My Creepiest Night Hiking Experience

hey y'all Dixie here because I just posted a video several days ago about not hiking I thought it would be a good idea to share with y'all a story about not hiking and if you remember a while back I shared my most gessie isnora experience and and told y'all that I might start doing some of this storytime and it seemed like folks were kind of up for that so now I'd like to share with y'all my creepiest night hiking experience so once upon a time in a faraway land called the Appalachian Trail I was on a thru-hike and I was already about 500 or so miles in I'd taken about a week off trail because one of my siblings was graduating high school and I had just returned back to the trail and the folks that I had made friends with known as my Trail family or trimly we're about a week ahead so I decided to take on the challenge of catching up with him I knew if I was gonna catch them that I'd have to start honking more hours of the day which meant I was gonna be doing a lot of not hiking sometimes not stopping until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning when I would just kind of stumble around like a zombie set up camp and then wake up the next morning and do it all again because as many of you know you don't always have service while you're backpacking and then I didn't know if all of them would have service even when I did the best way to find out if I was catching up with them or not was to check the shelter log books on the Appalachian Trail there are shelters which are three sided structures that are spread if I had to guess about an average of ten miles apart and in each of those shelters you'll find a notebook of some sort that usually has entries in it and all of the folks that I was trying to catch up with would write in the shelter log books ketchup Dixie and what date they were there and and usually if they were staying for the night or eating lunch so I would check those every day and every time I would pass a shelter because it was exciting to see if I was gaining on them or not and I really didn't want them to know how close I was getting because I had this idea in my mind that I would sneak up on him and the night while they were sleeping or something and surprise them so anyway as the day's progressed I started closing the gap more and more one particular night while now hi can I approach the shelter at about 2:00 a.m. and I had gotten pretty good at my ninja skills so even though everybody was asleep I managed to sneak in grab the shelter log book and it was actually kind of wedged a little bit under somebody's sleeping pad but I was able to pull it out go off to the side read it find how close I was from my friends sign the shelter logbook you know with something like came in like a thief in the night or something like that and then slid it back in that way folks could get a laugh about it in the morning and I left that shelter put in my earbud one so I could still kind of hear the noises of the night in my other ear and I've been listening to Fleetwood Mac's Rhiannon for like oh wow like I was kind of fixed on it for this particular stretch of not hiking several nights in a row because it's kind of got a good beat that you can walk to and it's got that creepy vibe to it that's perfect for not hiking so anyway I headed back into the woods listening to Rhiannon and not long after I entered the woods I know it's it a lot appeared behind me and I thought oh no I hope that I didn't wake somebody up and disturb them while they were trying to sleep and I just kind of kept trucking along and thought well have to be more quiet next time so I kept kind of walking on but I noticed that the light was kind of following me a little bit and I thought well maybe they had to get up and go pee and they kind of walked onto the trail a little bit to do that so I trucked on for a couple more minutes and I noticed that the light was still coming through the trees down the trail and so then I started to worry a little bit like have I made somebody mad and they're coming after me to like give me a lecture in or you know what's going on here so I kind of picked up the pace a little bit and the light still followed so trying to justify it in my mind any way I could I'm thinking well maybe somebody else is not hiking but again now it's past 2 a.m. like what kind of crazy fool is out hiking on the trail past 2 a.m. other than me so anyway I decided that it was a little creepy to me to meet up with people on the trail at night and I didn't know what this particular person's intentions might be so I thought it best to just try to pick up my pace and go you know at a faster speed to try to just kind of leave this person in the dust so I'm trucking along a little bit faster and after several more minutes passed I still see that this person is behind me and keeping up with me at my faster pace faster than most through hackers would go especially after a full day of hiking and they're not falling back at all so I start panicking and going as fast as I possibly can I mean y'all I'm basically running down the trail and it was kind of a more damp night so rocks and roots and stuff we're slick I was falling down and scrambling back up two to go as fast as I can my heart was pounding and I thought this person's coming after me and surely it's not for a good reason if they are also running down the trail to catch me so I'm just going you know as fast as I can for as long as I can and I am just about exhausted and run down so the last thing I know that I can do because it's not safe to turn around and head back to the shelter and at this point I'm so far away that even if I screamed nobody at the shelter is probably gonna hear me so I just did the only thing that I had left to do in me and the energy for and that was ditch off the side of the trail into the brush and into the leaves and such and I just hope that if I cut off my headlamp and laid there that maybe they would pass and and not see me and I had to do it quickly because they were gaining on me and I was hoping that they wouldn't hear me ditch off so I got down and I'm just laying there like in tears and I turned to look at the lap that I know it's quickly approaching and in the darkness I realized that the LAT that's coming after me is the min the whole time I was about to kill myself getting away from the moon there was nobody coming after me it just had happened at almost perfect timing that as I was leaving the woods the moon had risen so I guess the moral of the story is that some people don't grow out of believing that there are monsters in the dark or maybe just don't psych yourself out by listening to Rhiannon while not hacking alright y'all well I hope you enjoyed the story of my most creepiest not hacking experience and you know I've vowed because I made such a fool out of myself that I would never tell that story but here we are so if you all have any stories like that where you've just really made a fool of yourself while backpacking or not hacking then feel free to share that with me thanks for watching y'all we'll see you next time

Channel: Homemade Wanderlust

Views: 226,649

Rating: 4.9229398 out of 5

Keywords: travel, hiking, backpacking, hike, gear, adventure, fun, story, Appalachian, Trail, PCT, CDT, thru-hike, Auburn, Alabama, epic, climbing, canyon, national, nature, mountains, update, park, lake, trail, tents, camping, summer, University, Aubie, River, stream, Mountains, National, Scenic

Id: 0yPsCR5ew4I

Length: 6min 59sec (419 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 12 2020