Well, you don't see that every day :)

[WapitiTalk1]

What was your most "unique" find while hunting deep in the elk woods. Now I'm not talking Mylar balloons that have settled to earth or an old coke can with a pull top. What have you found or seen, way.... way back that made you scratch your head and say "really".

[wawhitey]

honestly im afraid to say what the strangest thing ive found in the woods was. dying to spill the beans but i cant

[cnelk]

A discarded meth lab

[LckyTylr]

This won't seem out of place, as it's the only logical location that you'd expect to find it (in the woods), but it was an odd coincidence. I was out wandering around one early afternoon during archery season trying to locate more sign. I wasn't hearing any bugles and had ended up about 2 miles further away from the truck than I had planned. Now I'm almost 5 miles from the truck and I find myself dropping down into a nasty hole because it looks like the one and only place I have seen that would assuredly have elk in it. At the bottom I find a little stream flowing down and then I stumble upon a wallow that had shown a lot of activity. Gold Mine! I was patting myself on the back, thinking "I'm so far back in here, nobody in their right mind would come this far back to hunt". I figured this wallow had never seen another human . . . sweet! I decided that I'd be taking a LONG walk out in the dark that night because this spot looked promising. I stumbled around until I found a good place to sit where the thermals would be right towards the end of the day, I had a nice shooting lane. I dropped my pack and sat down . . . on a Set Trap!!! Luckily it was so old that the spring was nearly rusted out, but it still, literally, bit me in the A$$. When open, it was about 6" in diameter. So much for my pride, I got bit and it was clearly evident that I wasn't such a bada$$ . . . someone stumbled all the way back here with a load of steel traps . . . Props to that guy. What a great location though, I would imagine that the wallow has been around for years and years and would be a perfect place to set up a wolf trap before they banned that. I brought it home with me, since it wasn't serviceable anymore and probably long forgotten. It reminds me that I need to train harder to out hike the next guy.

[Swede]

Lucktylr: They must have some very small wolves in Idaho as the trap you describe is a lot smaller than what I had.

[JohnFitzgerald]

Harvested pot farm.

FYI....be careful when you stumble upon places like this. They like to set booby traps and don't always take them down! Back out the same path you took in.

[GetemDuck]

I've found some cars in some where places when hunting back in WVa but i never find anything cool.......But I know there is a guy out there who found a game camera just setting on the side of a tree once. I'm sure he thought it was abandoned so if took it home.....yup who ever you are that was mine but I guess i was done with it........lol

[Z Barebow]

Nothing too dramatic in the elk woods.

But when I was a kid upland bird hunting, I found a railroad caboose in a ravine. It looked like a hermit had lived there until the late 60's or early 70's. (By the newspaper and magazines in the car.). The guy had a single strand of wire and some metal rods to try and protect a spring for drinking water. The car was in excellent shape with all of it's windows intact. (It was at was ~ 1 mile from nearest road and not visible, so it wasn't shot up). The biggest kicker is this railroad car was at least 10 miles from the nearest set of tracks.

[Lefty]

Found an old cast iron pully/block. Weighed about 100 pounds. 3500 feet up some nasty mountain side.
Talked to an oldtimer. he said a group of investers sold mining claims in suckers in eastern magazines. A few showed up and had gear hauled in and soon found out the claims were bogus.
Found a brand new outhouse in a secluded deer/elk camp

[bnsafe]

havnt found a lot in the woods, but at work

[Swede]

I was thinking of a find I made years ago when I read the last post and thought about the irony.
In the early 1960s I found an antique flush toilet. I was hunting near the ghost town of Cornucopia Oregon, where someone during the earlier mining days had constructed a platform over Pine Creek. At the end, right over the stream was a single hole outhouse. Handy!

[LckyTylr]

Well, maybe it wasn't a wolf trap, but I couldn't think of what size critter that trap might be good for. Pretty overkill for fox and coyote (it seems) and not big enough for bears. Wolves seemed like a logical guess.

[Swede]

Lckylylt: What you came across was a #2 or #3 trap. It would be about right for a coyote or similar sized animals. I would go with a #5 minimum for wolf or cougar. If it was a single set I would prefer a #7. There are some variations in sizing, but the #2 and #3 are common at 5 1/2" to 6/12". To me a set wolf trap is scary if it is ever located where anyone might step into it.

[Slim jim]

I ran into an old plane wreckage up in the ruby mtns in NV last year. It was near a peak at around 10000'. I was trying to find a shortcut to get up and over a range that would save me four out of a 9 mile hike. It looked great on google earth but when I got to timberline I had to cross a steep giant boulder field for over a mile. Not very smart with a 60lb pack on your back and solo.

[JohnFitzgerald]

Here's another one. Came across a hunter with a compund fracture of his arm! He had no GPS, no map, and was heading in a direction that would have taken 12 miles to come to a road. Considering I can hunt that part of the wilderness and never see a single person for 10 days. Either he was lucky, I was lucky, or we both got lucky that we meet in that exact spot.