Have come face to face with wild bears twice, but something else was more disturbing.

Way back when I was starting high school a group of us teens (ages 14-20) went for a hike up a trail to see suburbia from a local hilltop. We started out at sunset so it was a while before we really noticed that one guy had gone missing. I sort of mildly wondered shouldn't we go look for him? but being one of the youngest in that group I wasn't going to change its plans--and I certainly wasn't going to strike out alone.

So up we went, saw the view, and retraced our steps. It took an hour or two.

Call us clueless or call us assholes but we didn't particularly look for our missing guy. Right near the trailhead, though, he finds us. He calls out my boyfriend's name, runs across the trail in front of us, and then leaps into the air...

...landing a belly flop on a large patch of cactus.

Hundreds of spines stick out of him as we get him to stand up. While we return to our cars we piece together the chain of events: he had stopped to buy a joint from a stranger. The joint turned out to be laced with PCP and he was tripping the whole time. He was shaken up from being alone in the wilderness but he literally did not feel all these cactus spines. We have to talk him into getting medical treatment. So we drove him up to the local hospital and dropped him off at the curb.

I barely knew the guy, he had already graduated high school, and I wasn't too eager to be anywhere near him afterward. But I don't think I'll ever forget the sight of him leaping face first into a clump of prickly pears.