Wow!! We got WALLOPED!!

[Nugget]

"I couldn't think of scenarios where I'd be caught that lost in the snow with children. I was thinking a car breaking down or skidding off the road."

It's was far worse than that....lol My former husband was on a mission to chop down a tree from some farmer's front yard to save three bucks.
We probably wouldn't have been found till spring if it hadn't been for one farmer being late moving down to his winter abode.

[FCD]

I should probably not derail FCD's thread with my tale of Christmas tree hunting gone wrong. 

Don't worry in the least about that!

It's all good!!!  These are winter stories (even though it's not truly "winter" yet, which was about half of our problem.  Totally got caught flat-footed!)

Keep those stories coming...I've got several more myself (but never cutting down a Christmas tree).  I do have one on a snow machine up in Alaska though.

[FCD]

I've got several more myself (but never cutting down a Christmas tree). ...

Here's one...

A buddy of mine and I decided we were going to go camping and fishing in the high Wind River Mountains of Wyoming one year.  It was a serious 4WD drive into the location, and at one point we had to go through a serious bog about 4 feet deep (above the doors in my 2500 4x4 Suburban).  We got stuck (badly), but managed to pull ourselve's out, forward.  We kept driving until the 2-track ended.  Where we parked was this huge Dodge with 40" swampers and a 20" lift kit.  (Oh, no wonder we got stuck!).

So, we headed up into the Wind Rivers (which are an incredible mountain range).  We hiked to our destination, about 10 miles steep, uphill, all the way.  We got to this high mountain lake.  There were fish everywhere!  Big cutthroat and brook trout...biggest I'd ever seen...BUT these huge fish, right by shore weren't biting anytihng.  Nothing.  They were eating the massive flies which where everywhere and were probably gorged with yummy stuff.

We were 15 miles from the truck, and very hungry.  Our pact had been...we'd catch our own food...so we'd brought little food ourselves (just things like eggs, butter, salt and pepper, along with tin foil and cooking stuff).  It was ugly; the fish weren't biting, even though we could see them right in front of us on the rocks.

We did this for two days, and we'd caught nothing.  I had some corn relish as a snack and accidentally dropped a bit of it in the water.  BOOM~!  Major fish hit. 

(Fishing with corn was illegal, and I soon understood why...because it catches fish!!!)  I looked at it like we were starving, and needed food to get back down the mountain (as did my faithful Labrador).  So, all bets were off.  We had like (10) (seriously) corn kernals left, and we caught about 3 big fish.  Never tasted fish on the fire that good as I did that night.  WOW!~  Just pulled them out like...1...2...3.

Sorry, but survival works that way some days.

Getting back out was even harder (had to break out the chainsaws at the mud bog, because the Dodge driver was a douche), but we did eventually get out with my winch.

This probably sounds pretty mild, but it was pretty extreme in the moment...considering it was late October in Wyoming.  Just ten days more...probably no one would have ever heard of us again!

The mountains can be a tough space sometimes.