Strange sounds in the night
I took my bride, who had never backpacked before, on a pair of 2-3 night trips in Rocky Mountain Nat Park, CO, on our honeymoon in 1978. Incredibly, we're still married now, 172 years later. Anyway, on our first night out, after driving from Charlottesville, VA to Estes Park, CO in a Honda Civic, snagging our backcountry permits, and hitting the trail with ZERO acclimation, we were enjoying the twilight around the trusty old Svea, when a loud, strange noise emanated from the meadow around 100 yds down the trail. The noise was repeated several times over the ensuing half-hour. It sounded like a really loud flute/recorder and we never saw what was making it. My bride was really questioning our (my) sanity for being there, as I hadn't a clue what it was, either. It was late September and we subsequently learned about the bugling of bull elk during the fall mating season.
Decades later, I was car-camping at Oconee State Park, SC while on a rafting trip on the Chatooga River. It was a group of a dozen guys around my age, with Tim being the senior and about 10 years older than me. Well after dark, after enjoying a goodly number of frosty adult beverages around the campfire, we suddenly heard HEAVY automatic weapons fire erupt in the near distance. There were multiple bursts of small arms fire after that, then more heavy weapons. After a few minutes of collective "WTH?", we heard Tim's voice coming from down an embankment beyond the campfire. "That was Ma Deuce, some M-60s, and about a dozen M-16s". Tim said this as he returned to the campfire from down the hill, where he had instinctively dived for cover when the shooting started. The firing was blanks, of course, courtesy of military training under way in the Nat Forest lands surrounding the State Park. Many of the group did not previously realize Tim was a 2-tour Vietnam veteran who served as an artillery forward observer. The man knew his automatic weapons, and he knew what to do when the shooting started.
AO