Wilderness NIGHTMARE in Minnesota Canoe Country Campfire Story!

Hey guys, Chris here. Today I'm in the Sierra Nevadas. I'm car camping for tonight and we're going to be cooking dinner over the fire. Also, I have a campfire story and this story is about four men who went into the Boundary Waters canoe area wilderness in northern Minnesota and what they encountered there was so frightening it forced them to cut their trip short. That's next. Got me some fresh cut firewood from the grocery store. I also got a nice level spot I think right there for the tent. I'm using more brush and stuff so this is a very clean campsite but that is just fine so all right let's get to it. Okay so I have for dinner a foil dinner. I did this all at home. I have some yellow potatoes cut really thin. Did a layer of that. Then I did a layer of cut carrots that were shaved and cut and then I did a little bit of butter. Some different seasonings and then I did some salmon on top of that. A piece of salmon, a couple of cuts of lemon on top of that and a little bit of butter. So we're going to set that on the grate and see how that works. If not, I'll just put it right in the edge of the fire but the coals are starting to come together so and that is one of the easiest meals I've ever done while camping so cheers to that. I got Battle Born beer. It's a Nevada beer and it works because I'm in Nevada so there we go but we'll see how that works. Anyways, I did all that at home. It was great. Worked really well. Kind of fun too. I did a sample last night on the barbecue at the house and I really enjoyed that. That was fun. It was fun. I just dropped it onto a plate so all right cheers. I also have my Trekology YZ-Lite 750 camping chair, backpacking chair and this thing is pretty lightweight. It's considered ultralight actually and it's 1.65 pounds. I got it on Amazon $44.99 so that is one of my camping chairs. I actually have four camping chairs right now. I'll have to do a review on all four camping chairs side by side by side. I also have a 1000 lumen, there it is, camping light. Looks like a little blender doesn't it? A little mini blender but yeah it's pretty bright so that works for camping. It's too big for backpacking obviously. There is a nice little hanger at the bottom here. I don't even know what the name brand is on this thing. A little hanger there. It's got some different settings and yeah it's like a portable Coleman. Here we go. Oh yeah look at that. That is awesome. That is Atlantic salmon and there's potatoes and the lemon slices I talked about. That was really good. The salmon in the foil. You got to try that. It's awesome. I got several recipes. I'm going to be definitely doing that again and there we go. Love the FANUX headlight, 1500 lumens. Okay so tonight we got a really good one here. This is a story about four men that were three of them were stationed at the Grand Forks North Dakota Air Force Base. Their names were Steve, Roy and Dave and then Dave's son Mike and they all decided to do a canoe trip into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of Northern Minnesota and they were outdoorsmen, experienced backpackers but they had never gone on a canoe trip, a canoe excursion and if you know anything about the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness it's about 150 miles long filled with lakes, rivers, swamps and granite outcrops and forest. It's just an amazing area. It's adjacent to Canada so it's in Northern Minnesota. 2,000 plus lakes, just a massive wilderness area and there's several trails that go into it and these four men decided to do the canoe trip to the Moose River trailhead and then they were going to take the canoes up to Lake Agnes. So they followed this Moose River. They got to this Lake Agnes, spent the night and it turns out that first night they had some bear activity in their campsite and they were not happy about that. Apparently they didn't secure their gear very well so the next morning a ranger happened by and he said can you guys just move on out of this area and just continue on the route so they kind of rerouted and they went to a portage from Lake Agnes over to Ram's Head Lake and it was about a maybe a mile portage and if you don't know what a portage is, a portage is where you go to a designated point at one lake and you're trying to get to another lake and there's usually a trail in between and you literally haul your gear, your canoe, you carry it on your head and your gear you can put on your back and sometimes you have to make a few trips back and forth to get all your gear and your canoes from one lake to the next and it's usually the closest point between two lakes and they run a trail through there just to make it easy and that's how they travel in the BWCA, Boundary Waters Canoe Area, in northern Minnesota. That's what they do and so they get to this Ram's Head Lake, they paddle across the lake and there's a series of islands. There's one big island and there's a couple other smaller islands a little farther away. They set up their camp on this island and they all share this big canvas tent and they have a campfire and then they have dinner and then they just go to bed. They're just bushed, they're just tired. They wake up the next day and they decided to