Salamander's excellent posts got me thinking about this subject. Our deer season is finally over and I am headed into my favorite haunts in the Talladega National Forest this weekend because that marks the beginning of "safe to hike" season. But events late last summer in an area I frequent have got a lot of us TNF hiking and 4 wheeling people looking over our shoulder in a different way.
There are a few, very few, Black bears in the TNF and in the last 30 years I have never seen one. Our greatest critter threats are timber rattlers, copperheads, rapid coyotes, feral dogs, rapid racoons I would say in that order. I once would have told you MJ growers were the greatest human threats if you stumbled into their grow patches, but they have been pretty well suppressed the last decade or so, or at least it seems that way to me. Then you have a few methbilly's, but those are not as frequently encountered the last 5-6 years because the cartel import streams have priced their manufacturing efforts out of the market. We have had a really bad run of rural convenience store robberies and murders the last few years, particularly in Talladega county, and until last summer, that was probably the place where I was on highest alert, stopping to gas up or grab something on my way to the trailhead.
The murder of a college student by some really strange hobo's who had built a big camp last summer changed everybody's perspective. While the judge in the case put a gag order on everybody involved, there have been some third party researchers who turned up a lot of disturbing facts about the murderers
Summary of the incident
From other reports, we know that there were over a half dozen tents in this hobo encampment, so it was a much larger group than these two women. Who knows when the others decided to bug out. The five year old toting a pump shotgun around...yesh...I respect the restraint the deputies showed.
I really hate that my peace of mind about wilderness hiking has been more or less disrupted by this event, but it is probably a healthy wake up call for solo hikers like me. I think Salamander pointed out a lot about the criminal human element of wilderness safety in his posts.
The days of me entering the trail with anything but a hi-cap handgun and two reloads are certainly over forever. I guess I should go ahead and sell all these great "woods gun" big bore revolvers because I will never carry one again. The nearest grizzly is over 1,500 air miles away, but what I could stumble into is now just as challenging in my mind and it might resemble a firefight more than trying to stop the charge of a bad critter.
My alertness will be tuned up this weekend and from now on I guess. Stumbling upon a timber rattler will happen this year as it always does, and we will just avoid each other as usual. Stumbling on violent gangster cult hobo's is much higher on my risk list now.
And no, if you have me at gun point and a window opens, I am not going to give you a chance by telling you to drop the gun and get on the ground like this kid did. A whole lot more shooting and no time for talking.
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Originally Posted by Lost River
