some rails built from logs like you
tie horses to. Except there was no hoof prints or
dung around. Liquor bottles all over the place.
And then I discovered a 12 inch glass dildo
standing straight up on a sitting stump. Anyways
I took some iodine from my first aid kit and
disinfected the object and rinsed it off with
water. I then brought it back to camp with me
and thought about slipping it into my hunting
partner's sleeping back but I decided not to in
the end. This incident really let the steam out of
hunting trip. My guess is that some people from
Steamboat Springs decided to have a sex orgy and
they had to leave in a hurry, why else would you
a keg behind. Still have the keg to this day.
 
Biggest bull elk I've ever seen, tripped over a hose lay on a fireline and broke it's neck. The rack was displayed in our warehouse for years.
 
In the mountains of NE Oregon, a tripline tied to a simple contraption that would have struck the primer on a 12 gauge shell filled with 00 buck. About chest-high on a tree not 6 feet away. Sure glad I spotted it! It was easy to disable, so I did and reported it to the FS. A few days later the paper said a big marijuana grow was busted up by the green-truck brigade, hooray!

I've often wondered if the shotgun shell would have been effective or not. It wasn't in a barrel, just mounted flat on a small board with one of those metal conduit hold-downs. I'm sure some of it would have hit me, but I think a lot of the energy and shot would have gone out the sides of the hull in the explosion. Again, sure glad I saw it!
 
The knife could have been stuck in the tree in the winter. couple of feet of snowbank would easily account for the height.
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Maybe someone had a treestand at one point and left it there.
 
Nothing too crazy but i'm always amazed when i find a lone shoe while hiking or hunting. It never fails, there is always just one shoe.
 
I have enjoyed this thread. The best thing I have ever found was an arrow stuck about 10 feet up in a tree with the remains of a tree squirrel pinned to the tree. :p
 
I found a set of crutches out in the middle of nowhere one time. I have always wondered how they ended up there.
 
A buddy and I once found the remains of a 67 Corvette probably a good mile from the closest road. No idea how it got there. In the same section of woods, probably a quarter mile away we found the remains of a house, mostly just the crawlspace, but part of a brick fireplace was intact too.
 
Sometime about 1968, a bunch of us where hunting on the west side of the Catahoula swamp in Central Louisiana. Very rugged, flat area, it is a floodplain of the Little River/Old river area, dominated by a huge, flat lake. We were out in the middle of that swamp, about a mile from the nearest road, and we found a school bus. Not a school bus body, painted green and modified for camping, but a by-God, totally legit school bus with all the seats, yellow as the day it came out of the Blue Bird factory.

We marveled at it for a little while, and wondered how it got there. We used it as a landmark for several years, until a big flood came along and took it.
 
While squirrel hunting very early one morning I saw a pileated woodpecker--we called them "woods hens" because of their size--that had just finished hanging himself. He had swooped down between two trees, caught his head in a fork of a thin sapling, and broken his neck. He was still warm.
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That reminded me of this: (good thread)

One day when still-hunting for deer near a friend's pond, I scared up a flock of geese. I can only assume that I was blocking their normal takeoff path, and they had to climb sharply to get over some poplar trees.

One of the geese hit some branches and (I guess!) broke his neck, falling stone dead, back into the pond.
 
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