Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game If I may ask just what was your worst jam?

The time the fire pin got cold on a 264 win at the moment of truth . Or when I slid and got stuck so a bugger could pass!!

Had a few but the ones that were fun...kidney stones on a Coues hunt was interesting.


Once broke a driveshaft on my blazer 20 miles from the nearest paved road with a young lady inside who was on crutches...but that one turned out kinda cool.

Rolled my truck 8 miles from camp, 35 miles from cell service and 100 miles from a town, and 350 miles from home. Temperature was -20.
Thankfully there were quads in camp.
It got a little Western...

Snapped the rear axel next to the wheel about 15 miles from nearest phone just before daylight. Spent most of the day walking to the phone.

Got lost for a few hours late in the day during elk season in Wyoming by thinking a drainage I was in was was a totally different drainage. I bushwacked to the top of the mountain to get my bearings before dark and was able to hike to a main forest road and hitch a ride 4 miles back to camp. Not really a close call, but for about four hours it was really unnerving not really knowing where the hell I was.

Got lost by about 8 miles in an Oregon storm and borrowed a truck full of explosives to avoid hypothermia.

Got turned around for an hour or so in a snowstorm with a friend that panicked.

Kodiak Island:
- Couldn't get the outboard I had arranged for
- Inflatable leaked
- Partner had very serious allergic reaction
- Charged by Brown Bear; killed it in self-defense

Despite that, I killed a couple nice Kodiak Blacktails.

Watermelon.

Didn't jell and not enough sugar.

Worst JAM??

Something the mother-in-law sent home. Unknown berries, I think she was trying to poison me.grin

Had a young lady shove her hand down my pants at a party I threw. Her husband was in the next room looking at my .44 Redhawk. My wife was in the bathroom. Does that count?

Outdoor activities have been rather uneventful. Forgot my sling at home in PA last elk season. Bout it.

Jalapeno, boy was it hot!

I tried to make ‘blackberry’ one time...well, actually it was jelly. We have crowberries hereabout but everyone calls them blackberries. They make pretty poor jelly IMO. I even aged some of it for 10 years; it improved some but it still wasn’t really what anyone would consider worthy of toast.

Mint. Lamb is great without it.

Had an SVT38 lock up tight with a fired case in the chamber that I could not drive out with a steel cleaning rod and mallet. Had to take her to a gunsmith. She never would reliably cycle steel cased ammo unless it was lightly oiled despite chamber polishing. Sold the rifle and doubled my money so I don't even miss it, though having one that actually worked reliably would be cool.

Oh thanks. Tff.

Where to start?

Been in 2 vehicles that were totaled.
Rolled one jeep and laid one jeep on its side.
Got gore by a deer TWICE.
Had 2 runaway trucks on mountains passes.
Got stabbed.
Had 3 sticks of dynamite set off 30 feet from me.
Sank a boat in a lake.
Had a business partner steal mega bucks before he fled.
Had an 18 year old girl die in my arms.
And that just what I can think of off the top of my head.

The scariest thing was 3 teenage daughters that lived with me.

Watched a 17 yo kid die while I was trying to render aid and call in life flight... That stuck with me for a while.

That is what I was doing as well but was holding her while others tried to help.
I had to drive the ambulance once. A 16 year old boy that just got his license, rolled his truck while mom and dad followed. He was dead when we arrived but because mom and dad were watching, heroic efforts were made. Mom rode in the front with me. She squeezed my hand all 30 miles to the hospital. She kept pleading with me to pray with her, which I did the whole trip. After arriving we were requested to remain as they may need help with the parents when the news was broke. I was beside dad when the word came. He collapsed in my arms. There was not a dry eye in the house. Hard core firefighters and police all cried along with the family. An experience I hope to never relive.

My stories have mostly been told here, so likely this is a repeat, can't remember.

Trapped by steep terrain at the foot of a cliff in the little melted out gap between glacier ice below and rock wall going up. Goat hunting, I'd climbed a quarter mile up a long steep snowfield as a shortcut to the top that looked passable from below. The old corn snow was soft enough to kick steps in it at first but toward the top it got steeper and hardened toward bluish ice. I cut left for better going but that put me above a sheer drop off cliff and by then I knew that I could not go down without falling. My only hope was up and that way ended against the rock wall cliff, about 40 feet below the top of the ridge. I was relieved to still be alive, but knew that no one would begin to look for me until after sundown the next day.

