Probably not the type of answer you’re looking for, but I’ve got a few that happened outdoors.

The first was when me, my brother, and some friends hiked up some train tracks to go to a ghost town at the top of a mountain near where we’d recently moved. About a 6 hour hike in. My brother was ahead of us, around 100 feet/30 meters ahead. He suddenly turns around, yells “TRAIN!” and the next thing we know, there’s a fuggin train coming around the bend. There’s only around 6-7 feet/2 meters of space between a rock wall and the tracks. We jump off the tracks and push up against the wall. With our packs on our backs (we were going to be camping for a week, so they were large packs), it felt like I could have stuck out my tongue and touched the train. The scariest part was that none of us saw if my brother had been hit. It happened too fast. The train took forever to pass, it felt like an eternity. I just knew my brother was dead, I was terrified. When the train finally passed, we rushed to where he’d been, and found that when he jumped off the tracks, he wasn’t against the wall, he was in a sort of spring/small pond, 10 feet/3 meters lower than the tracks, soaking wet. Terrified we’d been hit. First words out of his mouth were “cigarette. Now!” He was unharmed.

Next scariest thing was when me and some friends went driving in a national forest near us, and her car broke down. We walked up what we thought was the road, but turned out to be a trail. Someone started shooting at us. We ran like crazy and made it back to the car. Tbh, I don’t remember how we got her car home…

Let’s see…

One time? I took my parent’s dachshund, tootsie: camping- this was when they first got her; she was maybe a few months old.

It was bear country in WI. Specifically, what’s called “primitive” camping where you can park at a state forest walk in and just set up camp.

Right by a beautiful trout stream. I was waiting for the sun to come up, enjoying some coffee, before going off to wet my line and get breakfast.

She was laying next to me, (an aggressive snuggler.) when this big ole bear comes up the stream.

When she saw it, she started trying to pick a fight. Barking.

Fortunately the bear was incredulous and possibly faintly amused. It looked at the puppy. Looked at me. Back at the puppy. It’s expression said “you realize you’re a snack, right?”

Fortunately, it moved off down the stream.

Yeah, she’s a dachshund to her core- sass, class and won’t hesitate to pick a fight with anything and then run behind you when it starts.

Doing dumb shit training in the woods for the Army. My platoon finds an area, sets up perimeter, and I post up to my spot pulling security staring out into the woods. I start digging a fox hole to chill in. It’s about 105⁰, 100% humidity and tornado season.

God Bless America.

I spend a bit over an hour digging my shallow-as-shit hole before noticing there is a lot of ticks in it. Like a lot more than I’ve ever seen. I’m so God damn tired I about knock out anyway, fuck the ticks.

Some dickhead tells me that ticks hate sulfur.

“If you rub a bunch of sulfur on your body they won’t eat you.” ??? Okay you backwoods Hick bastard, you better not be lying to me. I spend the last of my energy putting a tarp above my hole, covering the tick ground with a towel, eating some matches, praying the ticks fuck off from my sulfury sweat, and waiting for it to get dark.

It starts thunderstorming.

Maybe it’s just because I grew up in the north, but there is something viscerally WRONG about it being a hundred degrees out and having this much rain coming down. Hot air and cold rain at the same time. I go to sleep in my foxhole, expecting to be woken up in a couple hours for fireguard and having contracted Lyme disease for Uncle Sam.

Just kidding. Big ole ugly Platoon Sarge sees my genius tarp protecting me from the rain and gets jealous of my galactic brain. Just cuts the corners off the tarp with his ten dollar PX Gerber knife and smokes me for showing the “enemy” where my foxhole is. Gonna love the fist fight I’ll have with CIF later when they ask where my tarp is. I go to sleep.

That stupid red tinted Vietnam-era flashlight hits me in the eyes.

“Hey, wake up, you’re on fire guard.” Wake up, it’s pitch black, and my hole is flooded with rain water. I’ve never felt colder and closer to death. Whole body was permanently tensed and shivering. I feel numb. Extra numb in my back though. I pull out my light and check. My back is COVERED in ticks. Dozens. Maybe even a hundreds.

They’re having a king-sized FEAST from my left ass cheek to center-back.

I forget that I’m frozen solid, full fucking sprint to the least wet ground, stop drop and roll, sprint to the other guy on fireguard, and tell this man in the loudest whisper possible to just SMASH everything on my back. I guess that spot is about where your kidneys are, huh. My retarded 19 year old self didn’t really know what a kidney punch felt like, but then the fireguard homie saw the ticks and bashed my shit in with the stock of his M4.

I couldn’t even make a sound. The pain was crazy. It was probably about 2am in a forest, I am about one degree from my brain freezing solid, missing half of my blood and back flesh to this God damn tick egg colony, might have just lost one of my kidneys, and didn’t even have live ammunition to blow my brains out and end it all. And this fucking guy I barely knew was just slapping away at my bare back with his hands like I was some whore he picked up at the bar.

