Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire What is things have you discovered while hunting?

Here's a photo I took of where it sits. It's at the red X. A glacier could have put it there but it's lava and there's no other lava for many miles. It's in the Wood river valley abut 20 miles north of Ketchum.

Same as 1minute on the flat ground homesteads in the Snake River country. Lots of old farm implements. Found an old railroad camp on Hogg Rock in Oregon where the Chinese? laborers set up their big tents or buildings. Found some old stove parts nearby. There's an amazing rock retaining wall going around the mountain (Hogg Rock) that I guess was to support the railroad grade. Lots of it have has been taken out by avalanche slides. Found a fired 270 round nose bullet in a mountain meadow when elk hunting one year. Didn't look like it hit anything but had marks from the riflings on it.

Came up on a drug cooking shack like the one described above, didn't see it until I was real close. Came across many MJ grows on national forest land before pot was legalized in Oregon. Some grows had cables stretched between the trees with giant nets overhead. Looked like something out of Vietnam. Walked into one active grow and got lucky the guard wasn't there, but I could see where he'd spent the whole summer sitting guarding that patch. He probably would have shot me if he'd been there.

Went fishing in Alaska once and had a bush pilot drop me off at a lake about 60 miles out of Anchorage. Found an old aluminum boat covered in brush and an axehead that I was able to use to cut a pole to push myself around in the boat with. Caught so many pike my arms and back ached.

Found lots of axe and arrowheads over the years. A few vintage metal wagon and homesteader items. Found a Benjamin .177 pellet gun leaning up against a tree once. It was the old brass one so I refinished the stock and it worked great since it didn't rust. One spot found a bunch of hyroglyphics (sp) on a hidden rock wall in a canyon while out coyote hunting. Some of the paintings depicted deer hanging upside down. A few feet away was a round hole shaped exactly like a vase about 2' across, in solid rock, going down at least 6'. I think it was used to hang game upside down underground for storage. Also there from later years were the remains of a still. It was very difficult to find.

Find old cars the coolest being an old Packard. Brought the hood and lights home from that one, they're out in the front yard. Antlers, dead critters. Cabins, gold mines, abandoned logging operations.
You name it!

Find a few blacktail deer too.

That boulder could be the remains of a volcanic "bomb" ejected from one bad momma volcanic eruption possibly millions of years ago.

Glacial erratic.

Once read rocks the size of coffee tables were ejected as far as Vegas from Mammoth in CA.

finally!

the general sherman is the largest stem tree in the world. it is in california so i guess your claim that the biggest in the US is in Idaho might fly!

hunting on a ridge about 10 miles back in we found a trappers cabin on the edge of a meadow. still had the door on it but the snow of 96-97 had crushed the ridge pole and roof. walls about 3 feet into the ground and 2 feet above. 6 foot roof overhang over the entrance with the stove sleeve just inside the door. the door was split cedar with hand wrought strap hinges.
on the inside of the door were about 50 names scratched or written in pencil. all were dated and started in 1873. there was one that was very interesting. T.Roosevelt 1888

Over more than 60 years of hunting Arizona's backcountry, I've found two different rotting riding saddles and one packsaddle hung in trees a long way from any road, apparently left there after their owners had horse wrecks and never returned to retrieve them.

I also found the complete skeleton of a big bull elk stretched out with a leg caught in the middle and top wire of a fence that ran across the side of steep mountain. There also were two instances of deer skulls and antlers growing out of the forks of trees where meat hunters had discarded the heads. When hunting mountain lions and bears with hounds, we came across a young male killed by another lion, partially eaten and covered with dirt and brush.

Before people started packing this stuff out, there were lots prehistoric Indian artifacts, parts from wagons and autos from the early 1900s, rusty kerosene lanterns and wood stoves, as well as primitive mining equipment dating back to the arrival of Spaniards in our mountains.

I also found a very old sheath knife with a rusted blade and a crumbling bone handle. I was gutting a mule deer and laid my knife down to do something. When I went to pick it up, I found this old knife next to it. Who knows how long it had been there, but this was about 1955 and someone had gutted a deer many years earlier exactly where I'd shot my buck.

