People share the weird things they encountered in the woods | Askreddit Scary

People share the weird things they encountered in the woods | Askreddit Scary

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
What kind of weird findings you have encountered in the woods?
Liken Subscribe or I'll haunt you tonight. I got a
special wilderness permit to go into an area in the
mountains in CAA where they hadn't allowed foot traffic in
in twenty years. There were no trails. It was myself

(00:23):
and two other marines, and we did it in exchange
for seeing if there was a rare kind of trout
in the streams up there. I guess the Forest Service
didn't have anyone who wanted to do it. I'm not
sure I was set up with this by a friend. Anyway.
We hiked for two days with no trails, using just
a map and compass, and on the second day we
walked around this huge cliff to find a full on
cabin with a lawn and solar power and washer and dryer.

(00:44):
The whole nine yards all built into the rock face
of the cliff. You couldn't see it from above, so
it had gone unnoticed for years. We talked to the
guy that lived there and he said we were the
first people he had seen hike in in fourteen years.
He was a retired helicopter pilot and he had flown
all the equipment and by hil he was squatting on
federal land and knew it, but didn't seem worried. He

(01:04):
said he hikes out every two weeks for supplies by
a different route than we came in, and he showed
it to us. We used that route to get back
as he had a trail beaten down, so the walking
was easier. All in all, it was pretty cool. The
trout of Forest Service was looking for were in the creeks,
so it is still close to foot travel. And we
never told the Forest Service about the old helicopter pilot,
so I would bet he is still out there. I

(01:27):
hunted some land in Wilkes County, North Carolina that had
five wreck moonshine stills located along the two creeks on
the property. That was kind of cool. One spot I
love to hunt near Baden, North Carolina was just loaded
with Native American arrowheads. Thousands of flaked off pieces of
stone and such unbroken points came back one season in
the area was posted off for an archaeological dig. I

(01:49):
never took anything out of the area as it felt
just too cool to be bow hunting directly over a
spot where people had made arrowheads and other stone tools
for countless years. The most offbeat was on Higginson Henry
whytefe area in Kentucky, sight of a big foot scare
I wrote about. The area was either a World War
II interment camp, not sure which, but the woods had
really grown up out there in the middle of nowhere,

(02:11):
big trees everywhere, was a five holes out house. Farther
out was most of a World War II vintage airplane.
Neat stuff when I got out here. The neat stuff
I found in the woods while hunting was stuff that
most of y'all take for granted. Seeing my first run
of salmon in a creek wow, picking up pieces of
pumice near Mountain Saint Helen's, I reckon It all depends

(02:31):
on where you've been and what's new. This last dear season.
I hunted on my friend's ten thousand acre ranch and
I came across a deer shed on a small rock pile.
The shed had obviously been placed there, and upon looking closer,
I found a small plastic container buried at the base
of the rock pile. I opened it up and found
a pencil with writing paper and people's thoughts from the location.

(02:52):
His family has had the ranch for over fifteen years,
but many of the entries were recent. Around two thousand
and five to two thousand and six wrote about shooting
at elk out of season in May and bagging a
cougar in the same spot. Other entries contained profanities about
a rattlesnake and Jimmy smashing it to death. The next
entry was a hippie saying Jimmy needs to be one
with nature. The highly intelligent elk and cougar poachers wrote

(03:15):
their full names with dates of the hunt, and we
turned them over to my friend's uncle. We left the
shed and wrote a note inside the container saying you
were on private property, etc. Et cetera. On Mary's Peak,
I came across a car down an old, dark road
and it was covered in towels and tarps. I didn't
knock and really didn't want to know what kind of
creature was inside. From time to time I run into

(03:35):
odd folks or spooky shrines, but I'm always armed and
stay away to avoid a confrontation. I pitied the kids
that found the body in Brown's camp. The news report
said it was quite gruesome. I'll tell you something weird
that happened Last year, Me and a few buddies were
up near Mount Saint Helen's going for a snowmobile ride.
It had recently snowed three feet, so we decided to

(03:56):
go up for an evening ride. Well, when we got there,
it was apparent that no one else had been up
there riding, snowshoeing or cross country skiing since there were
no tracks in the snow. The area we were riding
into was next to the Clearwater Canyon on the twenty
five road. Anyhow, we took off that evening, heading out
all the side roads, having fun and cruising around. After
a few hours of riding, we went back to the

(04:17):
truck for some food, and with a bright, starlit full moonnight,
we decided to go out for one last night ride,
which was pushing eight thirty in the evening. Well, the
four of us proceeded back up the twenty five along
the Clearwater Canyon when we noticed lights down in the
canyon occasionally flickering on and off. After stopping for a
few minutes and looking down into the canyon, we could
not identify what it was. The weird thing was there

(04:37):
is no way to get into the Clearwater Canyon. Unless
you walk the three miles in. There are no public
roads that passed through it. After watching the lights, it
looked like there was machinery or something working down there,
but none of the lights made sense. It sort of
freaked us out a bit, so we decided to get
out of there. I was on the lead bike, so
as we all started our snow mobiles up to head
back towards the truck, we didn't realize that Chad had

