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Did you run into someone being a complete an total toolbag while outdoors? Post about it here, because as we all know, there is nothing goons like more than laughing at idiots/jerks/weirdos! I'll start with something from a while ago. South of the main channel I use to go out into the gulf is another channel that services a well to do neighborhood full of overpriced mcmansions and overly fancy boats. On the north edge of this channel is a very long wall of large rocks that are just under the surface at low tide, and even at high tide with smooth water I'd be leary about going over them in my flats boat. Well, one day while out snorkeling on a nearby flat, me and some friends got to witness some yahoo in a brand new deep v center console boat come hauling rear end down that channel and do what was possibly the dumbest thing possible. They decided to not run to the end of the channel before turning to the north and immediately slammed their nice new shiny boat right up onto these rocks. We waited just long enough to see that everyone was generally alright before just sitting and laughing like a bunch jerks. I imagine the seatow bill and hull repairs set them back a pretty penny.
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Sep 6, 2020 04:17
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Nothing specific springs to mind, but I do have a certain weariness with sports bicycle freaks (aka MAMILs - middle aged men in lycra). Denmark is a biking nation, and mountainbiking in the forest is a huge pastime for men with midlife crises. They'll ride silently and quickly right up behind you, growl "BEHIND YOU" or "GET OFF THE ROAD" and then race past. It ought to be legal to throw a walking stick in their wheel as soon as they act like babies.
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Sep 19, 2020 09:29
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The only time that I had bad thoughts towards other hikers was when we came across a couple on the Sunshine coast trail. They had lots of stories about hiking in Nepal, Spain, and wherever the gently caress else that sounded expensive. That didn't bug me too much but they kept going on and on how difficult it is to carry your own gear. They couldn't imagine doing it on a more challenging hike and they were aghast at the fact that we've never even entertained the idea of hiring someone to do it for us. And then when we got to camp they were on about getting a fire going for the night. In August. In a (semi) protected old/secondary growth forest. In the middle of a drought. With forest fires burning in every other part of the province. They didn't understand what the big deal was and called us a bunch of boyscouts. Unbelievable! Bougie fucks.
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Sep 19, 2020 19:16
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We just got back from a week in Badlands/Black Hills and other campers are the worst. The first site on the edge of Badlands, we put up our tent on a ridge overlooking everything, but got back from hiking to a 40' RV with its rear end 10 feet from our tent which is a big what the gently caress because the area is literal miles of access road to put up camp and there was nobody else within a couple hundred yards of us. T he rest of the week was at one of the national park supported campgrounds in the Black Hills and our neighbors were two drunkass boomers playing fart rock until 11pm every night, having screaming arguments every morning, and then getting wasted and loudly yelling about how much they love each other. But, it was off peak season so the camping was free at least. So I guess that was a tossup. I really don't understand people that want to just get wasted at camp all day every day making the effort to traverse 10 miles of not super great fire road. You could do it for a lot less effort off the main roads. 
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Sep 20, 2020 23:21
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i like to watch for the people wearing worthless or no footwear when I'm doing popular hikes. a few hikes ago I was telling a friend to look out for them and not 3 minutes later a couple rounded the corner coming down the mountain and the guy was completely barefoot holding a pair of broken flip flops with maybe another 2 miles and 1000 feet down rocks to go before the trailhead. its pretty common to see these kinds of people during the busy season but it does sometimes surprise me how far along trails they make it and how ambitious they are to attempt 7 miles and 2500 feet in a pair of shoes they got for $9 at the gas station
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Sep 21, 2020 07:13
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That reminds me of the number of people I saw heading up long trails in Badlands without any water or any real sun protection on a hot as gently caress day.
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Sep 21, 2020 14:17
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PokeJoe posted:i like to watch for the people wearing worthless or no footwear when I'm doing popular hikes. a few hikes ago I was telling a friend to look out for them and not 3 minutes later a couple rounded the corner coming down the mountain and the guy was completely barefoot holding a pair of broken flip flops with maybe another 2 miles and 1000 feet down rocks to go before the trailhead. its pretty common to see these kinds of people during the busy season but it does sometimes surprise me how far along trails they make it and how ambitious they are to attempt 7 miles and 2500 feet in a pair of shoes they got for $9 at the gas station They’re everywhere. Saw a family taking a hike here at my local park a month into “the COVID” a the wife was wearing suede boots pushing a stroller on a muddy bike trail. Two minutes later they were back at the car.
