Dan Meyer provides scary tales of outdoor encounters

It’s every bit as true now as it was in 1969 when the Rolling Stones famously sang the lyric: “You can’t always get what you want.”

In this case, what I wanted was a deluge of fascinating stories from readers about their weird and/or unusual experiences in the outdoors.

I asked for those submissions a couple of weeks ago in a column, promising to regale you all with the myriad tales I would almost certainly receive. I even envisioned having to cull some of the more mundane offerings.

I was almost certain I’d be swamped with enough responses for a couple of weeks’ worth of interesting opinion page material.

What did I get instead?

Crickets.

With one notable exception.

Morganton’s Dan Meyer sent me a hair-raising – and extremely well-written – account from his lifetime in the outdoors, involving two major scares on the same day.

Meyer, a Brooklyn native, is a former executive director for the Outward Bound School based in Table Rock (1971-76).

Prior to that, he was manager of the half-million-acre Yakima Indian Nation Forest in Washington State.

Before that, he worked as a timber cruiser in the Pacific Northwest, a job which, Dan told me “consists of following a compass bearing and stopping at prescribed intervals to measure every merchantable tree within a given radius. Back in the office, these numbers yield an accurate estimate of the kind and amount of wood that can be expected from this forest tract.”

Meyer was working at about 6,000 feet in elevation in early November. The ground was covered with snow and he was wearing snowshoes.

He had stopped in a dense thicket of lodgepole pine (“named for the use of these small-diameter, straight trees to support teepees and lodges,” Meyer wrote).

The woods were noiseless except for the scratching of Meyer’s pencil as he recorded measurements.

Suddenly, barely 10 yards from where Meyer stood, a throaty growl broke the silence, quickly transitioning into a deafening, high-pitched scream. All but invisible amid the thick stand of timber, a bull elk was letting Meyer know these were his woods, and interlopers were not welcome.

And we’re not talking about an outsized Bambi here. Elk, especially bulls, are massive animals. They can kill you without breaking a sweat. At times (during the rut) they tend to develop nasty dispositions.

But, fortunately for Meyer, this bull couldn’t do much more than bellow his displeasure. The density of the lodgepole pines, combined with the size of the elk’s headgear, prevented him from charging.

Tragedy averted, Meyer finished his work and started out of the woods. A mile or so into his hike, he realized he hadn’t been traveling alone on his journey into the timber earlier in the day. A set of clearly defined footprints traced step-by-step the ones Meyers had left that morning.

Before you jump to conclusions, it’s not what you think, even though Meyer was in a place and time that could be considered ground zero for the Bigfoot phenomenon – Washington state in the 1960s.

These were cat tracks. And while the jury is still out on the existence of Sasquatch, mountain lions are most certainly real.

At one point, the big cat’s tracks left the trail, made a wide arc up a steep slope, and ended at a high spot where the lion could get a clear view of the timber cruiser passing beneath him.

“Was I prey or just ‘a person of interest?’” Meyer asked.

Fortunately for Meyer, and for us, the latter would seem to be the case.

While it’s true you can’t always get what you want, as the Stones reminded us, sometimes, you get what you need.

I needed an interesting column for this week, and Meyer supplied it.

Thanks, my friend.