(04:58):
gotten stuck and was left behind. Well, when he got
back to the truck, he was freaked. I'm talking so freaked.
He was shaking and really weirded out. Chad's been my
best friend since we were seven years old, and he's
never in our friendship acted as if he were scared
of anything, while Chad went on freaking out, saying we
needed to hurry up and load up and get out
of their screaming there's something up there with a super

(05:18):
bright light and it was coming for me on foot. Well,
I guess when Chad had a snowmobile stuck, this thing
or human I don't know, came up out of the
canyon towards him, and by the time he finally got
a snow machine unstuck. It was twenty yards away or so,
pointing the light right into Chad's face. To this day,
we've still never figured out what or who would have
been that far off of any roads in that canyon

(05:39):
with three to five feet of snow around, and still
can't figure out why someone would be walking out of
the canyon, which was two to three miles from the
bottom to where we were at nine thirty to ten
p m. At night. The only thing we can think
of is they might have been doing some military training
in the canyon. I found two meth labs about five
to six years ago while turkey hunting near Eugene. The

(06:00):
amount of trash was amazing, tents, five gallon buckets, a
coalman stove, pots and pans, so much food and cold
medicine wrappers it was sickening. I washed really sure if
where I had ventured was legal, so I made an
anonymous tip. My brother was out scouting near Eugene about
six years ago and found a decomposed body with a
chrome handgun laying six feet away. They led the cops

(06:21):
there and showed it to them. It was identified as
missing mentally ill man enlisted as a suicide. A place
where we used to hunt late season near Ashland had
a man camped in a VW bug. Yes, the small
VW back off the dirt road. During the hike in
you had to pass his camp. I never saw the
car move, but did see him taking a shower with
one of those solar shower bags while it was snowing

(06:41):
and there was four inches of fresh snow on the ground.
Huge fat naked guy showering in a snowstorm. While hiking
with my dad and brother near Mountain Saint Helen's, we
came across an abandoned canoe in this small, raging river.
So it was kind of weird to see someone actually
tried to float the river in a canoe, and of
course my dad wanted to take it back with us.

(07:02):
We were too far in to pack it out on
the trail, maybe seven miles or so in, so we
had the dumb idea of trying to float it out. Well,
the current had it pressed fairly hard on some rocks,
so we had to pry it out with tree branches.
We finally all got in and started down the river.
Twice we had to bail out of the canoe because
we were going to be smashed against some large boulders.

(07:23):
We had that darn canoe totally inside out with the
current and wrapping it around fallen trees. Several times we
had to just get out and walk it around some rocks.
It took the better part of the day, but we
finally made it back to the trailhead. We were all
white from being cold. The aluminum frame was totally destroyed,
but the canoe was still floatable. To this day, my

(07:43):
dad still has that wreck of a canoe. Weird thing
in the woods, but at a ski resort, Bachelor. My
dad died in nineteen eighty eight. My wife and I
were just married and did a lot of snow skiing.
My mom gave me my dad's wedding ring, a one
carrot diamond with a heavy gold setting. I was wearing
it on a day at Bachelor. We had been skiing
all morning. We stopped to have a burger and a

(08:05):
beer at the lodge. I looked at my hand. The
ring was gone. Now we had skied all over the place.
I was sick I had lost the ring. I looked
in my glove, not there. I was in tears. My
dad's ring was gone. It was a custom ring. My
wife was trying to calm me down. She said, you
can have new one made. Well, it just would not
be the same. To me, I said, let go home.

(08:26):
She said, go to the Lost and Found and ask.
So I did. The lady said, you can come back
in the spring and look. A lot of people come
back then to find things. Maybe it will turn up. Yeay, right,
let's go home, I said. My wife says, come on,
cheer up, it's not the end of the world. I
was ready to spit up my lunch at this time.
She says, let's go for one more run. I said no,

(08:50):
She says, come on, so we go one more run.
Black chair. At the time, I blowed down the hill
and wait at the bottom of the run for my wife.
She is taking her time. I was standing at the bottom,
skis off and getting kind of hot under the collar,
not to mention sick to my stomach. Up to me,
she skis. She has tears in her eyes. She says,
I found your ring. I first thought, real flipping funny patty.

(09:12):
She takes off her gloves, goes for her pocket and
pulls out the ring. Wow. The rest of the story
is that she stopped midway through the run too. I
don't know powder her nose. She skis backwards to slow herself,
looks down and sees a dark spot on the snow.
Takes her ski pole and flips the snow and uncovers
the ring. I don't know how this happened, but God

(09:32):
was there. Twenty years later, the story still has talked
about a lot. How did that ring get back to us?
Me a ski resort, tons of people amazing to me
Down here in s Oregon. I have stumbled into a
half dozen pot fields, some pretty basic, but a couple
were large and pretty sophisticated. I found one stolen brand

(09:54):
new Toyota pickup that had been missing for three months.
Also one body that turned out to be a suicide.
Once found a very large cage in a small meadow,
like circus cage. The bars were probably one point five
to two inches thick. The cage was roughly six feet
wide by about eight feet long and about eight feet tall.
It had a door that slid down at one end.