just kind of hang out, hang low. A couple of them are really tired and so Steve decided to get in the canoe by himself and just take a little break. It was afternoon and he did the 500 yards or so from the island over to the shore of the wilderness area and he went to a creek called Meander Creek and he heard that there was a waterfall over there. So he lands the canoe, gets out and goes through the brush, follows the creek. It's a little brushy and then it hits a clearing. He finds where the waterfall is and he's a little disappointed because this waterfall is not very big. The water wasn't really running that well on it and he thought, okay, this is, I'll just kind of hang out here for a little bit. So he sat down on a granite rock next to the creek here and all of a sudden he hears footsteps off to his left and in the brush right behind him, this pretty thick brush all around him, and then he hears the footsteps moving around behind him and over to his right side where the creek is down here and he didn't think much of it because he thought, well, it's probably a moose. There's a lot of moose in this wilderness area or some deer or something and he could hear the brush moving and some noises in the woods. It wasn't too far away, maybe 20 yards into the brush and so he's sitting there and not thinking too much of it, hoping that, you know, whatever it is, maybe it will show itself through the brush and you'll see, oh, there's a moose, there's a deer or something and all of a sudden, right when he has that thought, he hears this loud crack and it sounded like somebody took a blog and hit the side of a tree but they hit it in such a way that it was really loud and it startled him. He jumps up and he's standing there and it's dead silent again and he's looking around, not sure what to expect and all of a sudden, after about a minute, he hears it again. Crack! This loud sound, almost like when you hear a professional baseball player hitting a ball, they hit it so hard and so just right, it just has this crack sound and as soon as he heard that, he hit the path running parallel to the creek, down through the brush, back to the canoe and he gets in the canoe and he shoves it off as fast as he can and paddles the 500 yards back to the island where the rest of the crew was and as he's paddling, Dave and Mike are hanging around the campfire and they're on this island and they kind of look down towards where there's almost like a little bay and it's kind of rocky down there and they're kind of up a ways and so they can see him for quite a ways and it's like a 20-minute paddle and he paddles as fast as he can, gets over, lands the canoe, gets out and he walks in really pretty quickly into the campsite and they go, what's going on? Are you okay? And he he was really unnerved by this whole experience and he kind of stammered. He didn't know really what to say and then all he could say was, there's something out there. That's all he could say and just then Roy, who was in the tent, he was sleeping, he gets up and he heard everything and he said, really? Okay, well I'm going to show, let's go show these pussies up and he thought there was some guys or a guy over there. He didn't know what was going on but he thought, he was the leader of the group in the Air Force Base and he was possibly a captain so they were, three of them were from the Air Force Base at Grand Rapids and so they get in the canoes, two canoes, four guys, so they get two guys in each canoe. Steve was really reluctant to get in the canoe but he didn't want to stay there by himself so he goes over, they paddle over there, kind of gung-ho, land the canoes, get out, go up the creek, get to this clearing, the same clearing where Steve was earlier and they said, okay Steve, what exactly happened here and he told them about the footsteps and what had happened and they started laughing at him and they said something to the effect of, oh the old Boy Scout and soon as they said that, crack, they heard the crack sound and this time it was like 15 feet into the brush, right there and they, it was dead silent, they all were quiet, they just stood there and listened, not sure what to expect and then after about a minute, crack, they heard it again and at that point, Roy, who happened to bring a canoe paddle with him, he says, all right and he heads headlong into the brush to confront this noisemaker and the other guys were standing there and they just watched him head straight into the brush and they could hear him moving away through the brush and they heard it again and several more times and it got fainter and fainter and fainter until about after 10 minutes and then they heard Roy call out and he had head south into the brush and he was, now he was west of their position and he yelled out to them, where are you guys? I'm lost and they said, Roy, we're over here, we're over here and so they tried to lead him back with their voices through the brush and they could hear him come through the brush and he came out of the brush and he said, everyone to the canoes now and they didn't hesitate, they all listened to him and they headed right down to the canoes, they shoved off, paddled as quick as they could back to camp and they were like, what happened there Roy? And Roy