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Sep 22, 2020 03:34
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This past week I did a work trip on the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument. The night before the launch, we got our boats in the water and moved them to the downstream end of the beach as etiquette dictates. The next morning we showed up to load our boats and some private party had yardsaled all their poo poo across a three lane ramp during the night. Unrigged boats, one of them not even inflated, frames, tables, coolers, oars. Three or four of them were still asleep on their raft trailer in camp and two of them stumbled around trying to move stuff while we just wedged our trailer in by their pile and started carrying things around and through them. Boat ramps are just the worst sometimes.
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Sep 22, 2020 03:52
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The best rule I've ever seen for boat ramps is the bigger and/or more expensive the boat, the more fuckery will be involved on the ramp. The aluminum john boat with a vintage 70s 'rude on the back will be in/out before you can blink and the brotruck launching a 24' deep v that might as well have been driven straight from the dealership will take the better part of 30 minutes to launch or recover.
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Sep 22, 2020 11:11
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I watched a bro rip the tow eye out of his dads big cig boat after our local big fireworks show years ago. Crank crank crank whoops.
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Sep 22, 2020 12:38
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Hiking couples where one of them is carrying the pack/water/etc and the other is carrying nothing always make me smirk. Usually the non-carrying partner is the woman, and is clearly dressed to get some instagram shots. Sometimes it's the other way around though. Either way, carry your own poo poo. People who play music on bluetooth speakers on trails bug me too. I don't want to hear your poo poo.
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Sep 22, 2020 13:38
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This is a fun thread that I'm glad I found. I think my favorite idiot hiker story is the guy who bear sprayed his hiking partner in Glacier and then got pissy at my group because none of us had any water to help flush out his eyes and face (this was the last quarter mile of the highline trail so all of our water had been drunk by that point). Thing is, I saw the whole thing happen because they were maybe ten/fifteen yards in front of us. The bear was well off the trail and minding its own business eating berries. The guy just panicked and ripped out the spray and went to town without warning his friend who I don't even think had seen the bear yet. Good times. My other favorite idiot hiker story is from the Lava Canyon hike on the south side of Mount Saint Helens. Very short hike but there's a 30 foot ladder you have to climb down/back up about 3/4s of the way down to the end. Ran into a guy who ate a bunch of mushrooms down there and was just staring up at the ladder terrified to try to climb it.
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Sep 22, 2020 18:46
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I was out climbing the other day and a couple was nearby and one of them talked about Epic Movie and how funny it was.
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Sep 22, 2020 18:49
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FacebookEmpathyMom posted:This is a fun thread that I'm glad I found. I think my favorite idiot hiker story is the guy who bear sprayed his hiking partner in Glacier and then got pissy at my group because none of us had any water to help flush out his eyes and face (this was the last quarter mile of the highline trail so all of our water had been drunk by that point). Thing is, I saw the whole thing happen because they were maybe ten/fifteen yards in front of us. The bear was well off the trail and minding its own business eating berries. The guy just panicked and ripped out the spray and went to town without warning his friend who I don't even think had seen the bear yet. Good times. Oh this reminds me of one of my favorites. I was helping my wife do her field research back when she was in grad school. She'd been doing surveys in a wetland along one side of this lake in a national park, and every morning a cow moose and her calf would come poke around and graze down the bank a ways and they all got along just fine. One morning, this couple who had been backcountry camping in the area happened to be down at the lake at the same time and the woman saw the moose. So she blunders down to the edge of the lake, gets between the cow and calf, and started taking pictures of the calf. Mama moose immediately got irate and started charging her and coughing and stomping and generally being a huge mostly unhinged tank of an ungulate. The lady took off up through the trees blowing a whistle as hard as she could and yelling. My wife had a park service ranger radio and we were just sure we were going to have to radio down to HQ for a ranger to bring a bag up and scraper this idiot into it while we consoled her husband. It all ended fine, but man I hope that woman felt the fullness of her stupidity for a long time after that.
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Sep 23, 2020 02:36
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HenryJLittlefinger posted:Oh this reminds me of one of my favorites. I was helping my wife do her field research back when she was in grad school. She'd been doing surveys in a wetland along one side of this lake in a national park, and every morning a cow moose and her calf would come poke around and graze down the bank a ways and they all got along just fine. One morning, this couple who had been backcountry camping in the area happened to be down at the lake at the same time and the woman saw the moose. So she blunders down to the edge of the lake, gets between the cow and calf, and started taking pictures of the calf. Mama moose immediately got irate and started charging her and coughing and stomping and generally being a huge mostly unhinged tank of an ungulate. The lady took off up through the trees blowing a whistle as hard as she could and yelling. My wife had a park service ranger radio and we were just sure we were going to have to radio down to HQ for a ranger to bring a bag up and scraper this idiot into it while we consoled her husband. It all ended fine, but man I hope that woman felt the fullness of her stupidity for a long time after that. People and wildlife just always result in the stupidist interactions. I don't know what goes through people's heads. I guess not hiking but I love when people just come to a complete stop in the middle of a curvy rural highway and get out to start snapping photos.
