Diego Pagan
The Mountain Lion
Four young men lost with one flashlight and mountain lion.
In this valley also lies a great danger. It was just an average Friday, nothing planned just a casual day, after school going to the skatepark you know having a blast. Then my friend Caleb offers for me to stay the night. Caleb lives out in Falls Creek and the drive out there is very scenic and beautiful. There is white cliff and it's a glacier valley, there's all these trees and shrubs oak. It's this beautiful drive. We always get out there and instantly we start skating on this skate pad and it's this old garage.
They renovated their house and moved the garage about ten away, so they have this big old concrete square in the ground and there's a whole bunch of skate features and it's really fun. After we skate it's time to go inside and chill. After chilling for a little we eat dinner. Now we are just waiting for time to pass. The way that Caleb’s house is set up is there's all this shrub oak around his house and it covers the trail to the barn. It's these wicked crazy trees that look like a horror movie and then there's this big barn with this like gnarly crooked ladder that's twenty feet tall. It's like vertical so it is so scary to get up and they're spaced apart by two feet so it's really really difficult.
Coming back to us waiting, it's basically midnight. I fall asleep to wake up in shock, I'm so tired. Caleb proposed the idea to go to his barn so we could be loud and bring the speaker. So we open the door and go. The window of his parent’s room is facing towards the trail to the barn, so we can't have flashlights on. All the trees are like bent down so we kind of has to crouch, but I don't really have to. On the trail to the barn, there's always stuff moving in the bushes and it always feels like something is moving and he also has horses underneath the barn so they make some weird noises.
We crawl up the gnarly ladder and get inside, we turn lights on, we all grab a chair and connect to the speaker. We hear the horses below us make grunting noises. The barn is very old, so things always shook. We stayed there from like twelve-thirty to three-thirty. Caleb also has a guest house, but it's down the street and in the forest and this person Jeff lives there.
Jeff is like a guru, a hippie of some sort. He's a very wise, mystical old little Woodman basically. So we're in the barn and it's like one thirty in the morning. I'm with Jack who moved away to Denver, and Caleb, I get out of the barn and we're like all waiting up at the bottom of it. When we all gather up we hear this gnarly scream of some sort about fifteen feet to the left. We all are like in shock, our hearts are beating.
Oh my god! What the hell was that? we are all saying to ourselves. We were freaking out and at first, I thought it was just a horse going all wild, but I was not sure. We all got up to the road and it turns out I was the only one with a flashlight and as I was running down the road and I turn around just to check on everybody and Caleb is not there. Caleb ran down a different trail which is super scary because we had no clue where he went.
Behind Jack I could see down in the shrub oak where we just were, these red vivid eyes staring at us, reflecting off of my flashlight so we all kind of freaked out and I ran quickly to get to this trail. Safely, we got up to Jeff's house we were all out of breath from running. I think Jack was crying. Jeff walked outside with us and brought a nice flashlight and shined it down the trail we were just on and the mountain lion was right there. It was just crazy to think that we were like fifteen feet away from it at one point in the night and it was really bizarre.
It was a beautiful night, except we almost died from a mountain lion and then Jeff has this giant wood stick with like all these like jingles and stuff on it and it's really loud and he shakes it and drags it through the woods and it scares off the mountain lions they also have blow horns out there now so that's pretty helpful. We walked home at like four in the morning and as we were walking home in bliss, thankful that we were alive.
They renovated their house and moved the garage about ten away, so they have this big old concrete square in the ground and there's a whole bunch of skate features and it's really fun. After we skate it's time to go inside and chill. After chilling for a little we eat dinner. Now we are just waiting for time to pass. The way that Caleb’s house is set up is there's all this shrub oak around his house and it covers the trail to the barn. It's these wicked crazy trees that look like a horror movie and then there's this big barn with this like gnarly crooked ladder that's twenty feet tall. It's like vertical so it is so scary to get up and they're spaced apart by two feet so it's really really difficult.
Coming back to us waiting, it's basically midnight. I fall asleep to wake up in shock, I'm so tired. Caleb proposed the idea to go to his barn so we could be loud and bring the speaker. So we open the door and go. The window of his parent’s room is facing towards the trail to the barn, so we can't have flashlights on. All the trees are like bent down so we kind of has to crouch, but I don't really have to. On the trail to the barn, there's always stuff moving in the bushes and it always feels like something is moving and he also has horses underneath the barn so they make some weird noises.
We crawl up the gnarly ladder and get inside, we turn lights on, we all grab a chair and connect to the speaker. We hear the horses below us make grunting noises. The barn is very old, so things always shook. We stayed there from like twelve-thirty to three-thirty. Caleb also has a guest house, but it's down the street and in the forest and this person Jeff lives there.
Jeff is like a guru, a hippie of some sort. He's a very wise, mystical old little Woodman basically. So we're in the barn and it's like one thirty in the morning. I'm with Jack who moved away to Denver, and Caleb, I get out of the barn and we're like all waiting up at the bottom of it. When we all gather up we hear this gnarly scream of some sort about fifteen feet to the left. We all are like in shock, our hearts are beating.
Oh my god! What the hell was that? we are all saying to ourselves. We were freaking out and at first, I thought it was just a horse going all wild, but I was not sure. We all got up to the road and it turns out I was the only one with a flashlight and as I was running down the road and I turn around just to check on everybody and Caleb is not there. Caleb ran down a different trail which is super scary because we had no clue where he went.
Behind Jack I could see down in the shrub oak where we just were, these red vivid eyes staring at us, reflecting off of my flashlight so we all kind of freaked out and I ran quickly to get to this trail. Safely, we got up to Jeff's house we were all out of breath from running. I think Jack was crying. Jeff walked outside with us and brought a nice flashlight and shined it down the trail we were just on and the mountain lion was right there. It was just crazy to think that we were like fifteen feet away from it at one point in the night and it was really bizarre.
It was a beautiful night, except we almost died from a mountain lion and then Jeff has this giant wood stick with like all these like jingles and stuff on it and it's really loud and he shakes it and drags it through the woods and it scares off the mountain lions they also have blow horns out there now so that's pretty helpful. We walked home at like four in the morning and as we were walking home in bliss, thankful that we were alive.