Anyways, turns out whatever the hell super soldier serum they shoot in your ass when you join was good enough to keep me alive that night. Definitely didn’t guard any fires like I was supposed to. I pissed blood for a bit and have a huge ugly scar on my back, but amazingly didn’t get any diseases. Even got to keep the kidney, woo.

Eating the matchstick didn’t help, -1/10 do not recommend. Kinda feel bad for giving the kid that bashed me some tick-PTSD too.

I was visiting some family in Transylvania, Romania and in the afternoon we decided to go for a small hike, in the mountainous woods. It was my wife and I, her local cousin and a dog. We head off into the woods on a path leading up a mountain.

At some point we passed a smallish stream and when we later returned to go back it had flooded and we couldn’t cross so had to take a detour. No phones/gps but the cousin claimed both he and the dog knew the way, so we followed them. Not long after we were in the middle of the forest in pitch black darkness as the sun went down fast, no longer following a path, but climbing up steep slopes on our hands and knees. At one point my wife put her hand down and touched something she claims was a mouse, she nearly started crying at that point. I was more worried about bears, but hoped the dog could scare them away if we met one.

Took us a few hours, but eventually we found a road and was able to follow it back. Though with Romanian traffic, I’m not sure if being lost in the woods wasn’t safer than walking a busy road at night with no lights.

Woke up one morning at summer camp with a rattlesnake curled up on my sleeping bag. I did not move until late afternoon.

Turned around on a hiking trail to see a large tusked boar a few feet away staring me down and huffing at me. All the trees around me too small or too big to climb. I backed away reeeeeeally slow and it went the other way.

Got ejected from and then trapped underneath a 12-person whitewater raft that was also stuck on rocks in a shallow section between rapids. I don’t know how I ended up back in the raft, I just remember silently saying goodbye to the world and blacking out. Then went down the same river again the next day, cause apparently I killed some brain cells the first time.

(etc)

Was camping in central east Texas once and I woke up around 2 am to my dog growling softly, I petted her to calm her down and noticed light foot steps outside the tent.

I looked through a tiny gap in the zipper and could only see some sort of very large wide animal rummaging around the campsite.

Now bear wouldn’t be impossible but also isn’t super common in that area. My biggest worry was some sort of feral hog because if my dog barked and startled the hog it would trample us. A bear would more than likely run away.

All I could do was sit there and pet my girl to keep her calm and keep her from barking until the animal passed.

I moved from CAL to East TN in my teens. We lived in the middle of nowhere, like garbage got picked up every 3 months, had to drive a mile to get our mail, that sort of thing. Anyway, we had a pit we threw garbage in that was about 200 or so ft from our back door. I was the oldest and so it was my job to take the trash to the pit after dinner every night. I had forgot that night, and around 1am decided to run it down. I have a 12guage that we took when we went down that way as it was on the outskirts of a thick wood. This night, my genius ass forgot the gun, but grabbed the bag and headed down to the pit. It was a full moon and very easy to see. I get down there and toss the bag into the pit, and hit a black bear right in the face. Realizing what I did, I haul ass back towards the house, the bear roars and gives chase. I could hear it pounding behind me but was too scared to look back to see how far it was behind me. I get into the house, slam the door, heart pounding in my chest. I look out the windows and the bear is about 5ft from the glaring at me through the window, it’s standing on its hind legs and I swear it was 12ft tall! (I know it wasn’t, but this is the memory of someone who was in total terror. Also, this is 25 years ago.) It paced back and forth a few times, I went and grabbed the gun, just in case it decided to try to break in. When I got back to the door it was gone. I never forgot to take out the trash, or to grab the gun again though, I can tell you that much.

I saw a hornet. Killed him and a few more came. Then i swiftly moved away and they left me alone.

My life is pretty tame.

Getting caught in a large rainstorm in the evening while on a mountain trail with 3 more hours of rocky descent to go.

Last Autumn I went on a month long road and hiking trip around the Tohoku region of Japan to climb as all of the 100 famous peaks of Japan in the area. I drove in a kei van from Kyoto to Tohoku and then went around all the mountains on my list, so I did an absolute fuck ton of driving (4400km total) and over 200km of hiking in just under a month.

While these are generally not challenging hikes, I didn’t really want to mess around camping, since I don’t have a lot of camping experience, and although I could stay in a mountain hut, I’d still need to take a setup for sleeping and extra food, so I just tried to make everything a day hike.

Mostly this was fine, but one of the last hikes I did was Mt. Iide, which was the longest of all the hikes, with about 22km of mountain trail and total ascent of around 2000m (not height, just sections where I was hiking up a hill).

I set off at 6am, slightly later than planned, but it wasn’t a big problem, and the first hour and a half was absolutely fine. The weather was cloudy with some light drizzle, but I was feeling good, and had reached a narrow rocky ridge after emerging from the forest. I scrambled up a few rocky sections of path, and was quite enjoying it, but at one point it felt a bit steep and as I pushed myself up what I thought was the trail I realised that I must have made a mistake as it had basically turned into light rock climbing, and the rocks didn’t seem especially firm either. I looked down and realised that if I fell I would fall quite a long way down into a valley, because the ledge I clambered up from was too narrow to stop me. I didn’t really want to risk backing down onto it either as I was nearly at the top of the short climb, so with some effort I managed to push myself up and back onto the next part of the trail and to relative safety.