My greatest find was a Spanish arrista, a round flat rock about six feet in diameter and two feet high with a donut-like hole through the middle of it. These were used to crush gold and silver ore and were powered by oxen and mules. It must have weighed a couple of tons and there was no way to get a vehicle to it, but someone, somehow had hauled it off before I took a friend to the site to show it to him.


Bill Quimby

I'll be damned......did not know that.

My favorite thing to run across was the old Basque sheep herder carvings on the Aspen trees in No. NV.

Found one tree that Pedro or Juan or whatever his name was had marked every year from 1922 until 1938.

That's a lot of lonley years in the mountains. No wonder they liked to carve neked women.

Some of them were pretty damned good at it too.

Found a cistern in the woods, no house, but there were giant pecans and pear trees. It had to be an old homestead there at one time.

Lots of really big boulders moved around by glaciers as well as rocks imbedded in floating ice during the Missoula floods.

Lots of old logging equipment half buried and rusting out. Couple of caves with left over mining timbers and rails. Couple of watches, wearing one currently. Old cans, bottles and misc stuff.

However the coolest thing ever found was by my pops. Hunting the Sweetwater Mtns in Eastern Sierra he found an old mining claim inside a very old Prince Albert can. Found it crossing the middle of an old mudslide. Just happen to look down at the right time and saw the metal glinting up from between some large boulders. Early 1900s if I remember correctly. I’ll get some pictures and post them sometime.

weather balloon, flashlights, old knives, arrow heads-even found a porn mag tied to a deflated 45th birthday balloon-also found a very lost and very drunk mexican fella once, felt bad for him and gave him a ride to town so he could call someone.

Old logging areas in Adirondacks - old crosscut saw blades ( I can think of three still hanging on trees that I could relocate), wagon wheel rims, iron parts from logging sleds, steam locomotive boiler, brown stoneware jug, old bottles/cans/buckets when you come across a logging camp location, a large stack of hemlock bark that had to be 80 to 100 yrs old that never made it to the tannery (in an area we call tanbark ridge!)

Every now and then come across a hemlock tree that has been hit by lightening, impressive - they look like they exploded.

We have an old hunting knife at our camp that someone found 10 or 15 yrs ago that cleaned up an sharpened nicely - its in kitchen use now.

I stumbled onto an old trapper's cabin near West Point, Ohio while out grouse hunting. It was caved in, but I poked around and could see stretcher boards inside, and typical cabin junk. I did find a frizzen for a muzzleloader inside the door. Dad used to talk about an old oil pump station up on the mountain above our camp in Pa. He'd hunt his way up there and visit the old grease monkey than manned the pump. It was one of these setups where the pump burned the oil it was pumping to pull the oil up to the holding tank. They guy lived up there year round, and always had a cup of coffee to share with visitors. Dad would take him up a sandwich and a candy bar-said he was always glad to get something beside the squirrels and venison he lived on. I tried for years to find that site. Finally one year, I stumbled onto some old pipe laying on the ground and backtracked it to the well. The pump was long gone,except for the mounts it had stood on, and the holding tank was still there, but in bad shape. The only thing left of the shack was some corrugated tin roofing or siding.

I had another interesting find up in the mountains there too. I was still hunting out on a long ridge and came across a propellar out in the middle of nowhere. Not a mark on it, no twisted blades-it looked like someone just placed it there. I looked up through the trees looking for sawed off branches where it's flight path may have taken it, but the trees were not busted up at all. I've always wondered how that came to end up there.

While elk hunting with my son in New Mexico, we found a Taurus Judge handgun lying next to a fire ring.
We found the owner when the hunt was over.

How'd you know who to look for, Sal?

I had almost forgotten about this one! I found this about 16 years ago while sheep hunting above Sunlight Creek north of Cody, WY. I referred to it as a "rock pup tent". The walls are made of rock with small logs across the top for a roof. It's just large enough for one man to get into. It was in a drainage that appeared to have had some mining done. I can't even imagine calling this home while I worked my claim.

Sorry about the poor picture, bought a cheap digital for my sheep hunt. I guess you get what you pay for! memtb

We ran into a guy with his eyes on the ground walking circles in the woods and asked him if he had lost something.
He described the gun to a T including the three .410 shells in the cylinder.