(10:16):
It looked extremely heavy and I have no idea how
someone got it that far from a road approximately three
miles and what they were trying to trap with it.
Found a small Indian Cemetery in south central Oregon looked
like it was a family buried there, all from the
early nineteen hundreds. From the makeshift tombstones. Also found a
wrecked airplane a couple years ago. It was a small

(10:36):
two seater plane and there was no survivors. It had
been reported missing six years earlier and the Federal Aviation
Administration wasn't aware of where it was. Also, two weeks ago,
while scuba diving, I dropped down onto a wrecked sailboat
that hadn't been there that long, maybe a couple years.
The local fishermen didn't know it was there. I marked it,
and I'm going back in a few weeks. I found

(11:00):
one of the Satanic altars way up in the Mountainhod
National Forest. Once. We were about a mile back off
a popular hiking trail and stumbled across a pentagram arranged
out of medium sized, peculiar looking stones in front of
a large, flat topped boulder at the base of a
rock wall. My buddies who were with me, got really
scared and wanted to leave asap, but I made them
wait until I rearranged the rocks into a smiley face.

(11:22):
While fishing, the lower sandy. I walked past a large
naked guy playing with himself in the sand and talking gibberish.
I didn't see him until I was right up on him.
We made a contact, but I just walked on by
without missing a step, as if it hadn't really happened.
Bad memory. I also seemed to find pairs of shoes
on a fairly regular basis out in the middle of nowhere.
I always wonder how when the heck people managed to

(11:43):
lose their shoes out in the woods. My dad has
found some cool stuff in the woods over the years
as well, a lot of old logging artifacts, including a
really old hand crank wench that he found with cables
hooked to a huge old growth seater that was fairly
rotted out. Apparently some loggers had attached the winch to
one tree and used it to t try to pull
another in a specific direction while they were cutting it. Anyhow,

(12:04):
something went wrong and the cedar they were pulling on
ended up on top of their winch, hammering it right
into the dirt. Must have been there for quite some time,
since the timber my Pops was cutting at the time
he found it was fairly mature in any case, he
dug it out and pulled all two hundred pounds of
it back to the truck. For those of you wondering
how heavy stuff like truck seats and circus cages make

(12:24):
it way back into the woods, it's probably crazy old
loggers like my dad looking at that winch, I would
never in a million years get it into my head
that I would want to drag the thing through the
brush and try to lift it into my truck. In
any case, he got it home and spent weeks cleaning
it up and wire brushing it. It now sits in
his shop with an assortment of other logging artifacts has
found over the years. My hunting partners came across a

(12:47):
couple of marijuana grow operations. While we were all hunting
in the Saddle Mountain unit. We found a few of
the remains of an old diamond tea logging truck. It
wasn't much there, but I took the radiator surround. It
was rusted way beyond doing much with it, cleaned it up,
rattle canned silver, and made a shadow box wall hanger
out of it to display other found artifacts. I've run
across a couple of old concrete structures in the coast

(13:09):
range that must have had something to do with old
logging or sawmill operations, although their purpose wasn't really clear.
On different occasions on the Malala River, I found a
wallet with it and some money, turned it into the
Malala police and a Gerber boot knife kept that And
on the weird or creepy side, the dead guy said,
we were driving down this logging road, rounded a corner

(13:31):
and ahead of us, parked in the middle of the
road facing us, is a small foreign car. We were
not at first to where it was actually at the
end of the road, and we were sort of cursing
the person who abandoned it there. As we got closer,
we could see a man slumped back in the seat.
As we got even closer, approaching a wider spot in
which to turn around, we could see it was an
old man, like really old. He was ashen gray, and

(13:52):
we just knew he was dead. Now we're bemoaning having
to stop our hunt and go find a state trooper.
Just as we were exiting the truck to go verify
what we knew, the guy came alive and sat up.
We recognized him as the fellow who was camped just
a little way from our camp. We turned around and left.
The rest of the hunt, we avoided any area we
knew he was near for fear we might really find him.

(14:13):
To cease. The next time hunting, the John Day breaks
for Chukar deep in the canyon midway to Cottonwood above
the river. On one of the benches there was a
circular rock structure maybe eight diameter, with a waist high
wall made of single stacked rocks. I checked it out
for a while and thought maybe it was an old
time sheepherder's rough shelter, But that just didn't seem right,

(14:34):
and there was no fire ring or any sign at
all of occupation. Now, all along the John Day there's
petroglyphs of Big Horn sheep. I suspect this shelter was
actually a blind from which the Indians hunted the Big Horn.
In an iron mining region, hardwood forests have grown up
and covered the old mines and villages. One winter day,
after exploring a hard rock mine that bats hibernated in,

(14:54):
we hiked the hill that rose above the mine. A
short ways up we came upon an old cemetery from
the eighteen SI in actually very good condition, considering it
was unmaintained there in the oak forest. Reading the graves,
you would find clusters sharing the same date of death,
indicating the mine had seen a number of bad accidents
and just fun. I was doing an August afternoonday hike
by myself in the Jefferson Wilderness, looping up and around

(15:17):
Canyon Creek meadows on three finger jack. Hiking back out,
I followed the creek, where there were deer around every corner.
My exploratory detours made my hike much longer and darkness fell.
Being familiar with the terrain and being a warm, clear
summer night, I wasn't concerned about walking around in the dark.
I actually liked night time hikes a lot. I finally
picked up the PCT, heading north a little until intersecting

