Take time to share with me your 'weird findings in the outdoors'

A few years ago, I was perusing fishing websites and came across a message board with a thread called “Weird findings in the outdoors.”

Several glassy-eyed hours later, I found my way out of the rabbit hole and returned to real life. The topic, for me anyway, was positively addictive.

The stories folks had posted ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime.

The ridiculous: A family of Bigfoots (Bigfeet?) saved me and my little sister from a snowstorm and a pack of ravenous wolves.

The sublime: A hunter hiked for miles into the isolated back country of the Pacific Northwest and located a prime vantage point — high ground overlooking a well-traveled game trail, with a massive boulder for a backrest.

Settling in for the day, he glanced down and saw a perfectly formed stone arrowhead on the ground. Seems he wasn’t the first hunter in those parts who knew a good ambush spot when he saw it.

Never one to pass up an idea for an easy column, I made a Facebook post asking my friends for their own tales of weirdness in the wilderness.

I was deluged. There were so many stories it took me two weeks to chronicle them all.

There were eerie howls in the middle of the midnight woods; strange footprints in the snow; chance encounters with dangerous beasts; and of course, the obligatory naked hippie dude sitting on a rock and playing the guitar.

I’m hoping to get a similar amount of feedback on this column.

That’s partly because I’m genuinely interested in hearing — and retelling — your experiences, and mostly because that will give me another easy column for next week.

So, please send your accounts of all things weird, wacky, and bizarre you’ve encountered afield to marty@thepaper.media.

I’ll get the ball rolling by describing one of mine.

A dozen summers ago or thereabouts, on the fly-fishing-only trophy waters of the Raven Fork River in Cherokee, I had seen, from a distance, some sizeable rainbow trout feeding in the shadows of an undercut bank.

The depth of the stream and the density of the riverside brush prevented an upstream approach, so I decided to try and circle around, get upstream of the fish, and cast down to them with a streamer fly.

I plunged into the jungle on what looked like a path, but before I was a dozen steps in, any semblance of a trail dried up and degenerated into a maddening tangle of needle-sharp briars and gnarled rhododendron.

Too far in to turn back, I pressed on through 50 or 60 yards of claustrophobic vegetation, laboring to keep my fly rod from snapping on low-hanging tree branches.

Eventually, I emerged, sweating, bleeding, and cursing, in a tiny clearing not much bigger than a phone booth.

Surveying the terrain, I realized, to my chagrin, I was still some distance from the river.

As I scanned the dense wall of underbrush, I paused and did a double-take. There, in the middle of the opening, someone had neatly stacked a half-dozen, flat river stones, one on top of the other.

The bottom rock was the size of a large dinner plate, and each subsequent stone was a bit smaller than the one underneath it. The topmost one was silver-dollar sized.

The implication was bewildering.

In order to construct the tiny pyramid, someone would have had to battle through the virtually impenetrable thicket, packing in a stack of rocks that likely weighed in excess of 50 pounds; or else, would have had to have made several treacherous trips to the river, selecting the stones one or two at a time and hauling them back to the clearing.

And to what end all that drudgery?

I can only presume the sole purpose of the structure was to utterly confuse a sweating, swearing, bleeding, hillbilly, in which case, it succeeded brilliantly.

All these years later, I’m still baffled.

I can’t wait to read your accounts of similar strangeness, so get busy and let’s hear it — even if it’s just a story about a naked hippie dude sitting on a rock and playing the guitar.