People Who’ve Been Lost In The Wild Are Sharing What Happened And How They Survived, And Wow

10.

“Lemme tell you the story of how I got lost on a mountain and nearly died. Years ago, in the early 2000s, I was at a summer camp as a counselor in upstate New York: Camp Olmsted. It was a sleepaway camp, and we took care of kids there from like 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. The activities of the day were split into roughly 50-minute blocks, all except for one. This activity was about two hours put together, and it happened about once or twice a week. It was the Storm King Mountain climb. Now it wasn’t a grab-a-rock-and-climb style mountain, it was walk-a-path-for-a-lil’-while, yay-you’re-climbing-a-mountain-style mountain. Anyway, two hours was never enough time to get to the top, and we always had to turn back at the hour and change mark. This particular day, I had some free time after the climb, so I told my partner to take the kids back down. I was gonna continue the rest of the climb by myself, be back in an hour.”

“This had always been the plan, so I had the groundskeeper’s assistant come with me so I could have a climbing buddy. Anyway, 45 minutes later, we made the top. We kinda lost track of the path along the way but we made it, that was all that mattered. I actually saw a bald eagle flying around and saw some town that was craaazy far away. It freaked me out how high we were, but the view made it all worth it.

Now, it was time to get down. We didn’t remember which way we came so we just went in the general direction we felt we came until we saw the path again. Needless to say, we never saw the path. Of course, our 19-year-old minds figured if we keep going down, we’ll eventually get off the mountain.. Well, it turns out sh*t gets real once you get off the path. Thorns everywhere, animals wandering around, at some point, gnats just started swarming around our heads and refused to leave, and turns out our plan had some kinks. After a while, the hills became very steep, and we resorted to sliding on our butts as a method of travel. I started doing some Last Action Hero slides, and at the last minute, I grabbed a mini-tree before I went over the horizon. We went towards it because we thought it was yet another steep hill. And we were right, a 90-degree angle steep. I nearly fell off what looked like at least a 5-story drop. 

My buddy is freaking out, but for some reason I can’t explain, I wasn’t even scared. I was more worried that we’re late as hell, we’re going to get in trouble, and I’m going to get fired. I didn’t wanna get fired because I loved this job, I was basically getting paid to play with kids, and I liked all my co-workers. At this point, we were about 20–30 minutes late, and I was banking on the head counselor not noticing. I planned on just casually walking back to my group and acting like nothing was wrong. 

After much butt sliding, dead ends, and improvising, we finally saw a road. We celebrated, got on it, and began randomly walking in a direction. Eventually, some stereotypical biker-looking dude rode by. I asked him where Camp Olmsted was, and he said it was about 2 miles in the direction we were going. We thanked him, continued on our way, and had the bright idea to put dirt in our hair because maybe that’d give us more sympathy points and we wouldn’t be fired. At this point our clothes are beyond filthy, we have gnats swarming our hair, and now we have dirt in there as well.

After some light jogging, we eventually make it back. Groundskeeper Jr. goes back to his post, and I creep back to my cabin and tell my partner the adventure. I asked him if the head counselor asked about me, and he said nah, and I got away with it scot-free. Totally worth it.”

—Aurhiro