Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The closest you've ever been to death?

Amazing stories! While I've had several events in the past 60 years,
June of '80 and AK tried the hardest. My cousin and I drove up to Fairbanks from Casper to meet my dad's cousin for a Placer gold mining adventure. Just out of high school, my cousin was one year older. We drove 24 hrs a day to get there on time. On my turn, I fell asleep and woke to the sound of the truck mowing down scrub pines. I tried to get out, but the door was blocked by a 8' tall Boulder. No damage, missed it by inches. We continued on and met up in Fairbanks and headed towards Circle. We dropped our gear as we crossed Birch creek in the mountains. We had a 13' ft al+ canoe, the other three had a makeshift raft of tractor tubes and plywood. We had our gear and almost all of the food. We had 30 miles to float to where the 8" suction dredge had been heloed in, earlier that spring. We drug that canoe so much we popped several spar rivets, we had to fill the holes with pine and rubber cement. My closest call was as we came round a sharp bend, we ran into a snag. I was on the stern and was swept off, I grabbed a root and played bobber until my cousin could get back up to me. My hip waders trying to kill me by sucking me under the jam for what seemed like forever. He got close to me and held out an oar, I was so cold that I couldn't let go of the root, but finally did and made a desperate lunge, I don't know how I managed to grab it, but I did. He swung me over to the eddy. There were a couple other close calls that trip. We swamped the canoe and lost most of our food, I went up weighing 189, came back a month later at 154#. Our journal was pretty interesting.