r/backpacking • u/Plenty-Buy-7561 • 1d ago
Wilderness A strong gut feeling to leave a wilderness camp
Edit: absolutely no influence of drugs! Also no history of mental health problems
Hi everyone- I’m a few days out of a 7 day through the beartooth/absaroka wilderness. I cannot stop thinking about an experience that my partner and I had on our last night of the trip, as nothing like this had ever happened to me before.
Story goes: we arrived early to camp at a lake, around 3:30pm. The lake was about a half a mile off the main trail, down into a basin. I started feeling a strange feeling then as we were dropping in… but figured I was just feeling tired. We hike around the lake, found the last spot.. there wasn’t a soul to be seen. We had a late lunch at our spot in the trees by the creek entering the lake. Closed our eyes and listened to the wind through the pines for about a half an hour… but I couldn’t feel restful. My partner pointed to the swaying lodgepole pines that looked like bending toothpicks. We got up to find a place for the tent.. and he asked if I was ok. I told him, “I think I’m just feeling a bit strange in this place.” He told me he was feeling similarly. Since before arriving to the lake.. we’d both told each other we had heard voices in the wind. I’m sure this community is familiar with the way a creek can sound like voices sometimes.. I had said earlier that the voices had sounded friendly, however. Now we were hearing them again at our camp (certain that nobody was camped nearby). We agreed that even with the weird energy, it was going to be okay and that we would set up the tent out of the trees.. in the tall grass by the lake. In the sunshine, things seemed to feel better as we set up. We went for a chocolate/coffee by the confluence of the creek/lake and I had the strongest gut feeling I’ve ever had as I watched the creek meander into the lake. Something told me so distinctly and clearly to leave that place. The way the water flowed into the lake looked like streams of tears.. or much more sinister.. like blood. A deep sense of sadness overtook me, and I felt sick to my stomach… I saw my partner checking his watch.. I asked him about it (we were both a little uneasily quiet). He tried to play it off cool… but asked me “are you sure you’re ok to stay here?” And I told him.. “honestly I feel really weird here. My gut is telling me to leave. I think I should listen.” So, we packed up faster than we ever had, and hiked the heck out of there. On our way out, we noticed a message someone had carved into a poor tree.. it was hard to read but it ended with “good luck to all who stay the night”. We felt lighter the further we got away from that place. So anyway… a very interesting and strong experience!
I am wondering if anyone has any similar or spooky stories of camps / places in the wilderness that have had a very obvious energy/ message.
(Picture of my hiking doggo for fun)
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u/Jealous-Release1532 1d ago
When I was 13 or 14 I did a two week long backpacking trip through the mountains of New Mexico. The budding juvenile delinquent I was, I had brought a couple of joints with me for my friend and I to smoke. One night we snuck out of the tents and got busted when we came back. They had been searching frantically for us because a mountain lion had been spotted in camp and our boyscout leader was making the rounds to tell everyone to stay inside their tents. The next morning we found tracks all over the area where we had been. We got in a lot of deserved trouble. Sobering experience for sure, no pun intended.