Wolves!!!
Tam has a great post about wolves eating hippie sammiches.
Look, there are no predators living in Pennsylvania that prepare you for life in the northwestern wilderness. I camped there ONCE to go fishing, and I thought the guides were insane, but I followed their rules and had no trouble. These were the rules:
Never go anywhere except in a group
Everyone in the group is armed
sleep indoors.
As tempting as it was to sneak off and have a piss away from the group, there were bears where we were fishing. You didn’t even piss unless someone was arms length away.
Nobody was allowed to carry anything smaller than a 357 magnum, and that light a caliber was frowned on. The guides all had 44 mags. 45 acp was not allowed.
A tent, to a bear, is a fluffy calzone. A cabin made out of boards and plywood is a box lunch to a bear, it keeps all the occupants neatly stored for casual consumption. The guides stayed in a log cabin, with no windows bigger than 12″ square, and we stayed in similarly outfitted Conex boxes. The log cabin (18″ diameter oak logs, mostly) and the conex boxes all had BIG scratches in them, all over the damned place.
While I’m on this particular rant, you assholes spending hundreds of dollars to advertise North Face on the fronts and backs of your clothes? 99% of you have never been outside, nor done anything more strenuous than the usual number of reps on the machine at the gym. You’re real adventurers. Wander out into the closest forest preserve and tell me how long you last before you find something edible, or eat something poisonous, or die of starvation. Dumbasses.
