A Reddit user said the whole thing started the night before with what should have been a pretty routine mountain recovery. According to his comment in the thread, his buddy shot a deer late in the day not far from camp and close enough to the trail off the mountain that it did not feel like a huge ordeal. They gutted the deer and brought it back to camp for the night like normal, figuring they would handle the rest in the morning.
Morning was a different story.
He wrote that they woke up completely fogged in. Not “a little misty” fog. The kind where you cannot see past 20 feet. But their ride home was coming that day, so waiting it out was not really an option. According to the post, they had to rely on GPS tracks to find their way back. That meant they were already moving through mountain country in bad visibility before anything actually scary happened.
The trouble started when they got close to the place where his friend had shot the deer the night before. He said the fog was drifting in and out, opening just enough to show shapes and then swallowing them again. At one point, his friend spotted something through it and said, “Hey, another deer.” The poster looked too, and through the fog he could make out an animal shape moving toward them. At first, he thought the same thing. Then he said he got a better look and told his friend, “Dude, that’s a big ass deer.”
That was the exact moment the fog peeled back enough to show them what it really was.
According to his comment, standing only about 30 to 50 feet away was a grizzly. And the instant they recognized it, the bear started charging right at them.
He wrote that as soon as the bear broke into a run, the fog rolled right back in and swallowed it again. That detail is what really turns the whole scene into a nightmare. One second they could see the grizzly coming. The next second it was charging through a wall of fog where they could not track it cleanly anymore. He said that was when he started shooting into the fog while his friend did the same with a handgun. From the way he told it, there was no calm line of sight and no neat heroic moment. It was a grizzly coming hard, then vanishing back into the white, and two hunters firing at the place where they knew it had just been.
He added that he had drawn his handgun while his friend was trying to get his rifle out of his pack. Once they emptied what they had, the whole thing turned into a different kind of terror. They sat back to back for hours. Not a couple of tense minutes. Hours. The way he described it, they had no idea whether the grizzly was dead, wounded, circling, or just standing somewhere out in the fog waiting for another chance. So they stayed put, back to back, with the mountain blanked out around them, trying to decide when it was finally safe enough to move.
Eventually they decided they had no choice but to go for it and hike out carefully. He did not write that part like some clean triumphant ending either. It sounded more like the kind of decision people make because sitting there forever is impossible and moving is terrifying, but one of those two things has to happen. So they got up and made their way out of the fogged-in mountain after hours of waiting with no real certainty about where the bear had gone.
The whole story is ugly in exactly the way real hunting stories tend to be. A deer gets shot near camp. The next morning is socked in with fog so thick they can barely see. They reach the area where the deer was taken, spot what looks like another deer walking toward them, realize too late it is a grizzly at close range, and then watch it charge before the fog swallows it again. After that come shots fired into white nothing and two hunters sitting back to back for hours on a mountain trying to decide whether the bear is dead, gone, or still somewhere close enough to kill them.
What do you think — if a grizzly charged you and then disappeared back into thick fog before you knew whether you hit it, would you stay put for hours like they did, or start moving the second the shooting stopped?
Original Reddit post: What are some of your hunting horror stories?
