Night in the woods

So my story begins on Sunday at 7 am.

Now I’ve never been camping before (let alone hiking) and I was excited to experience something new. So my buddy calls me to pick me up at 6:30 and tells me we are going to be going to Myakka state park. Now I’ve only been to Myakka one time before for a few miles in, and was fairly confident in my ability to brave the wilderness, (me being an athletic individual and all) but little did I know that I was about endure a night of terror I have never dealt with in my life. Now my buddy is a pretty enthused wilderness expert right, he shows up to my house with a bag filled with supplies to last us the next 5 days all the way down to flint and steel for a Firepit. We only planned to be out for 2 days, (safe to say we were overly prepared) we only stayed for one night however.

With nothing but nature and 29 miles till we reach our campsite, we aimed to go to the last campsite adequately named prairie point, (smack dab right in the middle of an open prairie) with only a few problems along the way. The above picture shows an impassable body of water along the only path we have, so we have no choice but to go through it. As I take my first step I immediately get pulled back and told to look to my right, sure enough there was what looked like a 7 foot gator just hanging out in the water where my next step would of been. Talk about reality slapping you in the face right? So we managed to get passed the gator with a few well thrown stones and loud noises sporting only clogged boots as a reminder of what was inches away from us.

Now aside from that endeavor, we continue our trek forward with only a physical map to guide us. We continued for a few hours until we realized we have not hit camp yet, (about 6 miles out) and the sun was about to set in 30 minutes at 7:15 pm. So we decide to pick up our pace and start hoofing it to the nearest camp sight Oak Grove, instead of Prairie Point which was about 3 miles out. We had no choice but to brave the darkness with only a lantern to aid us for 3 miles.

As the sun hits the horizon we have about 30 minutes of fading light before it drifts completely into darkness, we walk and walk in the darkness until we come across a fork in the road, so we decided to just take the right path because the last time we looked at the map, this path was supposed to lead us directly into the campsite whereas the left will keep us going to the next campsite. As we walk down this new path we can hear all sorts of rustling coming from around us so we try our hardest not to stop but not to run either (otherwise any predators in the area could get enthused by a chase). Now we know for a fact there is only coyotes, cougars, gators and boars as potential encounters more so over bears and other big predatory animals so we were not too frightened however that night we encountered all 4 types of animals.

As we finally made it to camp we immediately started looking for dry wood and things to burn for a fire. Unfortunately that was hard to come by due to rain from the night before. Now that we have a little fire and makeshift camp with a sleeping bag and hammock, we started thinking about food. My buddies bag was filled with MREs and 6 liters of water for us so we decided it was safe enough to try and eat. (Things just get from bad to worse now) We managed to eat through our MREs and drink for only about 30 minutes before we were interrupted by howls of coyotes in the distance. It’s about 8:30-9:00 pm by now and we are exhausted but can’t sleep because we have to be on guard. My buddy sported a 9mm with 24 rounds while I only had a machete and skinning knife. We wait about 45 minutes after the initial howling before we ease up again. The time is now almost 10-10:15 and we manage to get about an hour and a half of sleep in. We were both awoken to sounds of coyotes coming from where prairie point is about a half a mile out we believe from our location. So we wake up this time and stay up, the coyotes sounded a lot closer then before so we decided to move any food scraps we have away from camp and try to start another fire hopefully masking our scents. As we are in this process it’s about 1 now before we hear more rustling coming from directly in front of us. My buddy took out his pistol, told me to be ready and to our surprise it was 3 boars non-chalantly walking through our camp. Now this would be a relief to some people but if you know anything about nature, you would know these boars are running away from something, not just walking through. We waited about 2 hours till easing up again seeing if the boars were followed and thankfully they were not. From this point on we just couldn’t sleep because it was almost light out and we were too on edge to try sleeping again.

Finally light hits the horizon and we immediately pack up and begin our trek back. Running off no sleep and left over adrenaline we hade no problems taking the shorter routes back.

This is where things got real spooky. As we walked back down the path we were paying attention to our tracks hoping we could see anything that may have been out there the night before. We saw coyote tracks, boar tracks leading into the brush, and cougar tracks way behind the coyote tracks. These tracks to the right in the above picture are my footprints going down, with lots of little paws walking all the way down the path right next to mine. That’s right, the whole time we were trekking in the dark, we had coyotes following us for miles that we could not see. If we never took that right path in the fork in the road, those coyotes would of followed us directly into camp making our night of terror, even more threatening. We believe the coyotes were originally tracking the boars, but when the boars went into the brush, the coyotes picked up our scent and started tracking us instead but lost it when we took the right path. The cougar we believe was tracking the coyotes, so all in all, me and my buddy trekking to camp, coyotes tracking boars then tracking us, all while a cougar was tracking the coyotes. (talk about mother nature’s food chain).

All in all this entire adventure was something I was not mentally prepared for but was something im glad to have accomplished. Unfortunately my buddy ended up tearing a ligament (due to us hoofing it all through the night). So thankfully we had a battery and used it to charge a phone so we could call a ranger for a lift. Very nice people the rangers are, took us back no problem and gave us a few pointers for next time such as, firing weapons would scare away predators, but they would come back minutes to a half hour later, more agitated then before. Would definitely come here to do this again.