In a related thread I related a story about my visits to a hot springs in the Santa Barbara backcountry--Agua Caliente. There are also GREAT places to hike. So me and 2 friends go there one weekend. After a Fri, nite soak, we were gonna leave Sat. morning on a 12 like r/t backpack hike, camp out in the middle of fucking nowhere, and the next day hike out, drive to the hot springs and soak our cares away. It's a pretty level hike. Very very beautuful, and the trail goes by a reseviour where we (illegaly) fished (no luck, but we saw HUGE bear tracks at waters edge.) So we get to this backpack campground. The hiking book I used for a reference had outdated info. The "camground" consisted of a rock ring in a clearing--that was it. So anyway we get high and finally about 11 p.m. or so deciede to crash. We had all brought hammocks and we pitched them and soon fell asleep. Sometime in the middle of the night I hear stange noises and I look around and there is a pack of wild boars passing through the campground. They're all around, both around us and UNDER us! Like I said, we were in hammocks so we were relatively safe, but male boars--peccaries to be exact--have sharp tusks and know how to use them. Now they may not have bothered us if we had been sleeping on the ground next to the campfire--who knows? But I sure was glad we were in hammocks. P.S. This was one of the trips when we used a REAL "energy drink". Kool-aid with cocaine added. You can hike until you're exhausted, take a few swigs of energy water and a few minutes later are ready for more hiking.
Nice coupla stories, ranger. Great idea for an energy drink. Maybe you can market it and make a fortune, then hightail it somewhere when people find out what's in it. How much do you know about whitetail deer? Time for a story of my own. This past Christmas Eve, I was sitting in the woods smoking a Christmas joint to myself, a tradition I'm making. Just about every day, anywhere between 4 and 16 deer will wander through our backyard, eating the corn we put out, and naturally they frequent the roughly 15 acres of woods on our property. So I'm smoking a joint, in complete darkness save for faint houselights behind me. I hear movement in the woods, so I try to stay quiet, except for occassional coughing. About 30 yards away, downwind of me, I start hearing snorting. A deer kept snorting and grunting at me for about 15 minutes. It was like the deer thought I was another deer, in the same territory and it was trying to scare me off. I know deer have been known to eat plants, but do you think the cannabis smoke had anything to do with it?
I think the smoke might have affected the deer--animals are afraid of fire. But I doubt the smell of pot smoke would affect it. Or maybe, like you stated, it was a buck and you were in it's territory.
Well, it was a joint, so there was no fire, just small clouds of smoke every few seconds. It probably was territorial, but it might not have been a buck. Usually the deer we see are does or yearlings, but occassionally there will be a buck or two. Oh well. I figured you would be the one to ask, so I did.
