I have a couple... two are on the road mid-trip and one was actually camping. Yes, it's a long post
1. Middle of the Alaska Range. My close encounter. I was in the middle of a mountain bike traverse of a certain corridor of the Alaska Range(traversing Black Rapids side to Tok side for the curious). I climbed up above the glaciers and camped on a nice soft grassy ledge for the night. Hadn't seen another person in 4 days and I'm (90% certainty) at least 40 miles from another human... not a bad palce to be. So I get the tent set up and lay down for the night. I was woken up by breathing outside of my tent and footsteps. The thought of another person didn't even cross my mind as there is simply NOBODY out there. I can't figure out what kind of animal would even be in this area... I hadn't seen tracks for 2 days and I was surrounded by glaciers and rock. More breathing, a snort, more footsteps. I am armed with a leatherman When a body part of some sort pressed against the wall of the tent I kicked it as hard as I could and jumped out the tent door. There were 4 small dall sheep staring at me looking rather surprised...
they had been trying to eat the moss from under my tent. So I moved my tent a few feet over to facilitate... they munched and paced around for the next hour or so.
2. Yukon Territory. My close call moment. I was driving solo from Fairbanks, AK down to the states in the middle of January (I grew up in AK so this isn't odd). I was about 3 hours south of Whitehorse at about 2am and there is a person walking down the middle of the road. If you've been in the area, you know how odd this is in the middle of the winter. I hadn't seen a car in the ditch anywhere or tracks going off the road. My spidey sense was tingling and I made sure my large ball peen hammer was across my lap (used for knocking ice off the bottom of the vehicle and wheelwells). I pulled up alongside the individual with the passenger window down and asked if SHE needed help. This lady never stopped walking and was mumbling something or other. I asked one more time if she was ok and suddenly a guy jumped onto the driver's side of my truck (ford expedition), punching the window and trying to open to door (locked), the lady tried to jump in the open passenger window and get over to me. She got hit square in the forehead with the hammer, fell out the window and I drove off. The guy was still on my running board trying to get in until he fell off at about 20 yeards later when I kicked the door open at about 30mph. I still have no idea what came of those two or if they even survived
3. Idaho. My Stephen King moment. This was on the same trip as the above story. It was the middle of the night (once again) and I was passing through SE Idaho on my way to New Mexico. Hadn't seen a vehicle in a while and was on the lookout for a gas station. I saw a sign for some little town and it had the symbol for gas so I pulled off the highway, hoping they had hot coffee I saw the lights from the bigger Shell station and thought that maybe it was a truck stop and I could pull off and snooze a bit. So I pulled ito the station and fueled up... no other vehicles or semi's around so my plans to snooze would have to wait. I went into the station and there was no employee to be seen. No big deal, was probably in the back stocking something or on the phone. I used the bathroom and started perusing the snacks... looked for some coffee but all 4 pots were cold... odd. After grabbing some snacks I went up to the counter... still no employee. I waited, peeked on their surveillance monitors, nothing. Cracked all the "employees only" doors and shouted a bit... nothing. It was just me in the gas station by myself. I left some cash on the counter for my snacks and went back to the vehicle. I did a quick lap around the building to look for someone and found nothing, not one car. I was pretty tired by then and I saw a sign for a campground 2 miles down the road through town. Couldn't be too bad, it looked like a town of a couple thousand in typical interstate-dependent decor. I drove up main street toward the campground and started to notice something... yes it was 3am, but there was absolutely no movement in this entire town. No glows from TV's in wondows. No lights in windows for that matter. No cars driving anywhere. No people peering at me through their curtains. I thought nothing of it and continued down the street until I hit the road to the campground... I'm not going to lie, it was dark and scary and something wasn't cool about it... so I turned around to head back to the highway. On the way back I shut my radio off, stopped in the middle of main street, and got out to listen. Nothing. No noise at all. This was too weird to leave alone so I went down some of the residential streets... there was one car parked outside of one house in the whole town. No lights on anywhere. I stopped again in the middle of the street again and listened... nothing. Too strange... not even a barking dog or stray cat. I reached inside the truck and held the horn for a good 4 seconds... a single light, angry person, barking dog,or curtain opening would have been fine... but nothing. I decided this was strange enough and headed back to the highway. On my way out, I could still see my money on the counter and the gas station was still empty almost an hour later. Wish I remembered the name of that town.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
I was thinking the same thing about 10 minutes after the fact.
The only story I have was way back when I was 6 years old. I was camping with my family in the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee. We were pulling a pop-up camper all summer long. Good times. On one of the evenings after dinner, my Dad was going outside to smoke. As he stepped out of the camper onto the ground, he stepped right on top of a skunk. I heard him yell "Oh s***!". My mom had to spend the night and the next day trying to get the smell off of my Dad. 
