Some of this is unlucky, and some of it is because I'm an idiot.

I was camping with my dog Arrow on the top of this sweet mountain that I've been hiking since I was a kid. It was a really awesome spot as it overlooked a whole valley and you could see for miles. I was pretty stoked to get the prime real estate right near the massive cliff with a view and no one else was staying on the summit for the night. Arrow and I have had some awesome times camping in different spots but he has been banned from all future trips due to what transpired.

I had just set up a small fire to cook my dinner when I set his leash down to pick something up (I always keep him leashed because he tends to wander). As soon as I look up, he's gone. Completely vanished from view. I start calling out his name and when he doesn't come back to me I start to get nervous. Then I hear his tags clinking together from near the cliff. I run to the edge and I see my fucking insane dog jumping down from ledge to ledge like a goddamn mountain goat. This cliff has about an 80 foot drop and I think he's going to fall and die. So I'm screaming like a lunatic because I think either a) I'm going to lose my dog or b) he's going to die.

Instead about twenty feet down the face of the cliff he catches up to what he's been chasing: a goddamn porcupine. He follows it under an overhang and comes out covered in quills. The poor guy lodges himself on the side of the cliff, teetering on the side. Now I'm convinced he's going to fall. So I sprint along the top of the cliff until I find a spot I can scale down, the entire time I'm calling to my dog that everything will be fine. I finally get to him and this ledge is maybe a foot wide. Looking down I'm now convinced that we're both going to fall and die.

Instead I pick his quilled ass up and start lifting him up over my head and onto the next ledge. I do this over and over again, praying I don't drop him or fall backwards to my death. I finally reach the top about 20 minutes after Arrow ran off from me. I'm fucking pumped that we're both alive. Then I realized that the wind had shifted and hit my fire that I had left burning like an idiot. So there was a serious brush fire at my campsite with embers belching out all over the place.

I tie my dog up even though he's not going anywhere and start stamping that shit out like a mad man. I dump all my water out on it. Throw my blanket and start smothering that shit. After like a half hour of containing this bitch I finally get all the embers and everything put out. I sit down next to my dog and see about thirty feet up in a dead tree are a bunch of embers starting to flare up. So I called the fire department and decided I needed to make sure it didn't actually start a forest fire. An hour and a half later they show up in 4x4s and cut that bitch down, put it out, toss me and Arrow in their truck with what's left of my gear that I didn't use to put out the brush fire and dropped us off at my car at the bottom of the mountain.

I brought Arrow to a 24 hour emergency vet and several hours and $1000 later they had removed around 100 quills from his chest, feet, legs, mouth, and face. Then it was around a 3 hour drive home. Got home at 4am. Most expensive and unlucky camping trip ever.

tl;dr Both my dog and I almost fell off a cliff. Almost caused a forest fire. Ended up with a $1000 vet bill...all in all I'm pretty lucky.