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Stories

This is a collection of camping and outdoors stories from you (the reader). We have heard many fantastic (and hard to believe) stories and learned a great deal from your experiences. Feel free to share your outdoor adventures with us.

Please post your stories as comments to this page or if you have photos to go along with the story then e-mail your story and photos to guy@unwindoutdoors.com.

I will start off with one of my true stories. This story is 100% true (I have a photo of the moose to prove it!).

Moose treats

Moose Snacks

I was backpacking with my brother and 4 other friends up in the high Uintah mountains in Utah. I won’t give you all the details but get straight to the action. Early in the morning after our first night camping I was the first to wake up. I went and sat on a rock next to a small river near our campsite and started reading my bible when heard a noise up stream. I looked up and saw a big cow moose drinking at the edge of the stream maybe 30 yards away from me. She saw me and calmly walked away into the trees. I ran into camp and woke up my friends (my brother stayed in his tent) who followed me on a hunt to find this cow moose which for us is an animal we only get to see a few times in our lives.

Anyways, we followed the river and hiked uphill looking for the moose. My friend had his camera with him and wanted to take some pictures. As we hiked upstream we started to hear some branches cracking. Something was walking around just across the river from us. We all crossed the river and walked into an opening in the trees. Right there in front of us, only 20 feet away, stood a large bull moose staring directly at us. We were all froze and watched as the big bull snorted and kicked his back hills into the dirt. He then did the unthinkable…he lowered his head and started to run straight at us!!! I have never run so fast in my life and luckily we all outran him. He could have definitely torn one of us apart.

Moose at 10 yards
Moose at 10 yards

So, my friend has the inclination to go back and take a few pictures of the moose. Well my adrenaline wash rushing and I said “what the heck!” so we hiked back up stream until we found him. He stood on one side of the stream and we stood on the other. With shaky hands my friend snapped a couple of shots and then we got the heck out of their.

We were really lucky than none of us had to go home in an ambulance. It was an experience of a lifetime. Not one that I think I would want to have again. I do have a picture of the moose that my friend took. I will find it and post it here.

Close up of moose
Close up of moose

3 Responses

  1. One of my fondest memories of camping is when I was about 10 yrs. old. We lived in Klamath Falls, Oregon at the time and my favorite cousin and her family were coming to visit us from Ogden, Utah for a few weeks in the summer. We decided to give them a taste of the wonderful outdoors there by taking them camping on the Oregon Coast! (I’m not sure you can even do that anymore.) We were there for three days and two nights and had a blast searching for starfish, swimming in the Pacific, exploring the rocks at low tide, and just sunbathing. Now those are not activities that you usually associate with camping! The best part, of course, was just spending time with 7 of the people that I love the most in the whole world.

    • Thanks for your post! I have always wanted to camp at the beach. Do you have any photos of the trip?

  2. One of the craziest camping experiences I’ve had was when I took a backpacking course in college, and we went backcountry winter camping in Yellowstone. The first day we packed in about 7 miles, and when we got around to setting up our tents, it had started to snow pretty hard. The two other packers I partnered up with and I were working feverishly to get the tent up so we could get out of the blizzard. Well, the tent happened to be one we were unfamiliar with, and we were pitching it all wrong. We had poles in the wrong places, and it was so frustrating at the time. I’m pretty sure our instructor was trying not to laugh. We were the last ones with our tent up, and definitely the wettest ones, but once we were down for the night we couldn’t help laughing about it. It snowed pretty hard that night, and we woke up to the most serene scene. Beautiful. No freeway or bus or building for miles and miles — not a sound, just crisp bright beautiful nature. And cold. Did I mention it was cold? Thank goodness we finally got the tent right!

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