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Sep 23, 2020 21:29
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I did a backpack a few years ago through an area where the trail was gone due to storm damage. The NPS explicitly stated to use a map and compass, because the canopy blocked GPS. I had to assist two groups through the storm damage when somehow, magically, their gps failed We came across a third group on a portion of trail that was intact. They had setup camp. I stopped to check on them (you can't camp in non designated areas). Guess what, they're gps told them they had gone past camp. They still had about 2 miles to go. I recommended they turn around...I still really hope they did.
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Sep 25, 2020 07:06
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Theres an incredibly popular hike here in Adelaide called the Waterfall Gully to Mount Lofty Hike. https://www.walkingsa.org.au/walk/find-a-place-to-walk/waterfall-gully-to-mt-lofty-summit-hike/ Its stupidly popular, with more than 600,000 people using the hike every year. Thing is, it goes through a patch of bushland that will go off like a bomb in a fire. In fact, it DID go off like a bomb when Ash Wednesday rolled through. So Parks closes the walk on extreme and catastrophic fire danger days, to the point of installing huge gates at pinch points at the top and bottom. Every single bloody time though, someone HAS to climb around the gate and go climb that stupid hill on a 40 degree day with a howling northerly wind. They get really pissy when you ask them how long its going to take them to climb that hill and they come back with 45 mins to an hr and you point out that in 1984 when the fires ran through, it did the same climb in 18 minutes...
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Sep 26, 2020 14:00
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Old Walking Jim had a song for this thread. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMWk8-nCdig
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Sep 27, 2020 01:58
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While planning some fall/early winter fishing days, I was reminded of a really dumb interaction I had. There is a local wilderness preserve situated on what used to be a big limestone mine. The big pits have been allowed to fill with water and FWC has added a bunch of native aquatic plants along with stocking a bunch of freshwater fish varieties to make it a self sustaining pond. The main ponds are up to 60ft deep in places so they are pretty slow to change temps and the main ponds remain nearly crystal clear. This makes them super popular to swim in that first month or so of warm days in spring here. These ponds are also a locally popular year round fishing area, with bass up to 8lbs being pulled out. So one of the first times I was at this park, I had walked the bank trying different spots, making sure to avoid areas where people were swimming. Finally I got to the far north eastern corner of the main pond where two little fingers of land pointed out making a semi protected little pocket. An absolutely perfect little spot to fish so I drop my gear on the shore and proceed to make some exploratory casts. This spot turns out to be awesome and I'm getting bit on every other cast. I'm at this spot maybe 15 minutes when some dude looking like an extra from a miami vice beach scene comes rocking up with his son and starts setting up towels, a boombox blasting crappy house music, snacks, etc. The noise is annoying, but whatever, not too big a deal, I guess dude just wants to chill in the sun with his kiddo. Except no. Dude takes a running jump off the shore and right into the middle of where I'm retrieving my lures, then starts encouraging his kid to jump in the same spot. Yes, tell your small child to jump where someone is pulling a razor sharp fishing hook through the water, a+ loving idea. I yell out and ask dude wtf he is doing, he tells me its a public park I can find a different spot to fish, I inform him his heads so far up his rear end he could make a plaster cast of it, etc. We both wound up packing up our stuff and finding new spots and I caught bigger fish in another pond that day, but still, dude was a jackass. Thankfully its the only time I've had to deal with people trying to swim where I'm fishing. Usually its people having their dogs (that are not allowed in this park at all for extremely good reasons) jump into the water where I'm fishing which is at least a one and done kinda thing.
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Sep 28, 2020 14:52
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I saw a family heading to King's Peak, both the kids were wearing converses. It's 13 miles one way and it gets kinda rocky in some spots. I have no idea if they made it or not but that just seemed like a horrible choice of footwear
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Oct 3, 2020 17:46
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I was about 6k into a ridgeline walk in the weekend when I passed a couple wearing sandals and carrying a two year old. Turns out they were meaning to do the 25min walk to see a waterfall, missed every single signpost, and just kept on trucking into the bush
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Oct 18, 2020 18:38
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I think my favorite was the group of middle-aged women I saw taking a trail that was marked "Hike at Your Own Risk" due to a minor landslide. Several were wearing slides or flip flops and one was wearing white capris. The landslide had completely washed out a large section of trail but it was passable if you slid down the embankment and walked along a creekbed for a bit. Every person I passed was absolutely covered in mud. A little further up the trail I saw a group who seemed confused on which way to go. One way had man-made steps and a blaze on the tree. The other ...didn't. They asked me where the "official trail" was and I explained the concept of blazes.