(15:39):
the trail that would take me due east and back
down to Jack Lake trailhead. This trail skirts wasco Lake.
Coming down and approaching the lake, but above it, I
heard a guitar and singing. Stopping at a cliff above
the lake some ways below me, invisible in the dark,
was a small group singing Don McLean's American Pie. You
know how sound carries over water, So I sat in,

(16:00):
finished my canteen and listened through all the long songs verses.
Finally they finished saying nothing. I just clapped in appreciation
and continued down the trail. I'm sure they must still
wonder who the heck was out there in the night,
clapping bigfoot. I found a few very mentionable and a
few unmentionables. One odd one was a full wooden case

(16:20):
of Coca Cola and bottles. We found it in the
Saco River in Maine on a canoe trip after a flood.
It was half buried in sand. Some of the caps
were rusted off, and there was cork lining under them.
Not weird but cool to find it was quite old.
In nineteen ninety one, I was hunting the Tioga unit
and shot a four point at about two hundred yards
down a steep ravine. He was just up from the

(16:42):
bottom on the other side, so I took the shot
because there was a flat hike out following the bottom
of the ravine to a rod three miles away. No
way I could pack the deer up, and the hike
out was a chore to say the least, but it
was clear shot and I dropped him. Later to find
out It was a non lethal hit, but the deer
slipped and broke its neck. A whole other story anyway,
I had a very early elkhorn handle gerber folding blade

(17:04):
knife in a leather case on my belt. My grandfather
had given it to my dad years before, and my
dad gave it to me as I was sliding down
the ravine to retrieve the deer. Followed a short blood
trail and located the deer. Went to grab my knife
and gut it for the hike out, but the knife
was gone sheath opened full of dirt. Not only was
I mad because I had to make a decision to
leave the deer until I could get a knife back

(17:26):
to where it was or pack it out whole. After
looking around a bit for the knife, I sacrificed my
tascoscope and broke out the piece of glass in the
front with a rock to use as a knife. It
took me about two hours with cut fingers to gut
the deer with a piece of glass. I broke the
ribs open, tore my t shirt into strips, and made
a backpack out of the carcass and packed it out.
What a nightmare. When I got home, my father told me.

(17:48):
He got a call that my grandfather had died of
a heart attack earlier the day. I didn't tell my
dad I lost the knife. I just took a quick
shower and went back down that ravine, retracing every step
looking for the knife. When I got to the bottom,
I had not found the knife. It was getting dark
and I had a long hike out with a flashlight.
I propped myself up against the rocky ledge and had
tears in my eyes about my grandfather's passing. I wiped

(18:11):
my eyes and looked down at my feet and saw
what I more or less hoped was a tiny point
sticking out of the sand. I brushed the sand aside
with my foot, and there was the knife. The sad
part is a few years later my dad mailed me
the knife to my po box in Reedsport, but he
put the wrong box number on it. The postmaster refused
to give me the name of the person who had
the box, but had later asked if they got a

(18:32):
knife in the mail. They denied it. Found a Seattle
Seahawks mile our balloon in the John Day Wilderness area.
Elk hunting always wondered where those balloons you see floating
away went too found an old leg hold trap, all
rusted away in the Fremont National Forest deer hunting, buried
under a foot of duff and needles, leaned up against
a tree and something clanked. Found an old rusted chain,

(18:55):
pulled it up and there was the trap. Hiking in
the Toodle River Canyon we found a deer skeleton. It
was buried twenty feet deep in the rocks and flood
debris from Mount Saint Helen's explosion. It was just being
exposed as the river channel eroded the bank away. On
the John Day River by Granite Creek, there is a
half built miner's cabin with a number of old logs
cut into length and skidded part way down the hill

(19:15):
to the cabin. I often hiked there and wonder if
the gold ran out or Indians chased them off. Maybe
it was too low and they got flooded out in
the spring. Easily over a one hundred years old just
rotting away. Lots of old miners cabins here and there
in the North Fork John Day and discarded junk off
the Chinaman Trail. Many old Indian campsites in the Bulah
Unit by Castle Rock one in particular was on a

(19:37):
peak with a small cave in front of it. The
cliff face is all fire blackened and there is a
lot of obsidian chips at the entrance to the cave.
Below you, the terrain falls away and you can see
all the way to Ontario. It is easy to see
this why someone would sit there. Pretty spiritual place really.
In the early seventies, I was hunting elk with my
brothers in Cook Creek of the Chesnimness Unit. I was

(19:59):
way out in the middle of nowhere and came across
the unopened ken of Buckhorn beer. Never had heard of
buckhorn beer before, and still haven't. It had the old
style pulled tab that kids made chains out of way
back when. Another time, in the same area, my brother
and I were crossing Cottonwood Creek and found where somebody
had killed two bulls in the bottom of the canyon.
They had boned out the elk and packed the meat out,

(20:20):
but they had left the tender loins attached to the
rib cages. It was cold and shady. They were in
fine shape, so we cut them out and took them
back to camp, had them for breakfast the next morning.
In the mid eighties, A friend and I were going
up the Clacamus River early one August morning to look
for elk. We were cruising along in his truck, going
about sixty to sixty five miles per hour, and I
was looking at the river out the passenger window. All