After sitting for a good while I used a knuckle buster Knap Sport saw to chip footholds up a steep ice ramp that ran up a nearby chute in the cliff face. I determined never to climb beyond my ability to go back down- and never have since.

I was in Fisher Ridge back in '83, on a mapping expedition with the National Speleological Society. I went down the hole with 4 other experienced cavers. At that time Fisher Ridge was not considered part of Mammoth. The mapping expedition I was on was supposed to map the connection between Fisher and the next ridge over. In succeeding years that ridge connected with Mammoth.

The group split into two parties. Party 1, two cavers, were supposed to use hand tools to open up a hole that had been blowing, indicating a large passage on the other side. My group, myself and two others, were sent to map the farthest push so far. We went in about 10 AM with a set of dry clothes bagged up. The water in the creek was cold, and we needed the dry clothes once we got in.

Were were about 2.5 hours from the exit in the mid-afternoon. I was pushing a passage alone, crab walking backwards on a shelf, about 5 feet above the floor. About 80 yards in, a blow blew out my carbide light. While I was relighting it, a blow in the other direction occurred. When I got back to my companions, they were half pissing themselves. The rapid changes in barometric pressure spelled bad things going on topside. We started running for the exit.

Where it had been drips coming from the ceiling, there were now torrents. The exit passage was a 100 foot hands-n-knees crawl through influx water. The passage was filling fast. I went first, and when I got about 10 feet from the mouth of the cave, I found the cave had sumped shut. I turned on my back and kissed the ceiling, found a pocket of air and started swimming. I came out into a massive thunderstorm. The two guys behind me got out. The two guys in the other party did not.

I was left at the mouth of the cave to help the two left in. My two guys went for help. I was standing at the mouth of the cave 20 minutes later when a wall of water came down the valley. I had to scramble out in a hurry to save myself from being sucked in. That was about 6 PM

I stripped and sat under a poncho on the hillside overlooking the entrance. About 11 PM another round of thunderstorms hit. I suddenly felt a sizzle on the back of my head. A second later, lightning hit an oak tree about 10 yards to my right. That was IT! I walked out and met the rescue party about a half hour later, about 10 minutes from the truck. I told them the entrance was sumped shut and anyone in that part of the cave was drowned.

I got cleaned up and spent the rest of the night sitting up with the supposed widow of one of the unlucky ones at a Jerry's. At daybreak, a party was sent in from another entrance. 15 hours later, they came out with the two stranded cavers. They had tried to make it out, got caught in the flood, and had to beat it back to a high spot a few hours in and wait. They had crawled into their garbage bags and lit their last candle, trying to fend off hypothermia before the rescue party got to them.

Three jams in 12 hours. Surprisingly, I kept caving with the NSS for another year after that.

As for gun jams...
Several years ago I shot an elk. It was down but I needed a kill shot. After that, I couldn't open the bolt to eject the empty. I finally had to take it to a gunsmith to pull the barrel. Turned out to be user error. There was 1 case that I'd failed to trim and it was too long for the chamber. I really don't want to know how much pressure it generated to stick like that.

Before I was smart enough to use tape on my gun muzzle, I was in pursuit of a fair sized herd of elk. Wading through knee deep snow I took a digger. Wiping off the snow of my Winchester, I noticed the muzzle was full. With elk all around I had to sit down and use my Bic lighter to thaw the snow from my muzzle. By the time I got the muzzle clean, the elk were in the next county.

that made a little coffee come out my nose. LOL

You're gonna have to tighten that up by year, there, Kawi..... Or at least by half-decade.

Tho over-all I'd say straining an 18 foot flat-bottom boat sideways through a 12 foot span railroad trestle is probably it. It happened, as these things do, real sudden like, through miscalculation (scientific term for dumazz), and I was pinned by the current and the one-inch 5 foot heavy-wall pipe lift-handle to the side of the boat as we went under. I sorta bent that pipe out of shape getting loose.... That's the only time I was at least for a few seconds pretty certain I was SOL dead....

Meanwhile, the Lab , out of all the floating objects, "rescued" the lunch, took it to shore, and ate it (It was a survival situation, after all), while I bull-dogged the boat to shore after it passed thru the trestle.

It is also how my boat got it's name - "Sneer". It appears it wasn't exactly flat on the floor when we welded it back up, and the right front corner has a lift to it.

Blueberry jelly, Mike. We cut the next batch 50% with water, followed the package recipe again, and it set up fine. The first batch made real good pancake syrup...