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Oct 18, 2020 23:10
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The Rat posted:Hiking couples where one of them is carrying the pack/water/etc and the other is carrying nothing always make me smirk. Usually the non-carrying partner is the woman, and is clearly dressed to get some instagram shots. Sometimes it's the other way around though. Either way, carry your own poo poo. We do this all the time. we will go hike 6-8 miles and just need a few snacks and one water. one small bag does the trick.
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Oct 30, 2020 19:32
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spwrozek posted:We do this all the time. we will go hike 6-8 miles and just need a few snacks and one water. one small bag does the trick. Before we had a kid, that's how we always did it. Trade off halfway through, play "who wants the extra exercise today," or whoever carries the pack doesn't have to deal with the dogs. Now one of us carries the kid and other carries the pack and deals with the dogs.
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Nov 12, 2020 05:34
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The Rat posted:People who play music on bluetooth speakers on trails bug me too. I don't want to hear your poo poo. This. This. This. This. Tourists that think its a good idea to pose with: bears, bison, moose, etc etc.... Lets take a selfie with the ~500 lb plus animal.
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Nov 15, 2020 18:29
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h3r0n posted:This. This. This. This. I grew up in Niagara Falls and our equivalent was people standing on the slippery rocks/climbing over the railing right at the brink of the falls to get a better shot, or pose or whatever.
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Nov 15, 2020 19:58
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h3r0n posted:This. This. This. This. A friend of mine is a ranger at Canyon of the Ancients and her husband is a ranger at Grand Canyon, and they say the most common animal injury is squirrel bites. So yeah don't take a selfie with any animal you loving buffoons.
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Nov 16, 2020 16:55
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The Rat posted:Hiking couples where one of them is carrying the pack/water/etc and the other is carrying nothing always make me smirk. Usually the non-carrying partner is the woman, and is clearly dressed to get some instagram shots. Sometimes it's the other way around though. Either way, carry your own poo poo. My girlfriend has a chronic illness making it difficult for her to carry any significant weight, so when we go on our occasional hikes I’m carrying everything or we’re not going at all. One of my least favorite idiots I meet outdoors are the ones, usually older overly talkative guys, who make jabs at this or for some reason look down on us for stepping outside.
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Nov 17, 2020 02:41
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HenryJLittlefinger posted:A friend of mine is a ranger at Canyon of the Ancients and her husband is a ranger at Grand Canyon, and they say the most common animal injury is squirrel bites. TBF the squirrel bite that contestant got was the best part of the alone series on netflix. I'm sorry little guy...OWWWWWWWWW
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Nov 17, 2020 04:05
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uncloudy day posted:My girlfriend has a chronic illness making it difficult for her to carry any significant weight, so when we go on our occasional hikes I’m carrying everything or we’re not going at all. This is a good point, I had not thought of this
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Nov 18, 2020 16:31
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uncloudy day posted:My girlfriend has a chronic illness making it difficult for her to carry any significant weight, so when we go on our occasional hikes I’m carrying everything or we’re not going at all. There’s something about being on a trail off in the woods talking to another hiker that makes it really easy to make them uncomfortable. Just a dead stop and full eye contact with “what do you mean by that?” gets em flustered. “She carried it up hill, I’m carrying it down,” with no hint of humor is my favorite. Semi-related to looking down on someone for stepping outside, a few years back we were backpacking at Pt Reyes and passed this (I assume) extremely queer guy in booty shorts and a crop top carrying a hard shell hello kitty suitcase backpack thing and greeting us with a really stereotypical “Heeeyyyy” and I for just a minute started to scoff but then I thought “drat, that is way more hardcore than me.” I still think about him a lot and hope he still hikes that way.
