Outdoorsy Shite: My most perilous outdoorsy moment

[GrimmaTheNome]

This thread is inspired by randomly starting to read Bill Bryson's 'A Walk in the Woods' which has been sitting on my shelf for well over a decade. I've only read the first couple of chapters - the first includes many horrible and scary things that can happen to walkers on the Appalachian trail, the second focuses in particular on bear attacks. Quite why he didn't say 'sod this, I'll go back to the UK and do the Coast to Coast' eludes me.

I think by the end of the book I shall have an increased gratitude for living and walking mainly in the United Kingdom where the worst that can happen is... what? Here's all I can think of. I expect someone will top mine but please do enter yours even if it really was exceptionally tame.

Adder encounter - DH pee'd on one behind a tree. It slithered off. Not very perilous at all. Well, the adder might beg to differ.

Lone bullock - chased DH and I through some woods where it shouldn't have been. We think it was lost and discombobulated. Quite perilous, it was big and faster than us, fortunately it didn't follow us up a steep slope.

I do kind of laugh about the bus stop incident myself. Dh says I'm the only person he knows who's been avalanched while shopping. Dd was 3yo at the time and was sat on a sledge about 3rd away from me. Luckily it missed her completely, it would have killed her from the weight of the snow and the impact.

I've had quite a few boarding and skiing accidents. First day ever boarding, I strapped a board on my feet and got on a chair lift. Had never been on a chair lift before either and managed to fall off it. Luckily it was close to the top but my mates were all at me. It was later that day I went over an 8ft drop head first on my back while sliding down the piste.

And the first day I went skiing I broke my leg.

Fell down a steep snow slope near the top of a Munroe in Glencoe one New Year and broke my arm. DH made me walk down about 2000ft to the Clachaig with it strapped up, no bothering Mountain Rescue for us.

Many instances of losing the path in mist and seeing who in the party will realise first and stop trying to scramble down a sheer cliff.

i do a lot of finger crossing re avalanches. living here we get quite a lot, with fatalities reported every couple of weeks, it seems. not all in our range, but close enough to be of note. they quite often close the highway. two weeks ago they closed the ski hill road whilst they set a class 2. misjudged it and got a class 4, it's quite impressive to see the ripped up trees and whatnot - makes you look at hillsides in the summer a bit differently too - we've got one site locally where you can see the trees going uphill on the other side of the road from the slip... not immediately obvious unless you are actually thinking about it.

fossil, that reminds me of a ranching friend of mine whose son was helping him out miles out on the land. got thrown and broke his arm, and his dad made him walk miles back to the road where his mum would meet him and drive him to the hospital. he said he didn't have time to stop and sort him out, so sent him on his way on his tod. i think he was about 13 at the time. his mum is still livid and it was ten years ago. to be fair, he was on the rodeo circuit and was fairly used to getting mashed up, but it was a bit harsh...

Viva, um....have you thought of trying a different hobby?

I was about to recount my perilous moments but have realised there's no sodding point with Viva about

Can't sail though, not posh enough.
you don't have to be posh to sail. Well, not if you're willing to do it on a Pennine reservoir. IOW may be different.

I think our major hazards list now includes cows, adders (but not really), weather and Viva.

I ain't posh.

Though I concede that you probably do need to be posh to sail in the Solent.

I fell down a waterfall once, though there were no animals involved. It was an outdoor ed weekend for GCSE PE when I was 16. The instructor tried to get us to drag ourselves up the incline on a rope through this freezing fucking snow melt (March in the Brecon Beacons). I fell all the way down Still have a big scar on my shin.

My mum was a cleaner. dead posh, me. I went to a very progressive comprehensive where the headmaster had some sort of breakdown and instigated an 'every afternoon is activity time' syllabus. He would never have got away with it now,but it was a very interesting way of getting a whole heap of grotty kids to try activities they would never ever have done in a million years. I learnt on a reservoir. Lucky enough to join the military and get the chance to do big boat stuff including a bit of racing, but I'm nowhere near iow league. doesn't stop me wandering round cowes slightly green, but I know my limits...