(20:43):
of a sudden, I spotted a body on the bottom
of the river. I told him to stop because I'd
seen a body. He didn't believe me, but stopped and
backed up. We walked along the guard rail, and when
we got in the right spot where the glare was gone,
we could a guy in about eight feet of water,
face down. He was wearing hip boots and a fishing vest.
There were two guys fishing off the rocks on the
river bank, so we told them they might hook more

(21:04):
than they bargained for. We were going to drive back
to Estakada and call the police or fire. When a
county cop came zipping up the river. We flagged him
down and told him about the body. He was responding
to a flipped over drift boat up stream about half mile.
Two guys had hit a rock and flipped their drift
boat about forty five minutes earlier. The boat hung up
on a rock with both guys hanging onto the boat,

(21:25):
they decided to swim to shore. One guy made it,
one didn't. The fisherman who drowned was wearing hip boots
which he never removed for swimming, and a fishing vest
with several pounds of lead. A county deputy nearly drowned
trying to make a rescue attempt, but that's another story.
My best friend's little brother was riding an ATV in
the early nineties up on Mount Hood. He drove off

(21:47):
the road into some ferns to take a pee. As
he was doing his business, he looked over and saw
a patch of freshly turned dirt. Without reacting, he finished
his business and rowed off for the cops. When he
brought them back, ferns were stuck in the fresh dirt,
as if in an attempt to disguise the sight. They
hadn't been there before, so the guy must have been
there when he pulled up the first time. They found
a pair of panties, and the cops told him he

(22:08):
could go. I bet that there are a lot more
on marked graves in the Mount Hood forest. For every
one that is found, there are probably a hundred that
are not. Sounds like the guy that talked to the
girl on the road with people in the bushes could
have ended up in one real easy. I found an adze,
which is an old time woodworking tool, leaning up against
a stump in the Mountain Hood forest. The handle that
was above ground was intact and the head was under

(22:30):
about six inches of dirt. Took it back to camp
and later sold it on eBay. Wasn't too far off
the four thousand, six hundred twenty road, maybe twenty five feet.
Might have been a fire fighting tool, or maybe someone
building a fence or a bridge. Well, the items themselves
weren't so weird, but the timing was amazing. It was
a week long canoeing and fishing excursion for four on

(22:52):
the Wannaha. Our self appointed quartermaster he was retired. He
had the time, arranged all the food in kitchen gear
Day one. Our quarter master was old school, no freeze, dried,
yuppy backpacking food. For him. We had canned goods. Hey,
what's a bit more weight when you're hauling it with
two full sized canoes. True, but apparently he ignored the

(23:12):
multi mile portage into the one thousand, four hundred foot
deep canyon while carrying all canoes and provisions. That's another story.
We soon discovered that we had one canned goods and
two that no can opener. One of our parties sacrificed
a sheath knife for the samurai sous chef routine, performing
ritual stabbings into steel cans in order to perform crude lydectomies.
Day three, Quartermaster and I were on foot fishing, taking

(23:36):
a short cut across a wooded peninsula from one pool
to another. Of course, he walked up to a tree
with a nail in it, six feet off the ground,
with a can opener hung on the nail. Day five,
it rained steadily all day mid June, Northeast, Oregon, soggy doggies.
Fortunately it was warm, or we'd have had some hypothermia issues.

(23:58):
Perhaps at day's end we found on a good campsite
and desperately needed a fire to warm ourselves, get a
hot meal, and perhaps dry some wet clothing. Since it
had been soggy all day. The word went out look
under trees, logs, brush, et cetera to find fire materials
which aren't too wet to burn. Quartermaster, looking under a
low bush, found a stashed plastic tarp, whose area I

(24:20):
estimated at about one fourth acre in size. We lashed
up a Wilderness Areas shelter equivalent to the astrodome, pitched
all the tents under it, built a fire at its edge,
and recovered nicely. How does he do that? One of
the strangest and most incredible things I've ever seen was
one time I was hunting on a ranch that was
just below the National Forest boundary in Chesnimness. It was

(24:43):
just after first light, and we were the only ones
that we knew about in the area anywhere around there.
This day. It was very cold, and it snowed some
a few days previously, but it seemed the grass was
still pretty tall and dry. There wasn't any snow still
on the ground where I was hunting. I came around
a corner of some trees on the edge of a
small draw and there before me was a section of
a large dead tree lying on the ground, and it

(25:03):
was totally on fire. I mean, this thing was probably
thirty feet long and about three feet in diameter. It
was large enough that if it weren't totally engulfed in flames,
you could walk up and sit on. There was no
sign of how it had been ignited. It was burning
full length and burning like crazy. What was so strange
that here, in this big expanse of dried grass, only
the grass about eighteen inches all around it had been burned,

(25:25):
blackened to the soil. How and why the entire meadow
wasn't on fire was beyond me. It was so strange
that I went and found one of my nearby buddies
and took him over and showed it to him. It
was so unusual that still to this day, I remember
seeing that, and it's just as much a mystery to
me now as it was then. There are some things
you see sometimes that'll stay with you forever. That was
one I won't forget. Hope no one has found my

(25:49):
wife and I in the woods, or that they don't
in the future. The Camo dude standing there watching would
be pretty creepy. Buddy and me were up wandering around
the woods when we're teenagers, and about one hundred yards
from the near a skid rode down over a hill
surrounded by forty year old trees. Was a fifty seven
or so chevy think it was a two door. I
need to head back up there and see if it's
still there could be some serious coin sitting there rusting

(26:11):
away in the woods. My mom and her friend used
to buy Douglas fir cones for Warehouser and a small
seed company in Vancouver. One year, they were up picking
cones and found a pile of rocks that looked like
a shallow grave. Freaked them out and they took off.
Was up in the middle of nowhere, about thirty miles
east of Veenumclaw and way up on a ridge, so
they didn't want to call the cops unless they were sure.