I looked around and realised there was another route up, with a chain to climb, and that I’d just done something really stupid because I wasn’t paying attention. The drizzle had also wet the rocks, and everything felt super sketchy, but I continued up the trail crouched low to the ground in a state of fear, and eventually reached a hut and took a short break.

Then I took a wrong turn, walking for almost 40 minutes in the wrong direction. I jogged back to the hut and continued the hike along another ridge with a couple more short rocky sections, eventually managing to reach the summit, but I was absolutely drained of energy and it was also covered in snow, so wasn’t especially pleasant to be there, but I had to slow down and take frequent breaks to refuel.

On the way back I was dreading heading back down the first rocky section, and was in a rush to get there before dark, but when I got there and saw it from above without the drizzle it didn’t really phase me at all and I walked down it in maybe 15 minutes. I managed to get back to the van by around 4pm, so I didn’t have to use my headlight at all, let alone on the rocks. Thanks to my route-finding error, I ended up walking 26km :/

This trip really woke me up to the dangers of hiking, and the need to plan carefully. I’d literally been driving to each mountain, usually sleeping in the van at the trailhead and hiking up the next day, but this time was almost too much for me, and I was lucky I didn’t have even a minor accident and that I had packed just enough food. I know there are far more dangerous trails, both in Japan, and especially in other countries where mountains are larger, more remote and the likelihood of bumping into dangerous fauna is higher, but I’m glad I learned this lesson in Tohoku, and not on any of the properly terrifying hiking trails in the Northern Japan Alps.

Years ago, I was into Geocaching. For the uninitiated, users hide small caches around the world, and the cache usually includes at least a log where people who find the cache can mark their visit. The coordinates of the cache are marked on the Geocaching website and people use GPS to locate it.

I thought it was finally time I’d put one of my own caches out for people to find, so I went to scout out possible locations for it. It was late autumn and was still light out. I knew that I wanted to put it on a nature trail I liked to walk so I went there.

One thing to know about late autumn up here in the Nordics is that it gets really dark really fast, meaning I was enveloped by a dark forest pretty quickly after making it to the trail. No matter, I thought, I had my phone and it had a flashlight, so I kept going, despite it having low battery (which, in hindsight, was a mistake).

I found a spot for the cache at about the halfway point of the trail and made a mental note of it, planning to come put it there during the limited daylight hours.

And soon after… Lights out. Phone was dead and I was in total darkness. Ambient light was close to non-existent due to how cloudy it was. I felt a bit panicked about the situation but kept going, feeling around with my feet to make sure I wouldn’t walk off the trail.

Lucky for me, I was quite familiar with the trail and eventually managed to come out the other end on a gravel road that was also unlit but at least easier to traverse and eventually got back home.

Not the scariest possible experience, but you can imagine how it feels to walk through a silent, damp forest in pitch black darkness while trying to feel your way out. Not sure I would have fared this well if the trail was unfamiliar.

I did get the Geocache out there the next day, and it remained there until I moved out of the area.

This may be tame but here goes:

When I was 15, I went walking up trail with my family in Chimborazo (a really big volcano in Ecuador) with lots of tourists and a guide. The walk is long and its windy as fuck with tiny tiny rocks and sand hitting your face/eyes but man seeing that mountain in front of you is amazing. It was tiring so I sat down to regain my breath while everyone kept moving on. I kept sitting and walking until I had enough and decided to walk down alone back to camp. Of course I told my family that I was heading down.

The thing is, it was real faraway or maybe it was that I couldn’t see that well with all the wind and sand so I felt disoriented, but I kept descending. I was feeling lost. I just saw ground all around me all alone with the wind hitting my ears loudly. I was getting a lil bit desperate but kept walking downwards to the left. Then I thought maybe it’s a bad idea to keep walking to the left, so I went to the right, and a few minutes later I arrived to the camp. I kept thinking to myself what would have happen if just kept walking to the left.

As a cyclist I lost count on the number of times I was almost ran over by some vehicle at 100+ km/h

Working on a radio tower on a mountain between 2 stone quarries. One day we are working away and we hear an explosion and the radio tower starts vibrating.

Now being 30M above the ground and the only thing connecting you to the ground is vibrating like hell is a bit disconcerting.

I went 4WDing in sand dunes in the United Arab Emirates with a bunch of American expats.

On one of the dunes I was on the outside of the car standing on the foot treads holding on through an open window. Part way up the dune the car started to tip, so I jumped away and luckily missed getting squashed when the car rolled.

It was a really stupid thing to do, and I got really lucky. Good lesson for me to have now I have kids - I have a more healthy respect for risk.