The kids from the local secondary here do sailing and canoeing as part of their PE. It's one of the least posh places in the country :)

Yes, but also surely the highest proportion of coastline to dry land, I'd have thought? The sort of place it helps to be at least web-footed if not mer-tailed

I took up paragliding recently.

Oh GOD Viva!

Ver' ver' unposh here, and also a sailor (well, at least until I had DS. But he will grow, and will be crew one day).

I capsized a stupid rowing dinghy in Poole harbour and got much closer to drowning than was comfortable (momentarily trapped underneath). This was right outside the RNLI national training centre, and did they notice? Did they hell.

Re: cows. I always thought the way to deal with inquisitive/ mardy cows was to walk right at them with a "show-them-who's boss" attitude, and, preferably, a big stick. Have I been unwittingly flirting with danger all this time?

Also, has anyone else noticed that Irish cattle are the bolshiest? Or is that just me?

We had a break from sailing after DD, and then when we tried get her hooked on it on it she got scared (bloody picos) and fell in love with windsurfing instead. Things don't always go to plan.... lovely unposh sailing club is gradually unscaring her with Oppies, but DH has gone and signed us up for a beginners windsurfing course.

My child will adore sailing. S/he will have absolutely no choice in the matter.

Yup, the IOW is different. As anyone who has ever visited Cowes during Cowes week will confirm. I don't think they let you in the Yacht Clubs unless you're a second-home owner.

I can row.

Viva, Will Gadd lives in my town and so we get treated to local /international paragliding news all of the time - including when one or another of his partners falls out of the sky...

They have been trying to set up a new centre on Mt Norquay, but at the mo they climb the mountain behind us and take off. We quite often see them over the valley in the summertime.

I had my own Enterprise as a kid. A beautiful, beautiful, old wooden one. Sail number 849. < wistful> we bought it after school introduced us to sailing, and dragged it down to the south coast to sail off Dorset in the holidays ( dad liked to see if we could get all the way down studland bay to the nudist bit). He didn't sail at all, and treated the whole thing akin to riding a motorbike, leaning in (well, out) to the corners, presumably in a valiant attempt to capsize the thing... We only had it for two years, and then had to sell it when the tax man sent him an unexpected bill. Dh and I were planning on getting a dinghy with the kids, but we seem to have ended up living in the mountains, rather than anywhere boaty...

Just remembered peril-by-proxy. Lavatory peril. Dh (pre becoming dh) fresh faced from blighty came into the nurses lounge in the staff accommodation at our hospital in Queensland and announced that there was a 'very pretty spider' that had been sharing his personal private loo with him for the 4 days since arriving.

Oh how we laughed and rolled our eyes at his foolish innocence. That would be a Redback then.

My sailing peril was whilst sailing round kangaroo island and we hit a lull (is that the right term? Does one hit a lull?) anyways the damned sailing boat stopped and there LOOMING at an alarming pace was a Mo-Fo cargo ship bearing down on us. All I remember thinking was 'I am going to either be crushed to death or drown and the last thing I will ever see is a massive SAFETY FIRST sign in ten foot letters attached to the bridge of the fucking ship that is going to kill me'

It didn't. The wind came back.

Easily deployed engines are always a good idea

There were some frenzied attempts at that. I stayed out of the way and sent mind vibes to the captain of the monster ship. That and prayers to God for some wind.

Well if he had crashed into you you could rest easy in the knowledge that power gives way to sail :)

I could have died happy in the knowledge that it wasn't us who had cocked it up. Seriously though some of those container ships are like the size of Basingstoke. isn't there some fact that they take like 6 hours to stop and an equally gigantic time to turn even to turn a little bit?

I know! They have a turning circle of about 100 miles. Last year we were sailing and the mist descended. In the distance we saw a whale leap, but there was no way we were going to leap or we would have found ourselves in the shipping lanes. In the fog.