(26:31):
They head back up a few months later, but couldn't
get there due to the snow. So they sit around
all winter wondering what it was. Head back up in
the spring and it was a clear cut never could
find it again. A guy in high school was in
the same general area and found a pretty decomposed body.
Was sure no one would believe him, so he grabs
himself an armed to take back out to show people
he was telling the truth. Back in the late fifties,

(26:54):
when I was about thirteen or so, I used to
take off and hunt the mountains behind where we lived,
between Winston and Mr Creek. On one hunt, I was
hiked in about three or four miles up a steep
canyon and came to a one room cabin i'd never
seen before. It was still standing, and actually still had
the old wood stove in the bed and springs standing inside.
It had obviously been ransacked before, but there were quite

(27:14):
a few odd things left. On a shelf was one
single book, a first edition copy of Madame Boverie's Lover.
As I recall it was published in the early part
of the century, but can't remember for sure. At that time,
I had not a clue about such a book. For
you young folks out there that aren't familiar with Madame
Boverie's Lover, it is pretty racy for a boy or
girl for that matter of thirteen. After reading a few pages,

(27:38):
I decided that since the cabin had obviously been deserted
for many a moon, I could just borrow the book
for a while. I took it home and hid it
in my bedroom and would read it at night while
pretending to do homework. Amazingly enough, it up and disappeared
after a few days. Of course, I was way too
embarrassed to ask my mother about its disappearance. Worst part
was I still had a couple of chapters to finish.

(28:01):
About twenty years ago, a buddy and I were hunting
up in the Alsia Falls area and I decided to
walk down through some repro and meet him at the road.
So I get out and start through the brush heading downhill.
I got maybe twenty yards off the dirt road and
I noticed a little girl's bike laying there. I look
down the trail a little more and see a huge
area of fresh turned soil. I didn't think much of
it and walk through it. The ground was mushy, and

(28:21):
I tripped over something buried in it. So I look
down and here as the sleeve of a windbreaker, and
it looked to still have an arm in it. I
rushed down the hill and my buddy and I went
into Alpine and called the state police. After about a
three hour await, the cops show up and we go
to the spot. He digs around a little bit, then
tells us not to leave, but we needed to exit
the crime scene. We went back up to the truck
and he comes up and tells us it looks to

(28:42):
be a body. He was calling in another officer, so
we wait a little longer and the other officer shows
up with a shovel and a duffel bag full of equipment.
He starts digging a little at a time so he
can pull she's sleeve free, and then he stands up,
wipes his forehead, smiles and says, it isn't a body,
It's a jacket stuffed full of stuff. We were all
relieved to see it wasn't some little girl. But over
the course of the next few hours, the two officers

(29:03):
pulled guns, boat, motors, and all kinds of belongings that
had been burglarized from people houses from the pit that
was dug there. Whoever the criminal was a duck a
big underground stash cave to store all the loot. I
have caught two complete fishing rods and reels on the
same river while fishing, and another time I was on
an elk stalks side hilling it to get to a
herd on a clear cut and found a big cave
in the mountain wall and old but well rutted in

(29:24):
trail leading up to it. I didn't go inside to
check it out. I am not that brave. Seven or
so years ago, I and my buddies were hunting the
wallawas one evening We were driving to a spot and
came around a corner. There was a guy parked in
the middle of the road and peeing. He was watching
this tree covered in with that dry, stringy moss burn.
We were thinking, like, what the hell. The guy never

(29:46):
paid us no mind till the burning died. It was
quite a sight. Then hopped in his rig and got
over so we could get by. We got where we
wanted to go and discovered the guy had burned a
few trees here too. Upon looking a little closer, he
peed around every tree. That was just plain creepy. The
next day, we had a game warden in our camp,
so we told him about this guy. The game warden
kind of chuckled and said, you're sure he was peeing.

(30:08):
We told him we were a little concerned about this
guy doing it during the summer and burning the whole mountain,
so he would check things out. The next morning, we
had a forest guy up there asking us a bunch
of questions. He said he had a report of this
a couple of years ago, but didn't get up here
right away and the snow got too deep, so he
wanted to act on this quickly because there was also
some unsolved arsons in Elgin. So one of our guys

(30:30):
took him around and they found thirty to fifty trees burn.
A few of them were live trees, so that's what
he said. They could nail him on. Last we seen
was a bunch of green trucks racing up to get him,
but we never did hear what happened. I was hunting
elk in the rifle season of nineteen seventy eight or
nineteen seventy nine with my uncle. We were up the
middle fork of the Wilamite above Oakridge. There was about

(30:52):
a foot of snow on the ground and we hadn't
seen any elk at all. My uncle's work buddy was
hunting there too, but camp down the road from us.
We were it into anyway. The buddy pulls into our
camp after dark one night and says he wants us
to follow him out in the morning to a spot
because he had something to show us. That was it? No,
how was your hunt? No? Have you seen anything? Just