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Nov 21, 2020 03:42
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I'm not sure if they count as idiots so much as unprepared or something? Maybe that makes them idiots? I dunno, you be the judge. Probably 10 years ago my GF at the time and I were on a day trip in a canoe. Basically, we each paid about 40 bucks to an "outfitter", they piled use, and a bunch of other people in to a bus drove us upstream with a bunch of canoes. Dumped us off and said "see ya back at the park where you got on the bus"! The river was mostly shallow, slow, meandering water with the occasional narrow spot where the water sped up a bit and there were some riffles and whatnot. Not really a challenge for anyone who'd paddled a canoe more than twice. I'd been on a few canoe trips to Algonquin Park at that point, and my GF had done a bunch of paddling with me at various places so we weren't complete amateurs at it. We come around a bend and see a canoe stuck on some rocks. Its shallow, they ain't going anywhere. Its a dude in the back, woman in the front and their small (2ish?) year old child screaming in the middle. The dude is trying but not having much success, the woman ain't doing poo poo, kid is screaming. We ask them if they need help, they reply in the affirmative. The water was somewhat quick, but not that bad. It was shallow at least, maybe a bit more than ankle deep. I shove my paddle into some rocks and my GF gets out grabs the front of the canoe and does a bit of pushing, some pulling, some lifting and telling (telling them to stick paddle there, push that way, etc.). The dude is trying but the woman still ain't doing poo poo and the kid is still screaming. They get loose from the rocks and the dude is trying to keep the thing straight as they careen down the river but they're pretty much going in circles. They're literally bouncing off rocks, and spinning around in circles as they go downstream. GF gets back in the canoe and we follow. When we get to some slower water we came up beside them and I gave the guy a couple basic lessons on strokes since it looked like he was going to be doing most of the work. We left them at that and when we got back to the park and turned the canoe in, we mentioned to the employees about what happened. No news of drownings or missing people on the river so I guess they made it back.
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Nov 21, 2020 18:00
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HenryJLittlefinger posted:A friend of mine is a ranger at Canyon of the Ancients and her husband is a ranger at Grand Canyon, and they say the most common animal injury is squirrel bites. This makes me think of all the European tourists every summer who need to get rescued or sometimes just straight die in Arizona because they don’t bring enough water. Part of me wonders if they just think Americans are weak and the water pleas are soft or something.
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Nov 21, 2020 19:15
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Europe has basically no true wilderness left so they probably think "ah we'll just get water at the park's cafe when we need some".
stratdax fucked around with this message at 06:38 on Nov 22, 2020 |
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Nov 22, 2020 00:59
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Plus I think it's really hard for lots of people to conceive how far apart things are out west. Like, "area the size of medium-sized European nation" before the next gas station large. Here's a (tragic) tale of a search-and-rescue operation for some Germans who didn't understand that "Death Valley" could be literal: https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hunt-for-the-death-valley-germans/
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Nov 22, 2020 02:12
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Y’all need to read Death in Grand Canyon. It is absolutely fascinating the variety of ways people are stupid there and die from it. I don’t know what the most recent edition of it is, but it’s been revised a couple times since first printing to add more death accounts.
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Nov 22, 2020 06:10
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stratdax posted:Europe has basically no true wilderness left so they probably think "ah we'll just get water at the park's cafe when we need some". this isn't strictly true as parts of russia are in europe e: i think iceland is also in europe? that place is cool
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Nov 22, 2020 12:39
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quote:e: i think iceland is also in europe? that place is cool Humans did cut down all the trees that were in Iceland
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Nov 22, 2020 15:22
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You don't need to be that far from a paved road to have issues, just look up stories of tourists getting trampled by bison in Yellowstone. Sure there's a culture shift to take into account when coming to the US because services can be so spread out, but it's just as easy to get yourself killed outdoors in Europe as it is in NA. People not taking enough water in the SW is more about unfamiliarity with the desert than the acreage of wildlands in your hometown, Europe has only one desert.
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Nov 22, 2020 15:32
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As a European who has spent a ton of time in the American west my take is that we have absolutely no point of reference for the sheer scale and hostility of the place. Someone said up thread about there being no wilderness is Europe and I think that's a pretty fair comment. I've been to some fairly 'remote' places in Europe and you're always within a reasonable walk of a road or a village. The weather might get fairly extreme in say, the desert in Spain or northern Norway in winter but even then you're always near help, and you can't really end up in those places 'by mistake'. In contrast I've been to remote places in the US where if you gently caress up you're multiple days of walk to the nearest help, in rough conditions with no water available anywhere. It actually makes me feel a bit weird just how remote and hostile some of the places I've been are, and I've never felt that way anywhere in Europe. It's very easy to put yourself into a survival situation without noticing you've done so, while in Europe you have to work a bit harder. People do get pulled off mountains in Scotland in blizzards wearing sandals and stuff every year, but radio in mountain rescue and you'll be in the pub by evening. gently caress up like that in the Death Valley backcountry and if you're lucky someone will find your remains a decade later.
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Nov 22, 2020 20:36
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