“What a perfect night! The stars are so bright!”

Fiona was right, the stars were bright. It was a perfect night, the night before my birthday, just me and my lovely fiancee out in the middle of Jawbone Canyon OHV park, surrounded by rolling hills. We sat in front of the fire and watched the stars a while, noticing one that was particularly bright.

Then we noticed that particularly bright star was moving in a peculiar fashion, almost as if it was slowly coming down a mountain. It dawned on us that this star was in fact coming down the mountain, because this star was in fact a miners helmet light attached to… someone walking down the mountain path directly toward our little Mobile Desert Assault Base Camp.

Within minutes this strange, mountain climbing dude was standing in the middle of our camp.

“Shit! What a long way down!” he started. “My dog ran away and my truck is stuck up at the top… you know that cabin up there? Yeah, well I got a flat and then I had to walk all this way down and…”

And? And then, with no further explanation, he turned and marched out of our camp towards the main road, never to be seen again.

As the miners light disappeared in the distance, we both looked at each other, wordlessly saying, “What the hell just happened here?” Didn’t get much sleep that night.

Spent my birthday doing my second favorite thing in the world:

Later that day, my good friend Keith, aka Unleaded from the Great Unsponsored Nova Scotia Expedition and his son stopped by to help me and Fiona celebrate my forty-second year on the planet.

We shared the story of the mysterious mountain man. Keith immediately wanted to ride to the summit to see if we could find the dog, the truck, the cabin or anything at all.

Here is a video of our Ride to the Summit:

No luck finding mountain man, but the junkyard at the summit was pretty impressive!

Without a doubt, my APC Rally off-road riding training is coming along nicely, and of course, this was the Best Birthday Ever!

Author: frenchy