(31:12):
follow me out tomorrow. So we did. What he wanted
to show us was big foot tracks, no joke. The
tracks were in the snow, and they walked along the
road for about thirty yards where the side of the
road was about four foot higher than the roadbed. Then
the tracks jumped out into the road I would guess
twelve to fifteen feet, and then walked across the road.
Then the tracks stepped over a log that had snow

(31:33):
on it and didn't even brush the snow that was
piled up at about i'd say thirty eight to forty
high from the ground. I have an eight millimeters movie
of it all that I took when we were there.
That kind of shows the tracks not good equipment, and
it was getting sunny by the time we went back
to camp and brought the camera back. But anyway, Wow,
the tracks were just like everybody else who has ever
seen them describes them, about sixteen to eighteen inches long

(31:55):
and a longer stride than would be humanly possible. The
part that amazed me was where it jumped out into
the road and then stepped over that log without brushing
the snow off. I am a believer, no doubt. I
still kind of wonder why we never find bones or
a carcass somewhere, but there was no doubting what I
saw that day. Eleven years ago this June, we were
heading north from Nevata toward Files. We stopped for gas

(32:18):
at Denio and saw an article about a hot spring nearby.
After getting directions from the guy at the store, we
decided it would be a good place to camp out
for the night. He warned us not to camp too
close because the hot springs gets a lot of use.
We found the place after about an hour deter up
a road of ten inches dust. It was just getting dark,
so we made camp and dinner. After dinner, we decided

(32:38):
to take a dip in the perfect one hundred degree
hot spring. My wife was pregnant, so she just brought
a chair to sit in. A set of headlights came
from way way off in the distance headed our way.
My wife got real nervous. She reads a lot of
the serial killer type books. I told her to go
get the pistol out of the truck and come back
to the spring. After about thirty minutes, a big old
Lincoln pulls up and parks near by and shuts the

(33:00):
engine off. After about fifteen minutes, I couldn't take it
any longer, so got out of the water and grabbed
a towel with a pistol covering it and approached the car.
A guy opens the door and out spills numerous beer cans.
With the dome light on, I can now see there
are two guys and a baby in a car absolutely
full of beer cans. The guy in the passenger seat
has a big old knife in his hand and is

(33:20):
cutting his jeans off. Long scary story shortened up. These
guys were local cowboys that used the hot spring as
their bathtub every morning and every night. While my wife
had us dead and buried. These country boys just wanted
to take their evening bath, but weren't used to city
folks being in their tubs, so figured they better make
their jeans into shorts. They came on in and brought
the baby with them. The wife went to bed, and

(33:41):
I ended up chatting and having beers with them till
around midnight. They never did mention what the deal was
with the baby. I just figured it must be Dad's
night to watch the kid. The next morning, while we
were driving out, they were on their way back in
for their morning bath. A bit scary and a bit strange,
but ended up to just be some good old boys
doing their daily routine. Around March, I went fishing out

(34:03):
of Nehalem Bay in my inflatable. I was right below
the pull offs on Niiciny Mountain, fishing very close to shore.
There were several people fishing from the rocks. Above them.
I saw what looked like piles of rags and then
a tan colored object. At first, I thought it might
have been a dead deer. I kept looking at the
object and then comparing its size to the people on
the rocks. I didn't have my binos and I didn't

(34:25):
see arms or legs, but I suspected it was a
dead person. I picked up my handheld and called the
Tillamook Coast Guard station for a radio check. The duty
PO went radio check out. I didn't want to get
a helicopter over me and create a ruckus. I decided
to wait until I got back to Wheeler and report
what I saw. I never did. About two weeks later,
I was sitting at home watching TV and they reported

(34:46):
a dead body near Manzanita. Wow. I jumped up and
called Tillamook County Shearif and asked them if they found
it at Niciny Mountain, and he said yes. I told
him my story. It turned out the man was in
his seventies had been in prison for hiring some some
went to murder his wife. They didn't know who killed him,
but what it actually occurred was someone had taken him
to the pull off and made him jump. That's a

(35:08):
long way to the bottom. I think the road is
an eight hundred feet and his body was within two
hundred feet of the bottom. Lesson learned next time I
will call it in. Maybe it would have helped catch
whoever the murderer was. Don't know if they ever made
an arrest. My dad and I were hunting in Warehouser
property and were way back in on this section when
we came around this corner to see a van parked

(35:29):
right in the middle of the road. Out came to
guys with long hair out of this van with a
lot of smoke trailing behind them, waving at us to stop.
My dad did, and they said they were broken down.
We didn't have anything to jump start them, though. There
was a couple of women in the back with their
small kids. We gave one guy a ride back to town
in the back of the truck. We kind of figured
they broke down on their way to harvest some of

(35:50):
their crop. About ten years ago of Highway twenty six,
I was driving down this old road nobody had driven
down for a while. The road straightened out in one
hundred yards down the road there was an RV with
trash around it. It was kind of a gloomy, wet,
dark day, and I got this weird feeling someone was watching.
I high tailed it out of there. Couple years later
I drove by that road and saw an abandoned vehicle

(36:11):
pushed off the side of the road. Same kind of deal.
Hunting in the Tiago unit and drove down an old
road that off the side someone built a wood cabin
and they were there and they had guns. They didn't
look like the friendly kind either. My buddy hit reverse
and we got out of there. I have seen also
some of the usual condom, dirty magazine, burned out cars,
old steam donkey plaques to dead hunters. My wife and

(36:35):
I were vacationing in Hawaii went to Ypo Valley for
a little jaunt. The road down drops one thousand feet
in one mile twenty five percent grade, so it keeps
some of the masses out of it. All down on
the valley floor, it's about a mile wide and around
six miles long. The walls range from one thousand to
fifteen hundred feet tall and very steep on the valley floor.
There are taro farmers, but no real organized village per se.

