Scary Hiking Stories to Keep You Off the Trails This Summer
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What unexpected event changed the hiking trip?
My brother Marcus has a dog named Boone, and Boone is the only reason I'm alive to write this. I should start by saying I'm not a hiker. Not really. I work in HVAC. I'm on my feet all day crawling through attics and basements. And the last thing I usually want to do on a weekend is more walking. But Marcus had been planning this trip for most of a year, and back in May our father had a heart thing that turned out to be nothing serious but scared all of us, and I think Marcus wanted the two of us to do something together while we still could. So when he asked me to take a week off in the middle of July and come out to North Carolina to hike a loop in the Pisgah National Forest with him, I said yes.
I didn't want to. I said yes anyway.
How did Boone the dog react to danger on the trail?
Marcus is four years older than me, He's the kind of person who reads the gear reviews, who has the spreadsheet, who knows the difference between the water filters and has opinions about all of them. He'd done this loop before, years earlier, with a girlfriend who's now long gone from his life, and he talked about it like it was a place he needed to go back to, about sixty miles total. He figured six days if we took it easy, which we were going to, because of me. We'd start at a trailhead off the Blue Ridge Parkway, drop down into the drainages, follow a creek for a while, climb up to a ridgeline, and come back around. He had it all mapped. He had permits where we needed them. He'd planned the water sources and the campsites, and even where we'd hang the food at night.
I flew into Asheville on the Saturday, and Marcus picked me up at the airport, and we spent that first night at his place, which is a little rental cabin he keeps about 40 minutes outside the city. up a gravel road surrounded by trees.
What signs indicated something was wrong during the hike?
He'd laid all the gear out on the floor of the living room in two piles, mine and his, and he walked me through every piece of it like a man unpacking for surgery. This is your sleeping bag. This is your pad. You blow it up like this. Don't overdo it or it's too firm. These are your socks. You'll wear one pair and keep one dry. The dry pair is sacred. You never hike in the dry pair. This is the water filter.
What happened when the group encountered a suspicious man?
And he held it up like it was made of gold. And I rolled my eyes at him and he said, you'll thank me. And he was right. Except for what actually happened, which neither of us could have planned for. That evening we drove into the little town near the trailhead, and ate dinner at a diner and stopped at a gas station to top off and grab a few last things, and there was a Forest Service bulletin board outside the gas station with the usual stuff tacked to it. Bare warnings. A notice about a trail closure somewhere else in the district, and a couple of faded missing person flyers under the plastic. I didn't really look at them. I wish now that I had. One of them, I found out much later, was for the hunter.
How did the group respond to the escalating tension in the woods?
He'd been missing almost two years by then, and the flyer was sun-bleached almost white, just a ghost of a face and a phone number you could barely read. I walked right past it carrying a bag of beef jerky and a bottle of Gatorade, and I didn't give it a second of thought. Marcus says he doesn't remember the flyer at all, but it was there. It had been there the whole time. And he was bringing Boone. Boone is a shepherd mix, mostly black, with some brown on his legs and chest. Big through the shoulders, with one ear that stands up and one that flops. Marcus got him from a shelter about five years ago, and the two of them are inseparable in a way that I used to find a little much, honestly. The dog sleeps in his bed.
The dog rides in the front seat.
What critical decision did they make after the attack?
But Boone is also genuinely a good dog. Calm, steady, not a barker. He'd done plenty of camping with Marcus, and he knew the drill. I remember thinking when Marcus loaded him into the truck at the trailhead, that having the dog along would make the whole thing more relaxed. A dog like Boone, you don't worry. You just follow him. I want to be very clear about something before I go on, because it matters for everything that came after.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What unexpected event changed the hiking trip?
0:22–1:07
2
How did Boone the dog react to danger on the trail?
1:07–2:08
3
What signs indicated something was wrong during the hike?
2:08–2:34
4
What happened when the group encountered a suspicious man?
2:34–3:16
5
How did the group respond to the escalating tension in the woods?
3:16–4:05
6
What critical decision did they make after the attack?
4:05–4:54
7
What were the consequences of the group's choices during the hike?
4:54–5:48
8
What lessons were learned about safety in the wilderness?
5:48–1:42:25
Speakers
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