COEngineer
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- Jul 6, 2016
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This past Thursday night I was half asleep in my wall tent with my 17-yr-old daughter sleeping a few feet away. My other three hunting partners were sleeping in a pop-up camper about 30 feet away across the parking lot at a USFS trailhead. I was thinking about getting out of my warm sleeping bag to relieve myself when I heard a truck coming slowly down the dirt county road and I started wondering what time it was. Then the truck turned onto the short muddy road to the trailhead and I could see the headlights hit my tent. I thought, "Man, maybe my alarm didn't go off and it's time to get up." I turned on my GPS and it said it was 3:10 am (Friday morning). I immediately thought something was wrong. No one drives around at 3 in the morning unless they are lost, drunk, looking for trouble, or some combination of those. I got up and pulled on my boots and started thinking, "Where is my gun if something goes sideways..." and BANG! a gun goes off. I crawl to my rifle case and start loading it while telling my daughter to get on the ground. I ran outside a little ways from my tent and took cover on the hillside so I was eye-level with the parking area and aimed in the direction of the newcomer's truck. All I could see were the door lights and a guy standing beside the open door. I yelled, "What are you shooting at?" He replied, "Not you." I yelled again and he said something about his buddy loading his gun. I yelled at him to turn on his lights (I wanted to see if he still had a gun in his hands and where he was pointing it and I didn't want to turn on my headlamp and give away my position). He turned on some tiny red headlamp and started walking towards me at which point I yelled to one of my buddies in the camper to ask if he had a gun on this guy. When the guy heard that, he walked back to his truck. Eventually we got some lights turned on and the guy said the gun went off accidentally and then changed his story to, "It went off when I was checking it. My buddy had borrowed it and gave it back to me loaded." I asked what he was doing driving around at 3 in the morning and he said, "I was getting ready to hike up the trail." I pointed out that firing a gun in the middle of the night in a camp full of armed hunters is a good way to get shot. He said, "I get it. I'm sorry." He didn't seem drunk, but something was obviously not right with this guy. You could walk the entire trail system in the 4 hours before shooting light and who 'checks' their gun by pulling the trigger? I called 911 and reported what happened. The guy left. Sheriffs showed up 30 mins later and said they would look for him and pass on the license plate, etc to the game warden. We hunted that area for the next three days and never saw his truck and never heard back from the warden or sheriffs.
Edit: To be clear, I never took the safety off my gun or aimed it directly at him (I wouldn't have been able to see anything even if I had taken the scope caps off he was so close). Also, it was a moonless night and he didn't know I had a gun in hand and I never threatened him.
Edit: To be clear, I never took the safety off my gun or aimed it directly at him (I wouldn't have been able to see anything even if I had taken the scope caps off he was so close). Also, it was a moonless night and he didn't know I had a gun in hand and I never threatened him.
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