(36:58):
Turns out that back in King amamai As day, they
had themselves quite a spiffy set up down there, but
then at Tsunami came along and really ruined their day.
As a result, the king passed edict that they would
not live full time in that valley any longer. Anyways,
my wife and I go for a hike, pasted a
few taro farms and start following a stream up river
to see where it goes. We winde along, clambering over rocks,

(37:20):
stripping down naked, and carrying our clothes over our heads
while wading through a few spots because the walls cliffed
out and we couldn't find a trail. Finally, after a
couple of hours, we end up at the end of
this box canyon that is no wider than two hundred
yards hemden on three sides by cliffs that are over
one thousand, four hundred feet tall. A thin streamed waterfall
is missing over the edge, feeding a pool that seems

(37:41):
to be bottomless than the color of aquamarine. The whole
gig just feels spiritual sitting there. Looking around, we notice
a bench of land raised probably thirty feet higher than
anything around, and had an interesting growth pattern of vegetation
turns out to be rows and rows of tea leaf
plants placed among graves. Seems we found a graveyard that
dated back to the times of the king. Granted it

(38:02):
wasn't way out off the beaten track, but there wasn't
any sign of modern white man back in that canyon
at all. No trash, no prints, no tracks, no nothing,
just the magic of it all. This happened back in
nineteen ninety four on a cold deer hunting morning. I
was stationed at Fort drumm the Tenth Mountain Division and
had pulled Seek You duty all night. Part of the

(38:24):
reward for doing twenty four hour duty is getting the
next day off, so I was going to do a
little hunting on some of Fort Drum's awesome swamps and
pine forests. My plan consisted of getting off at six
a m. Hitting the woods, and catching two to three
hours of sleep at the base of the tree stand.
From that point on my plan. When ask you, I
packed in my sleeping bag and began taking my nap.
I was awoke a few hours later by the drone

(38:46):
of black Hawk rots approaching. Nothing new about this since
this is a military post, but the helicopter was beelining
to my location. At this point. I will mention that
a helicopter makes an awesome game driving tool. Because about
ten deer beat feet across the beaver dam. I had
my stand overlooking the helicopter slowed to a stop and
then hovered directly overhead. I'm in a green sleeping bag

(39:06):
with just my camouflaged face looking up from my cacoon.
Failing to see me laying there on the ground, the
crew chief begins to have his passengers repelled down almost
right on top of me. There were about three or
four personnel on the ground around me before anyone noticed me.
At first, I was taken prisoner because it was assumed
I was part of the drill, a show of my
hunting license and mandatory. So many cubic inches of Hunter

(39:28):
orange as well as a loaded rifle got me off
the hook. The investigation that followed said the area I
was using hadn't been changed to close on the Sportsman
telephone hotline, glad it wasn't a live fire. In two
thousand and seven, my hunting partner and I drew Washington
east Side Archery bul permits. On the second day of
the hunt, right before dark, we got a bull cranked

(39:49):
up across a big, nasty canyon. The next morning we
hiked in from the bottom of the canyon and tried
getting the bull worked up. All was quiet except for us,
so we kept exploring or hunting up that nasty, blue
down choked canyon. We spotted across the creek we were
working up something silver back in the timber. As we
were looking for a place to cross the creek, we
found a tree that had been fell across the creek

(40:09):
and the limbs were chainsawed off and footholes cut into
it on each side of the creek. We followed the
trail that lead off the bridge to what we spotted.
It was a camp. I found lots of camps tucked
back in wildernesses and Heidi holes, but this one was different.
It was a totem Pole camp. First impulse was some
type of Satanist at camp, but after checking the camp out,
we realized it was more of a high school or

(40:30):
dope smoking or beer drinking or get naked run through
the woods type of party camp. The camp has been
there for years based on the age of the totems,
only one was fresh. The silver thing was the silver
tarp covering the firewood. There was a couple of references
to bombs and bomb making carved into signs, so needless
to say, we didn't disturb stuff. These weren't standing trees
with carvings on them. They were carved on the ground

(40:52):
that A hole was dug and the totem placed in it.
I liked the Viking helmet and the animal bones attached
the poles. There was strings strung through the trees with
wine bottles and pine cones tied on. That was a
little creepy. We backtracked the blazed out trail out of there.
I wish we had found on the way in instead
of fighting all of the blowdown. I'm going back in
there this summer to check it out. This time I'll

(41:14):
be armed, just in case I'm wrong about the intent
of the camp. I erased the name of the creek
on the one picture to protect the guilty. Maybe I'll
make my own totem