Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Craziest or coolest thing seen/found while

I found where a tree grew around the motor of an old Harley . Entire bike was there parked behind the remains of an old corn crib tree just grew up and around motor.
Also was cutting a hollow tree and found a scythe inside it

I don’t sit down and forget anything.

I have OCD, I make sure I got all my shît before up and move.



Halfway thru that Mammoth Cave 3 hour tour, they was bleachers in there our group sat down for some guide tour happy talk

Rest of them people in that group probably thought I was some sociopath. I kept shining my flashlight under them bleachers as we mounted up, “alright people I got all my shît we can proceed, I got my wallet, I got my phone, I got my keys,I got my lighter, I’m good”

I once saw a 50's car sitting behind an even older barn. The hood was open and a 6" tree had grown up between the motor and the frame. It was at least 10' tall.

Scaling a very steep game trail toward timberline elk hunting in Wyoming when I found a heavy duty dining fork in my path. I took it.

Coolest thing: buddy and I were elk hunting during archery season in Colorado several years ago. We came over a ridge line in the trees and about 300-400 yards away there is a giant rock similar to Pride Rock in the Lion King movie that jutted out of the mountainside looking over the mountains. Looked just like Pride Rock. On the rock sunning herself was a mountain lion with 2 kittens playing on the rock. She knew we were there and watched us as we watched them with our binoculars. My buddy had just bought a new video camera with a lot of zoom to carry while hunting and film cool stuff. He of course left it at camp that day. I took a picture with my regular camera which amounted to a picture of a speck on a giant rock on a mountainside. Watching her with those kittens on that rock is one of my favorite memories.

Before my time but way back when a local guy was out in the sagebrush hunting deer. He shot a nice buck but needed both hands to drag it. He set his lever action Winchester against a sagebrush where he could find it and dragged the deer out. Yep, he couldn't find the rifle. 30 years later he was hunting in the same area and there it was, still leaning against the same sagebrush. I suspect the wood looked a bit rustic by that time.

My buddy and I were mule deer hunting an had climbed a hill to sit and glass between some boulders. Next to my foot I saw tiny flu specks when I looked closer they were beads that ants were pushing up out of a hole. We scuffed away some dry dirt and gravel and found a stone spear head. I have no idea what the beads were from but made us wonder if someone was buried under foot.

Found those at the top of a steep hill with no roads anywhere around. I guess there’s an old homestead somewhere in that area.

Not sure what the cylinders are. They were perfectly smooth like they were drilled. They’re about 36” diameter

Found an old log cabin foundation and remnants of a wood stove, old bottles, metal spikes 2 miles from the nearest road via gps on an island in Ontario. I’m guessing it was an old logging camp. I walked across a lonnngg beaver dam to get to it. Pretty cool but I can’t find the pics of it.

In Ontario, found some old car parts at the bottom of a pretty good sized hill/mountain. Amongst those parts I found 2 Ontario license plates daring back to the mid 50’s. Not sure if those were car wrecks or just a dumping spot.

A few odd things

40+ years ago I was hunting western PA and came across a abandon group of buildings that the locals later told me was a war time factory for Sylvania hid back in the boonies. They were old and creepy looking after all those years sitting empty. Tried to find them again 20 years later and could not find a trace.

30 years back my wife and I were returning from a weekend trip at my Potter county PA hunting camp, on the twisty old road from Cherry Springs heading to Galeton it was a Sunday morning as we rounded a corner and saw 3 nuns with fishing poles in their hands walking out of the fog. We pasted the field and looked back and could not find them again, later I checked and was told there are no convents nearby.

Found a few old Cemetery's in the mountains of rural PA that were way off the beaten path and run down. Looking at the head stones from 1800's it was sad of how many young children died every year in that area.

way back in i found a metal front grill from an old car. it was one that had a hole in the bottom for the crank handle. model t or something. it was way back in. i leaned it against a tree and it was still there last time i went up there about 10 years ago. the funny thing is there are no roads anywhere near it and it would be almost impossible to get a modern 4x4 back in there. no idea how it got there.

Camp Bullis Military Training Area, back in the years when I was employed by a Contractor monitoring bird populations.

Used to find all sorts of stuff left out there, from all different eras, mostly ammo related, like rusty bits of machine gun ammo still in links, inscriptions from the 1930's inside concrete blockhouses, ponchos, a 0.50 cal machine gun bullet in the dirt, pointed away from the range two miles in back. A friend tripped a whiz-bang practice claymore left armed.

Coolest thing though was behind the range fans, an area I was able to get into only once a season. On an open hillside a sunken grave-sized rectangle of collected rocks likely from the old days when that area was open prairie. I always wondered who had been buried there and when. Maybe Indians or outlaws got him and their friends buried him there.

I would like to see those lava bubbles. Next time I'm over that way. I will look for something like those things.

Birdy,

While I was doing contract OPFOR at Bullis I came home with a bunch of them heavy azz 1930’s era tent stakes that were used to set up the WWI era GP medium tent. They work real good with my big square awning set up. They had been driven in the ground and left there when the tent was taken down.

While coyote calling, I walked through a pasture in west central Ks. It was very near where I was born and raised. At one time several hundred people moved to this location and established a small town in the late 1800s, in anticipation of the RR passing through this town. The RR did not pass through the town and it collapsed.
Lots of foundations, rusty nails and bits of metal are all that remain. All I found of interest was a mule shoe, that was very rusty.

Got aggravated one day at some belligerent weenies in the north end of the A Shau Valley. They were playing games in the elephant grass, hide and plink stuff. On a whim I had the gunner chuck a couple of WP grenades about 30 yards up wind from them. The fire started and a few minutes later we flew thru a huge fireball that bloomed in our face. That was the craziest thing. Coolest was the next day, same place, no pun intended. The entire north half of the valley was ash. Burned up a few big trucks they had hidden in revetments, and I lost track of the number of 12.7mm AA gun pits we had exposed. Footprints is the ash going every which way and me laffin' like crazy.

The south end of the valley got torched that day and it pretty much shut them down for several months in the valley floor.

Now you know why I like fire.

Arthur Brown

Petrified wood in the artic circle couple hundred miles from a tree.
Crashed Super cub
Two crashed WWII bombers
Petroglyphs, one was of a 6 fingered hand?
Spear points
Headstone at an abandoned homestead in the desert with two names said were shot in 1878.
Mountain lion, bears, deer, fox burned to death in Forest fires.
.50 BMG casings
Japanese glass fishing floats on Alaska beaches
Foothold traps
Lost Christmas tree hunters near death.

Been hunting Slumlord’s back yard I see. Next time take a pic of the Curtis Mathis Teevee collection.

I found a corn pile behind the truck so I think I may have stumbled across Slum’s property line. Don’t tell him.

While rebuilding a fence corner, I found an old Zippo, engraved EJM - brought it home, and showed my office manager. Turned out it had been her brother's, seems he had worked for my father-in-law (sporadically) years ago.

Maybe it’s just part of my growing up, I don’t consider old abandoned cars or outbuildings or old foundations grown over with brush and trees as anything out of the ordinary. Heck, western PA’s woods has hundreds of old abandoned farms and such that I never gave it much thought.
I guess maybe that’s why I’m sort of a fatalist about stuff like legacies and things like that.
I constantly reminded that at one time, someone did all they could to carve a home and maybe a farm outta the woods, only to end up long gone and trees growing up through the old foundation, and woods retaking what had been a productive field.
A couple of decades is all it takes. People’s priorities tend to change.
Someday I’ll be one of those guys in the pictures that grandad has that nobody recognizes!
7mm