said, I ran headlong into the brush to confront this noisemaker, whoever this was and I realized it was leading me further into the forest away from the group, away from you guys and not only that but after several minutes I realized he felt like it was leading him into a trap and they were like, wow, this is crazy and he could never catch up to this sound and whatever it was, it was, it paralleled the creek and he was on this side of the creek and he would try to catch up to it and then wherever he thought it was, it wasn't there and then you'd hear that crack sound again and he would just, he kept following until it was almost too late, he got back and they were really freaked out by this so they realized at that point it was too late to pack up and leave the area because it was night and if you've ever been backpacking or canoe camping, you can't leave in the middle of the night, it's just too dangerous, it's dark and just you could get lost in the trail so that was not an option so they built a large fire and they stayed up really late and they just kind of huddled together and about two o'clock they went, decided we got to get some rest, we got to get out of here, first light in the morning, get out of here and they went into their tent, they all were in this canvas tent and laying down, they're half asleep and about 4 a.m. they heard down by the canoes in the little kind of bay there on the island a really loud splash and then some water kind of like splashing around and they got up, got the flashlights, unzipped the canvas tent, opened it and shined the light down there, not sure what to expect, not sure what they were going to see and they were, they didn't see anything else, they didn't hear anything else, they were really freaked out at this point and then they just finally, they just, they waited until the sun came up, about 6 a.m. they started breaking down the tent, moving everything down to the canoes as quick as they could and then Roy noticed about 10 feet away on the shoreline from the canoes, a footprint about 14 inches long, about half as wide, seven, eight inches wide in the mud, kind of on the rocks there, not too far from the canoes and it looked like whatever made the track there swam over from the main shore to the island and pulled itself up right at that point and so whatever it was, was possibly on the island that they were trying to desperately get off of, so they were definitely determined to just finish out the load, get everything in and they shoved off the canoes and they're paralleling the island because they have the island on their left and the main shore on their right and they're paddling as fast as they can and they're looking over at the island occasionally, not really wanting to but just in case they saw something there because it was kind of a like a hill coming out of the water there and all the trees and everything so they're right next to the island and they didn't see anything and then they finally got into open water and they headed over to the next portage to Lamb Lake, so it was about a mile portage hauled their gear across and they got across Lamb Lake and then they endured a two-hour portage through a swamp to get to Nina Moose Lake and they were really concerned at that point because they're really almost bogged down literally in a swamp, kind of freaked out about what happened the night before and the morning that morning they finally get to Nina Moose Lake, spent the night still unnerved, nothing happened, all was clear, they woke up the next morning paddled out across Nina Moose Lake and they got to the Moose River trailhead, finally got to the cars, got in the cars and they're leaving and they're very relieved to be to be out of there, this is what campfires do isn't it, it's smoky, it's a little smoky and they're driving away and they realized that they had experienced something not only unique but frightening and they knew it wasn't a moose or a bear or maybe a couple of deer locking antlers and making some sound or something, they knew whatever it was was something very unique something they didn't know what it was and they never wanted to experience that ever again, that's my story for tonight guys that's a good one, wow, I got a bunch others lined up so looking forward to doing that yeah you never know what's out there so all right well I'm going to enjoy the rest of this fire and then I am going to get some rest and I will see you guys in the morning, good morning about 26 degrees right now it's going to warm up though so slept pretty good and uh that was fun last night I enjoyed the uh the cooking storytelling big old campfire that was fun so all right well I'm just gonna have some coffee this morning and and I just get that going I definitely need a cup of coffee all right this is the quickest breakfast I could come up with there's coffee and oatmeal that is that pre-packaged or what all right that really warmed me up well guys I got to hit the road here I'm getting ready to do another video this weekend and I have a lot more stories to tell if you guys really like that like subscribe comment I read all my comments answer most of them if I can and I really appreciate that but yeah you guys have a great rest of your day we'll see you next time keep hiking